For better or worse, self-driving vehicles are the future. It will be a rather messy future full of media scare articles painting self-driving vehicles as unsafe, fully legitimate concerns about sending thousands of commercial drivers to the unemployment line, and varying rejection from consumers on grounds of distrusting technology and a preference to be at the wheel themselves, but it is the future nonetheless. I'm not yet sure how I feel about that, I can see both sides of the argument for and against self-driving vehicles,  but what I do know is that the benefits and cost savings are just so for commercial use that self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous within a decade.

The world's first self-driving beer run

Breaking News: Have We Detected 234 Alien Civilizations?

By John Michael Godier

Several days ago a paper came out that made an interesting claim. That claim was that anomalous signals from 234 stars in the Milky Way of types similar to our sun were emitting pulsed, regular signals consistent with what you would expect from alien civilizations employing laser communications.

While the media at large loves to take stories like this and sensationalize them and make all sorts of clickbait headlines that lead people to believe that aliens are discovered weekly, that's obviously not the case, and this particular paper is very preliminary but does still fall into the realm of possibility.

The paper authored by researchers Ermanno Borra and E. Trottier, details a study of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that looked for periodic fluctuations in the spectra of stars in the galaxy that were abnormal but consistent with a pulsed signal from an alien civilization. They found abnormal signals coming from 234 different stars.

But, abnormal doesn't immediately mean alien so much study and work will be needed to determine exactly what's going on with these stars. I stress, this story is more about figuring out a new way to detect alien signals rather than actually making the claim to have detected them. Take this one with a grain of salt, that's probably not what these are. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

The whole thing goes back to an earlier paper that Borra authored in 2012. In it, Borra posits that it should be possible to detect pulsed laser signals from alien civilizations mixed within the natural spectra of the stars that their homeworlds orbit.

Borra backs this up by pointing out that our current technology could produce such signals that would be detectable by other species if they were looking, using these same methods. That's if we made the effort to try to contact other races. We currently are not.  

Now, what is a spectrum? Think of it like this; stars have a sort of fingerprint made of light that reveals information about them. At its most basic level, it's simply using a prism to split light into its constituent rainbow spectrum and looking for dark lines that appear in the spectrum. These lines, called Fraunhofer lines, are caused by certain materials present in the star that absorb different frequencies of light. This yields information about the star's chemical makeup.

But you can tell much more from how those lines are arranged and shifted, such as if the star is moving towards you or away from you, of even if obscuring dips in the light are due to diffuse dust and gas or gigantic alien megastructures as what everyone's waiting for with KIC 8462852, and many other things.

And, luckily, astronomers have taken lots of spectra over the years while studying stars. A lot to the tune of huge sky surveys such as the Sloan survey which detail the spectra of at least 2.5 million stars at this point. Borra argued in 2012 that you could search those existing spectra for signs of alien civilizations using pretty straightforward methods.

Fast forward to today. Borra and Trottier did just that and out of the 2.5 million spectra they found 234 anomalous ones that could fit the bill for alien communications. That's a pretty tiny percentage, perhaps what you might expect given that intelligent alien life is probably pretty rare, but we don't really know.

But what was interesting about those spectrums is that the associated stars just happened to be overwhelmingly sun-like, meaning that the stars were of sufficient age and stability to reasonably say that it's possible for them to have civilizations developing around them based on the conditions of our own solar system and our development. Interesting results to be sure.

But, and the authors are careful to point this out, it's just that. Interesting and worth checking out. These signals are very weak, and while the argument can be made that aliens need not transmit using huge amounts of energy just to say hello, stars themselves can be really enigmatic and naturally produce all manner of strange signals.

We've seen some strange stuff with stars before that ended up having fully natural explanations. Natural is always very much more likely than artificial. There's a lot of variation in how stars behave due to a mind-boggling array of chemical and physical factors that can be present within them, to the point that we often come across stars we don't quite understand. There are anomalous stars out there that are so bizarre that they shouldn't even exist. But they do, which means we just haven't thought of a way to explain them yet. That's likely to the be the case with these anomalous stars.

