Post: #1

Source:

Quote: NASA's Kepler space telescope has spotted the most Earth-like alien planet yet discovered — a world called Kepler-452b that's just slightly bigger than our own and orbits a sunlike star at about the same distance Earth circles the sun.

"This is the first possibly rocky, habitable planet around a solar-type star," Jeff Coughlin, Kepler research scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California, said during a news briefing today (July 23).

[...]

Kepler-452b lies 1,400 light-years away, and is the only planet known in its solar system. It's about 60 percent wider than Earth, which gives it a "better than even" chance of being rocky, researchers said. The planet is probably about five times more massive than our own, making it a so-called "super Earth." It likely possesses a thick atmosphere, lots of water and active volcanoes.

The exoplanet completes one orbit every 385 days, so its year is only slightly longer than Earth's. And Kepler-452b circles a sunlike star that's just 10 percent bigger and 20 percent brighter than the one that hangs in Earth's sky.

"It would feel a lot like home, from the standpoint of the sunshine that you would experience," said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. (Jenkins led the team that discovered Kepler-452b.)

But Kepler-452b's star appears to be considerably older than the sun — 6 billion years, compared to 4.5 billion years.

"It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth," Jenkins said in a statement, referring to that just-right range of distances that could support the existence of liquid water on a world's surface. "That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet."


[...]

Here is an artist's concept of the surface of Kepler-452b.

Post: #2

I know they're not real and probably WAY off, I love the artist conceptions of Earth-like planets millions of light years away.

Post: #3

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Post: #4

It still seems to have not enough water, but who knows.

I just hope that before we discover alien life or make a contact - I hope that we get our shit together here on earth. Right now we are a feminized, shortsighted and unworthy civilization of dumb pussies. I don't want to be ashamed before the aliens, be they super sentient or just amoebas, we are just so unworthy of making a contact right now. I hope we achieve at least some Jules Vernisque type of morals before we make contact.

Post: #5

Are their aliens there, and can you bang them? Earth should have a random number after it too, like Earth 319c.

Post: #6

I like how astronomers have been moving the goalposts. They can only reasonably detect big planets, but they still want to get funding, so they hype up all these big planets as "super earths". Even better than the real thing!

I love this quote

Quote:"It would feel a lot like home, from the standpoint of the sunshine that you would experience," said Jon Jenkins

All because it has almost the same orbital period around the sun. They have very little idea about anything else other than the fact that it's 5 times the mass and it's "probably" rocky. But hey, big headline news "SCIENTISTS FIND ANOTHER EARTH!!"

At 5 times the mass it would be a nightmare to live there. Even if it has an ocean and you could grow stuff in it with robotic farming, you couldn't blast it up to your space station at any reasonable energy cost. This is yet another ecological dead end that we have no chance to get to in the first place.

Now if you were a super saiyan, it's a whole different story


Scientists don't want to face the horrible truth: This solar system is all we got, everything else is much worse. We won't be visiting other solar systems with our current technology. The technology to visit other solar systems (i.e. warp drives) might not even be possible.

Post: #7

Those artist conception of this planet make me chuckle. Nobody has any idea what that planet would look like. It could be just a bigger version of a lifeless Mercury for all they know. Or another hellish world like Venus. There's no way to know if there's any water there or appropriate temps for life.

I do find the idea fascinating that there could be a world that looked just like Earth with a blue sky, green grass and trees, blue oceans, oxygen but with no intelligent life on it. Like just a giant frontier rich in resources. That would be amazing.

Post: #8

One of the greatest open problems in astrology is, roughly speaking, that it is difficult to detect earth-sized planets with earth-like habitation.

That we find any at all is a remarkable testament to those brilliant scientists staring up into the stars.

Post: #9

dog...exactly what I was thinking.

If you look at all the factors that make life *potentially* hospitable on Earth, then layer in the factors that make life *potentially* hospitable to mammals on Earth, then layer the timeliness aspect (hopefully the star it circles is really boring with consistent radiation like ours, hopefully no major asteroids hit it in the last few million years, hopefully no major volcanoes or plate shifting has happened...that is, if the plates are shifting in the perfect manner Earth's are), there's basically zero chance of this being even remotely livable at this moment.

Scientists don't like attributing things to luck, but the one indisputable truth of human beings alive today...we're extremely, extremely lucky. Your cells are made of molecules that just so happened to glom together and replicate, then made cells, that survived incredible heat, incredible cold, water, no water, then your ancestors survived threats by dinosaurs and sharks and massive birds and tigers and lions and fish. Your ancestors survived the plague and cholera and genocide and witch-hunts...well, you get the picture.

