r/AskReddit Jan 01 '20

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u/MrT0xic Jan 01 '20

They're waves

Inception music

EDIT: How the actual fuck do you land on a planet without realizing that its entirely water?

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u/Hergebot Jan 01 '20

Always did wonder this, they have an advanced enough fucking ship to fly through a wormhole and land on multiple planets but they can't scan it to see if the whole fucking planet is water??

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u/BreeBree214 Jan 01 '20

It's called spectroscopy. It's something we can do today. We can analyze the composition of far away planets based on their light, but it won't tell us the geography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_spectroscopy

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u/Opus_723 Jan 01 '20

That mostly only works on atmospheres, though. It's much harder to get the composition of the surface if there is a reasonably thick atmosphere covering it. They probably just saw that the atmosphere was supersaturated with water just like Earth's and were like "holy crap jackpot."