Further study is likely to show that most, if not all, of these 234 anomalies are of natural origin. But, then again, if NASA itself is to be believed, it's also probably likely that within just a few decades we will have discovered evidence of intelligent alien life and studying stellar spectra is just one more tool we can use to accomplish that.

An Eyebrow Raiser

I'm not against AI or its development, nor am I worried about it ... yet.

apple-employs-tech-guru-from-university-that-taught-computers-to-defeat-humans/

KIC 8462852 Tabby's Star Update 10/6/2016

This is another installment in my continuing coverage of KIC 8462852 or Tabby's star, easily the strangest star we've yet come across in our universe. Since my last update, a number of scientific papers have been published that offer a new group of potential explanations for the dimming phenomena, but the possibility of alien megastructures causing the dimming events at this star still has not been discounted.

For more solid science only back story on Tabby's star, check out the other videos on KIC 8462852 on this channel. They are arranged by date in the title, starting with the first one I did on April 10th of 2016 and together in sequence provide a complete overview of what we know and what we can reasonably speculate if indeed the dimming events at this star are of alien origin, which I stress is highly unlikely.

Most noteworthy is that there now seems to be a disparity of sorts in the story. There are two phenomena that seem to be going on at Tabby's star. The first is the major dimming events first detected by the Kepler Spacecraft that caught everyone's attention in the first place. The second, which if it exists is almost certainly related, is a long-term dimming trend first noted by Bradley Schaeffer who found that the star had dimmed significantly over the course of a century.

Schaeffer's work was called into question by a group led by Michael Hippke leading to somewhat of a public row between several scientists. Hippke essentially questioned Schaeffer's methodology and stated that he could find no evidence of this long-term dimming trend. Schaeffer had based his findings on one set of sky survey photographic plates taken over the course of a century. This wasn't the only set of plates of this kind, and Hippke used a second set known as the Sonneburg plates after the German observatory where they were taken and again found no evidence of a long-term dimming trend.

More, several other scientists published a paper calling the long-term dimming into question as well. They attributed the dimming at Tabby's Star to a gap in the data, but oddly found several other similar F-type stars in the survey that do appear to be experiencing similar long-term dimming trends of their own on a century scale. These are of unknown origin. There seems to be all sorts of mysteries buried in old sky surveys.

So is there a long-term dimming trend or not? Well, now a third group of scientists have entered the mix. Using the data from Kepler, Benjamin Montet and Joshua Simon have seemingly confirmed the long-term dimming trend over the period that Kepler was active, or at least a dimming trend during that period. So the pendulum tips in favor of the long-term dimming trend existing once more.

But that isn't the only news. Regarding the deep short-term dips that made this star famous, several new theories have emerged or reemerged regarding natural explanations that better fit the observations of this star than the previous explanations, including the alien megastructure possibility, which remains the least likely of any of the explanations but still remains on the table.

One interesting new theory was put forth by Valeri Makarov of the US Naval Observatory. This theory suggests that what we're seeing is basically some star's disembodied debris disk, perhaps tossed out into interstellar space by another gravity source, passing in front of our line of sight to Tabby's star but not actually related to it.

This seems to potentially be a good fit with what we see with the star. Such material, being in interstellar space, would be very cold. That would explain the lack of infra-red emissions that you would expect to see if the debris was orbiting KIC 8462852. It would also potentially explain both of the dimming trends, depending on how that cloud of debris was set up.

The only thing standing in the way of this explanation is weak evidence of some periodicity in the Kepler light curves. This suggests, but not very well, that whatever is causing the dimming is in orbit of the star. The only way to tell for sure is to check out Tabby's star over a long period of time to look for recurring periodic dips. The good news is that this is already happening, Tabitha Boyajian and her team have the funding and are observing the star actively. The bad news is that it could be several years before we know.  