Oh, and you're molecules and amino acids and cells and ancestors were all lucky enough to have done it on this very unlikely planet.

That said, it's a really cool story.

(07-24-2015 03:34 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  Those artist conception of this planet make me chuckle. Nobody has any idea what that planet would look like.

So true, just fun to think about. Do we know what color the dinosaurs were? I don't think so, but fun to depict. Maybe T Rex was pink and only hunted among giant hibiscus flowers.

Post: #10

This is all about God. If God made us, that's a perfectly reasonable explanation for us being here. Philosophers have debated the possibility of God's existence, and it's agreed that there are several arguments proving God exists, and several proving he doesn't exist. As far as human knowledge is concerned, the existence of God is not proven, but is a completely realistic possibility.

However, if you don't want God to exist, or if you don't want a God that enforces a moral code that you don't like, then proof of life evolving elsewhere would seem to show that we are not special snowflakes created by the God of the Bible.

It's clear that the scientific community has a religious drive to prove that life evolved elsewhere, meaning we are all just random, meaningless matter.

Post: #11

This is cool, but I'm skeptical. A fair amount of scientific literature suggests that conditions like those on Earth are incredibly rare.

Post: #12

(07-24-2015 03:40 PM)heavy Wrote:  Scientists don't like attributing things to luck, but the one indisputable truth of human beings alive today...we're extremely, extremely lucky. Your cells are made of molecules that just so happened to glom together and replicate, then made cells, that survived incredible heat, incredible cold, water, no water, then your ancestors survived threats by dinosaurs and sharks and massive birds and tigers and lions and fish. Your ancestors survived the plague and cholera and genocide and witch-hunts...well, you get the picture.

I imagine physicists and astronomers would be much more inclined than laymen to agree that we are very, very lucky, regardless of their personal estimations of Drake equation-like expressions.

In general though, people don't like attributing things to luck, or random variability. You see people trying to weave post hoc narratives all the time in sports, business, finance, relationships, etc. but they're really just stochastic processes. Narratives and story-telling are fun! Stochastic and probabilistic mumbo-jumbo is yucky and boring.

Post: #13

How can anyone not imagine that there are aliens, there is life, and there are planets near in similarity to our earth ?

They talk about all the odds that had to happen to create our Earth.

Does no one realize the billions of planets that are out there ?

Post: #14

(07-24-2015 03:37 PM)storm Wrote:  One of the greatest open problems in astrology is...

I think you mean astronomy

Honestly, someone should tell NASA, the air force, and all of the defense contractors that they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on some form of non-traditional propulsion. Heck every science fiction writer realizes this is the biggest hurdle we have to overcome for even basic space travel.

As cool as it is, i don't really care about photos of Pluto or a rover on Mars. Why send a probe when we should be able to explore it with our own eyes?

Post: #15

(07-24-2015 03:21 PM)dog Wrote:  Scientists don't want to face the horrible truth: This solar system is all we got, everything else is much worse. We won't be visiting other solar systems with our current technology. The technology to visit other solar systems (i.e. warp drives) might not even be possible.

They're not looking for places to colonize, they're looking at the probabilities that life could have developed elsewhere and developing a catalog of targets for the next generation of telescopes that will search for chemical biomarkers in exoplanet atmospheres.

Most scientists are normal people who are motivated by a search for some objective truth, so I would disagree with your and heavy's implication that they have some agenda or are denying reality. They measure reality so as to not have to speculate about it.

Also there are two simpler reasons for the apparent "goalpost moving". 1) Public affairs and project management, not the scientists. 2) more years of data means more detections of these smaller exoplanets. It used to be the discoveries were mostly jupiters and mini jupiters. It takes a minimum of 3 detections, so 3 years of data for an earth analog. More detections needed (years) if it's low signal to noise (smaller diameter).

Post: #16

Colonizing isn't unfeasible, it's having any communication with the colony once it's established. You just send robots loaded with frozen cum, eggs, and an artificial womb. However even if the probe is designed to push up near the speed of light so that from its own reference frame only a few centuries pass on the trip, it'll still be at least thousands or millions of years from our point of view, so we'll never actually communicate with the future colonists.

