Looking For Earth-Like Exoplanets 73
Discover Magazine is running a story detailing the search for planets like Earth orbiting other stars. While we've been able to locate a few "super earths" so far, none of them really compare in size or the potential for habitability with our own world. Fortunately, advances in data analysis and new space-based telescopes — such as Kepler, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the already-launched CoRoT (PDF) — have some astronomers predicting we'll find such an exoplanet by 2010, and a habitable one by 2012. Earth-based telescopes are also in the hunt, though the article notes, "even if a habitable Earth-like world is found first from the ground, it will most likely take a space observatory to search for the chemical signals that tell us what we really want to know: Is anything living out there? If the planet is one that can be observed transiting, it just might be possible to provide a hint of an answer in the next few years."
Wow... An article about planets that isn't... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obsessed with the fact we haven't observed something we can't yet detect... This must be some sort of mis-post.
Re:Wow... An article about planets that isn't... (Score:3, Insightful)
This just seems like old news to me... I remember reading a post about 3 or 4 months ago about us finding "earth like" planets but outside the bounds of what we understand can substantiate life. Maybe it was on new scientist, but I swear I've seen almost the same tag line on a slashdot article.
This just reads like Discovery documentary - a lot of "meaningful"* questions, no real substance.
*by meaningful I mean trying to come across as meaningful, but either rhetorical or just plain obvious.
The psychological limit of awesomeness, really (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it seems to me that it's just a matter of perspective. We don't really see absolute values, we see deltas, and the baseline is the present.
Think of, say, dollars. Just saying "in year X you'll earn Y dollars a month" is only saying anything as a comparison. Whether it's in absolute dollar values, or "how much can I buy with it", the comparison only says much compared to your current lot in life. A 1960 standard of living would be luxury for someone from 1912 (think even just having antibiotics for a change), but would be a step back for you from 2008.
Or think of CPU MHz / Gigaflops / Gigabytes / whatever computer metric. "You'll have a computer with a 4 MHz CPU and 48 kilobytes RAM and a CRT" would have sounded like an awesome supercomputer in 1960 (they eventually landed on the moon with a weaker computer than that!) Have it in your home, all yours? Man, that would have sounded so unbelievably cool. Just think of what you'd do with all that raw computer power. But few people would even consider it a usable computer nowadays in 2008.
And I will postulate a _hypothesis_ that there must be a psychological "X times better than today" threshold, which drives those predictions. I don't know what that X might be. But there's a point where the "meh, who cares" factor of, say, predicting something 10% better next month, starts being the "that's awesome" of, say, predicting something 10 times better in 5 years.
E.g., think back when Moore's Law still worked that way, and you had, say, a 100 MHz Pentium. Predicting that you'll have 133 MHz in a few months, is uninteresting. Predicting you'll have a whole 1 GHz of CPU power in 5 years, now that would have gotten your attention.
So depending on which curve you are, and assuming it looks like infinite exponential growth ahead, the future (worth predicting) will always be Y years ahead. As in, "in Y years it'll be X times better than today." If you have the same X you aim for, the future will always be Y years ahead.