Complicating this further are the problems with the long-term dimming trend. If it doesn't exist, then one of the older theories returns to the table, the idea that the dimming could be caused by a cloud of disintegrating comets in orbit of the star. The lack of infra-red emissions would be accounted for due to the comets being cold. But there are problems with this theory that make it not a perfect fit for what is observed.

Another group of scientists modeled the comet hypothesis. While a very large, and I mean huge, number of comets does fit with the later dimming events in the Kepler data, they could not model the day 800 long, slow, smooth event. This remains a mystery and has no easy explanation under any scenario and in some ways does serve to support the alien megastructure theory.

Another possibility is that the star is younger than we think it is and still has a disc of debris orbiting it coalescing into planets. This is also not a great fit due to the lack of infrared-emissions, but another theory suggests that if we're seeing that disc edge on, then that would account for the missing infrared.

And now to the megastructures. While highly unlikely, this is most probably a natural phenomenon, we can speculate about a few possibilities. While the Kepler light curves are consistent with a Dyson swarm, and potentially even a large baffle in space designed specifically to block light, see my earliest video for that story on that, the long-term dimming trend would suggest that we're seeing it under construction. Very rapid construction, so much so that it seems unlikely according to the Montet and Simon findings. Even self-replicating nano-technology might have trouble building something that quickly. If it is aliens, then why are they in such a hurry?

I think this speed works against the megastructure hypothesis and for the natural explanations. A passing cloud of debris could have areas of higher density that might block a star and cause a dimming trend on a scale of centuries. At some point it would go the opposite way and turn into a brightening trend. So once again, I must stress, that it is highly unlikely for multiple reasons that the mysteries of KIC 8462852 are of alien origin. But, it's still on the table. Only time will tell for sure as more observations of the star are made.

Colonizing and Terraforming Venus

While talk about colonizing the solar system has dominated the news lately with Elon Musk's visionary plan for Mars, another potential target for colonization might not be getting the attention it deserves. There are reasons for this, the planet's surface is a truly hellish mix of extremely hot temperatures and sulfuric acid. That planet is Venus, and while at first glance it doesn't look like a good candidate for colonization, there are some surprisingly attractive attributes to this world that may eventually make it worthwhile.

As Elon Musk points out, we need to become a multiple planet species if we wish the human race to survive any calamity that might cause our extinction such as an asteroid impact. Sooner or later, something bad will happen and a second planet would serve as insurance against extinction. But why not a third planet? And why not Venus?

If it weren't for the hostile surface conditions, Venus would be the obvious choice for colonization as opposed to Mars. Surface conditions aside, Venus could be called a sister planet to earth. With Mars, due to its smaller size, we aren't yet certain that humans will avoid bone decalcification due to a lack of gravity. This is not the case for Venus, which is almost the same size as earth with comparable gravity probably eliminating decalcification as a problem for colonization entirely.

Venus is also closer than Mars, which favors both transport and communications. Launch windows for Mars occur every 780 days as the planet passes close by. For Venus, this is only 584 days. Flight times are also going to be shorter than for Mars. Like Mars, Venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. If you filter out the sulfuric acid, you can use that carbon dioxide to grow plants. And there is a zone on Venus that looks far more attractive than its surface.

This zone, which is about 31 miles in the atmosphere above the planet's surface, has a different composition due to the fact that nitrogen and oxygen are lighter than carbon dioxide. This means that if you fill a balloon with earth air, it will float in this region. The temperature here is nicer as well, about 75 °C or 167 degrees. If you go a bit higher, say 5 kilometers, it drops to a comfortable 81 degrees Fahrenheit. This zone also favors colonization in that it also happens to be about the same air pressure that we experience here on earth. Handy indeed. And, the atmosphere above this sweet spot naturally shields out cosmic radiation roughly comparable to how Earth's atmosphere does.