More than anything else it's an insurance policy so that if lesbians take over the world and evolve into giant non-sapient slug monsters, at least there'll be another shot at human life in the future elsewhere. Hell, for all we know this new exoplanet we discovered was the one that sent a probe here twenty million years ago and they're the ones with the lesbian slug monsters.

Post: #17

People forget one important thing to do with travel and landing on planets.

Gravity distorts time so if the density of a planet is greater than that of Earth you will age slower than those relative to you on Earth. They already have this problem not 100 miles above our surface with satellites but by milliseconds. I wonder how they will overcome this problem.

Post: #18

(07-24-2015 07:07 PM)Foolsgo1d Wrote:  People forget one important thing to do with travel and landing on planets.

Gravity distorts time so if the density of a planet is greater than that of Earth you will age slower than those relative to you on Earth. They already have this problem not 100 miles above our surface with satellites but by milliseconds. I wonder how they will overcome this problem.

The difference in gravity between earth and a planet someone bigger than earth wouldn't be enough to cause any noticeable time distortion. You'd need the type of gravity you see coming from black holes to really fuck things up.

Post: #19

(07-24-2015 07:33 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

(07-24-2015 07:07 PM)Foolsgo1d Wrote:  People forget one important thing to do with travel and landing on planets.

Gravity distorts time so if the density of a planet is greater than that of Earth you will age slower than those relative to you on Earth. They already have this problem not 100 miles above our surface with satellites but by milliseconds. I wonder how they will overcome this problem.

The difference in gravity between earth and a planet someone bigger than earth wouldn't be enough to cause any noticeable time distortion. You'd need the type of gravity you see coming from black holes to really fuck things up.

Even the black hole in Interstellar had to weigh as much as a galaxy and be spinning at 99% of the speed of light in order to make the time differential exciting enough for a movie.

Post: #20

(07-24-2015 03:20 PM)kbell Wrote:  Are their aliens there, and can you bang them? Earth should have a random number after it too, like Earth 319c.

You must want purple and sticky goo all over your dick. Nasty.

Post: #21

(07-24-2015 07:07 PM)Foolsgo1d Wrote:  People forget one important thing to do with travel and landing on planets.

Gravity distorts time so if the density of a planet is greater than that of Earth you will age slower than those relative to you on Earth. They already have this problem not 100 miles above our surface with satellites but by milliseconds. I wonder how they will overcome this problem.

Post: #22

(07-24-2015 04:33 PM)kaotic Wrote:  How can anyone not imagine that there are aliens, there is life, and there are planets near in similarity to our earth ?

Because there are good reasons to believe that there aren't. Advanced life is likely impossible in the vast majority of galaxies, and even in the galaxies it is possible in, it requires a massive number of factors to even become remotely possible. Barrow and Tipler's book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle discusses this in greater detail, but you need things like a star of the right type, tectonic activity, enough water, a particular atmosphere, etc.

In order to have advanced life, you have to go through a series of 12 steps, all of which have to occur before the star burns out.

Post: #23

(07-24-2015 07:33 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

(07-24-2015 07:07 PM)Foolsgo1d Wrote:  People forget one important thing to do with travel and landing on planets.

Gravity distorts time so if the density of a planet is greater than that of Earth you will age slower than those relative to you on Earth. They already have this problem not 100 miles above our surface with satellites but by milliseconds. I wonder how they will overcome this problem.

The difference in gravity between earth and a planet someone bigger than earth wouldn't be enough to cause any noticeable time distortion. You'd need the type of gravity you see coming from black holes to really fuck things up.

The fact that it exists just 100 miles from our surface should make it open to debate and investigating.

But it isn't for our generations to ponder because it is going to be some time before anyone gets off world to such distances.


And Dog24, go look it up if you want to be entertained. Time dilation in Google or better yet find some science fiction novels surrounding it.

Post: #24

(07-24-2015 08:35 PM)TravelerKai Wrote:  

(07-24-2015 03:20 PM)kbell Wrote:  Are their aliens there, and can you bang them? Earth should have a random number after it too, like Earth 319c.

You must want purple and sticky goo all over your dick. Nasty.

And not to mention those alien STDs that we have no immunity for, killing us in two weeks.

Post: #25

(07-25-2015 08:48 AM)Foolsgo1d Wrote:  And Dog24, go look it up if you want to be entertained. Time dilation in Google or better yet find some science fiction novels surrounding it.

Im an engineer and taught physics for many years, just because you saw interstellar once doesnt mean you are suddenly an expert in cosmology.