That's a lot of points in Venus' favor. But the obvious problem here is that you'd have to suspend your colony high up in the atmosphere of Venus and make sure it stays there. But this may not be as hard as you might think. As I mentioned, breathable earth air is a lifting gas on Venus, much like helium is here. That means that if you were inside a balloon on Venus, you could easily live, and so long as that balloon doesn't pop, you would be in much safer natural conditions than one would be on the surface of Mars.

If your balloon sprung a leak, for example, there would be no explosive decompression due to the similar air pressures inside and out. You would have plenty of time to patch it up. Similarly, you would not require pressurized space suits, just protective ones to keep out the sulfuric acid and of course a breathing apparatus and protection from the heat, which isn't that big of a deal.

Now, it's pretty windy up there, often reaching over 200 miles per hour, but there's also nothing to run into so you could let the balloon colony move with the winds, which would reduce structural stress.

There are cons to the idea of colonizing Venus as well. It has no oxygen, so it would have be manufactured from carbon dioxide. It also has basically no water, meaning you'd have to get that from the sulfuric acid. Retrieving anything from the surface would difficult given the surface conditions. And you would need some serious corrosion protection in all elements of your colony. Add that to the fact that Venus rotates very slowly compared to earth, its day is 243 earth days long. In fact, its day is longer than its year, which is only 224 earth days.

But if we did colonize Venus, might we be able to terraform it and make it earth-like? The answer is yes, it's theoretically possible. In fact, Paul Birch put forth just such a plan that would allow the planet to be terraformed in just two centuries. Humans have taken on huge projects that took even longer than that before, often it would take 500 years or more to build a medieval gothic cathedral. So two centuries is not that long of a time for a project.

Birch's plan envisions putting a thin solar shade perhaps made of Mylar or a similar substance in the line of sight between the sun and Venus and reduce the temperature of the atmosphere. As the planet cools, the high pressures will cause the carbon dioxide to liquefy and rain onto the planet as oceans. Then, as the cooling continues, the oceans freeze and become dry ice. You then cover the frozen oceans over with a thermally insulating layer and you've got a fresh planet to work with where the amount of carbon dioxide in the protoatmosphere can be controlled.

To make it earth-like, you would first need a lot of water. The problem there is that water is hard to transport, so it's better to make it onsite. To do this, you need hydrogen, which is something Venus doesn't have much of. But the gas giant planets do and it's possible to mine it from them.

Transporting that hydrogen could be accomplished with a mass driver system, you just electromagnetically fling loads of the material to Venus. In fact, it may eventually be the case that we build mass drivers on many bodies in the solar system to move materials around.

An alternative to securing the water which is much faster is to simply crash an icy moon into Venus in a controlled fashion. This is harder, but also surprisingly possible through using the gravity of bodies such as Saturn and its moons to move large objects around.

Then you need the oxygen. This can come from our frozen carbon dioxide oceans readily either by chemically releasing it or using algae or a similar bioengineered method taking advantage of photosynthesis.

The last major problem is Venus's slow rotation. One approach to this would be to speed the planet up, and there are theoretical ways to do that, but it would seem to make more sense to just simulate a 24 hour day. Birch suggests that we use a soletta, a kind of rotating mirror in polar orbit to create the illusion of a day. Alternatively, solar mirrors can both shade the lit side of Venus and reflect light to the dark side as needed to create a suitable day.

While all of this may seem beyond reach, at least in theory it's actually something we could do right now. Birch lays out in his paper that we could begin colonization of the atmosphere and terraforming efforts in 2030 and have a fully habitable second earth by 2250. It would be difficult and expensive, there's no doubt of that, but it is doable and may not be so expensive as we expand out and begin colonizing other areas of the solar system at the same time. Especially if Elon Musk's plan for Mars comes to fruition, a big part of that is that the entire solar system becomes accessible.

So both colonizing Venus' atmosphere and eventually terraforming are possible and perhaps even advantageous. And with all the buzz surrounding Elon Musk's bold plan to colonize Mars, I hope the idea of colonizing the solar system catches fire and some day Venus too may also be a self-sustaining home for humankind.

Elon Musk and SpaceX's Plan for Mars

Yesterday at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, billionaire and visionary space entrepreneur Elon Musk announced a detailed plan for putting humans on Mars. While it's quite ambitious and entails some unorthodox but surprisingly realistic ideas, the fact that it comes from Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, is significant.

There seems to be every indication that he's going to make it happen. If his past activities are any indicator, this is not pie in the sky dreaming but could become reality. You see, he's said all along that he founded SpaceX with the specific end game of going to Mars in mind. And now, years later, SpaceX is no lightweight start up. And now he has a coherent plan for going to Mars.

What was notable about his talk was that Musk revealed a lot of specifics about the engineering and science of just how his company is going to do this, to the point of delving into the function and testing of a rather impressive carbon fiber fuel tank SpaceX built for the project and even detailed his concerns about going to Mars himself due to the fact that he wants to make sure his company doesn't end up under the control of for-profit investors should he die in an accident. At the very least, Elon and SpaceX has gone "all in" with this one.

Step one of the plan is to build a suitable rocket. This involves an intermediate step. SpaceX's plan to develop a rocket that can take us to Mars has been in the works for some time. Known as the Falcon Heavy, this rocket has been designed from the outset to carry humans and will be fully capable as a super heavy lift launch system that can reach the Moon or Mars. In addition, it can carry significantly larger payloads into low earth orbit than we can with current rockets, to the tune of 54,400 kilograms. The first launch of one of these rockets, which really are a modified version of the Falcon 9 rocket, is expected in early 2017.

That's not long from now, and it ushers in a new age of successive very large rockets including NASA's Space Launch System or SLS, which will surpass even the venerable Saturn V of Apollo fame, but Musk intends to outdo even that. So very soon, at least, we will once again have the capability of sending humans beyond low earth orbit. Congratulations to SpaceX and NASA indeed. But Musk's plan doesn't stop there.

Musk's timetable to go from the first launch of a Falcon Heavy to landing a human on Mars is about ten years. Now, one possible snag with his plan is funding. He envisions a sort of public and private mix of funding sources, but these have not yet been fully secured. There are many ways he can do this, including crowd sourcing and using his own assets and money along with the profits from SpaceX. That might seem a stretch but on the other hand, it's Elon Musk and he's shown a certain ability to get things done.

Using the Falcon Heavy, the plan initially entails sending research spacecraft to Mars based on the Dragon design. Windows to launch to Mars which aligns with earth favorably every 26 months will each see a spacecraft launch starting with the first in 2018, less than two years from now. These missions will collect data needed for landing humans on Mars and moving to the next step. But then it gets crazy.

If SpaceX is successful, which while skeptical I certainly hope they are, this plan is no simple hop over to Mars to take a look around and leave. Musk's plan is far more ambitious. Shockingly so. In Guadalajara, he laid out plans for an all out self-sustaining colony and gave engineering specifics about an even larger rocket and spacecraft to be launched in 2022 that is specifically designed to found a permanent, self-sustaining colony on Mars that could result in millions of people living on that planet terraforming it into a second earth. Elon Musk wants to make us into a multiple planet species, and that's quite an ambitious goal indeed, but also sensible if he can make it happen.

This larger rocket and spacecraft is called the Interplanetary Transport System and it appears that SpaceX has already completed much of the design work. This is an unbelievably titanic launch system designed to carry 100 people and all of their supplies, gear, and separately the fuel needed to get to Mars.

How the system works is relatively straightforward. The manned spacecraft launches atop a reusable stage that carries it into a parking orbit. Then the rocket stage returns to earth to pick up a similar spacecraft adapted for refueling the manned spacecraft. Shortly after being mounted on the same first stage, the fueling spacecraft launches again delivering its payload to the manned spacecraft. It then loads the fuel onboard, returns to earth, and the manned spacecraft disembarks for Mars.

Musk described this spacecraft as fun. It certainly appears spacious, even if carrying a hundred people. But he envisioned that it might have a restaurant, quarters, and all manner of comforts making it seem more like a cruise ship than a spacecraft.

Once it arrives, it will enter the Martian atmosphere using a heat shield, then flip around and fire a landing rocket carrying it safely to the Martian surface. Once landed, the humans will disembark and set up a colony and a fuel depot. This depot would manufacture fuel on Mars to relaunch the spacecraft and return it to earth to be used to pick up more passengers and transport them to Mars, along with anyone with cold feet that wished to return home.

All the while, SpaceX will build more spacecraft and launch systems ultimately allowing for large numbers of people to go to Mars to colonize, build businesses, create a city on Mars and eventually make it self-sustaining. His time table for this is between 40 to 100 years before a self-sustaining colony can be established using a fleet of as many as 1000 of these spacecraft.

He envisions it how the west of the United States was colonized. California, for example, was a sparsely populated frontier until the Union Pacific Railroad was built, and now it's one of the main centers of American culture and population. The existence of the railroad was pivotal in establishing that, and Musk believes that his Martian transport system will serve a similar role. There were people that didn't believe in the construction of the railroad at the time, arguing that very few people lived in California and there was no point. They turned out to be epically wrong. Might that happen with Mars too?

Well, part of that question will be resolved with costs. If it's expensive to go to Mars, then it's not going to happen other than an international government project to send a few astronauts to set foot there, pat ourselves on the back and then leave. But if it's cheap, then that changes the equation.

Musk claims that his system will allow a person to relocate to Mars for less than $100,000 U.S. dollars. That sounds expensive, but it's very cheap compared to going to the International Space Station. In 2001 multimillionaire Dennis Tito went to the ISS and had to pay the Russians 20 million dollars for a week's vacation. In comparison, a hundred grand is so cheap that it could make sense for business people wishing to make money from resources on Mars or selling pizzas there.

In short, SpaceX's plan is to simply provide the transport. They want to be the railroad. Humans will found the colony as they will using Mars's natural resources. These are pretty good, actually, at least for founding the colony. There's no shortage of water on Mars, ice is everywhere that can be melted. Further, the planet's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, which means oxygen can be extracted from it. There's also some nitrogen there, and soil that almost certainly can be used to grow food. But can you make money from residing on Mars? That remains to be seen.

But the Interplanetary Transport System isn't just limited to Mars. By building a fuel production depot at Mars, essentially a gas station, a manned mission to Jupiter becomes possible. By locating another depot on the moon Europa, then Saturn comes into play. By building a depot at Enceladus, you can go even further. This system is designed to allow humans to physically go literally anywhere in our solar system. That's an amazing idea if you think about it, given that today we can't leave earth orbit with manned missions.

As an aside, Musk mentioned another interesting possibility. To generate money for his endeavour, he explored the possibility of using the ITS for transporting goods on earth. If you were in New York and had a load of tomatoes that you really wanted to get to Paris very quickly, the ITS rocket could certainly do it.

It could theoretically cross the Atlantic in less than 15 minutes. It would be a very expensive batch of tomatoes to deliver, but needless to say that such speeds, if there is a market for them, would prove very useful for the human race and very different from what we have now. And Musk intends to accomplish this within just a few years.

So once a colony on Mars is established, what will it be like? I'll leave that for a future video as Elon Musk's plan develops, but I hope we do it with better planning than we did here on Earth. I'm confidant we will, and maybe some day as the cultures of the two planets diverge we will learn from them as they learned from us.

Proxima Centauri b Update

Proxima Centauri B has recently shot to the top of the list as far as interesting exoplanets go. Not only is it the closest exoplanet to our solar system, it's also about the size of earth and within the habitability zone of its star. This is potentially earthshaking because this planet is so close to us that it's possible, maybe even probable, that some day humans will set foot on it or even colonize it, assuming that it's uninhabited of course.

Unfortunately, at least until the James Webb Space Telescope launches, we don't know much about this world other than what we can infer. We also don't know much about the conditions of life arising in a red dwarf star system. But a recent paper by Laura Kreidberg and Abraham Loeb of Harvard University gives some tantalizing hints of what Proxima B might be like.

The paper's overall purpose is to present the case that the James Webb space telescope will be able to determine if there is liquid water on Proxima B. This is the first step in establishing whether life can exist there. Where there's water, there could be life. But on Proxima b, it's a bit more complicated than that and nothing is guaranteed.

Firstly, they lay out that this planet may have no atmosphere at all. It orbits a star very different from the sun and it orbits it very closely in comparison to earth. More, it's probably tidally locked which means it's like our moon, one side of the planet always faces its star. This creates some unique conditions where one side of the planet is always in night and one side is always in day. That means quite a very unearthlike mix of a permanently scorching hot day side and a frozen solid night side.

With one side always in night, that means that the planet's atmosphere may have frozen out and locked itself up as ice on the dark side. If so, that would mean that life on this world is highly unlikely. But it also makes it a target for terraforming if we ever make it there. Frozen out atmospheres can be melted and restored, which is one of the main things we'd have to do if we were to ever terraform Mars and make it habitable for humans.

But if it does have an atmosphere, the researchers point out that atmospheres tend to redistribute heat. Warm air moves around with wind and weather, so the dark side of Proxima b may just be warm enough to have prevented an atmospheric freeze out. If so, then we're back to an environment that can have liquid water on the surface of the planet.

But there's another problem, Proxima b is so close to its star that it would be subject to stellar erosion of its atmosphere. The solar wind and radiation might literally have blown the planet's atmosphere off into space. That alone may have been enough to deprive this planet of an atmosphere early on before life had a chance to arise, or it may have survived but we just don't know enough yet to say. The good news is that we'll know a lot more in just two years with the launch of the James Webb telescope.

While Proxima b is too close to its star to directly image, it's year is only 11.2 days, the James Webb Space Telescope will be powerful enough to tell us much. We should be able to use the JWST to detect the distinctive infrared emissions that would be produced by the planet and watch how it changes as it orbits Proxima Centauri. From those observations, we should be able to determine if it has an atmosphere and how it's redistributing heat, and by extension if it's warm enough for liquid water there.

But as far as life goes, other factors may also play a role. One of these would be the presence of a moon. Life on earth is thought to have arisen in tidal pools. Tides are caused by the moon. No moon, no tides, and that changes the equations on whether life can arise on a planet. Other factors include the chemical makeup of the atmosphere if it exists, the geology of the planet, weather, magnetic fields, plate tectonics and so on.

But in a best case speculative scenario, Proxima B would be a world that has a ring of habitability rather than a global habitability like earth. If life exists there, it would be centered on the twilight zone of the planet where the light is not so strong as to create a permanently lit desert, but not so weak as to prevent liquid water. This kind of a habitable world is sometimes referred to as an 'eyeball planet'.

But if it did have life, what would it look like? Well, if such a planet had foliage, it would need to adapt to a completely different light profile than earth. As a result, instead of the distinctive green of earth's planet life, leaves on Proxima b would probably be black. Given the environment, animals would probably evolve to rely on seeing infrared rather than visible light. But it may not be possible for that sort of life to exist on that planet and perhaps the best we could hope for would be algae and microbes.

It has been suggested that worlds such as Proxima b, even if it did have liquid water, it would have conditions very different from earth and would present different challenges to life. These include permanent torrential downpours in certain areas of the planet and constant high winds that scour the planet's surface. The presence of an ocean may change that however, and allow for a protected underwater zone where life could flourish. Another factor would be the presence of geothermal vents underneath the frozen side of the planet and the potential for a protected liquid water environment under the ice.

So there you have it, while we may not know much about Proxima b yet, the James Webb Space Telescope will be powerful enough to reveal much more. In just two years, we should have a better understanding of our nearest exoplanet neighbor and determine whether it is to be the first interstellar object humans will visit.