NASA's Kepler Telescope Launched Successfully 82
Iddo Genuth writes "At precisely 10:49 p.m. EST, NASA's 'Kepler' telescope was successfully kicked off into space, embarking on a mission that the agency says 'may fundamentally change humanity's view of itself.' The telescope will search the nearby region of our galaxy for the first time looking for Earth-size planets, which orbit stars at distances where temperatures permit liquid water to endure on their surface — a region often referred to as the 'habitable' zone."
Not only has it launched... (Score:5, Informative)
...but it's generating it's own power and is communicating. From http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/mar/HQ_09-052_Kepler_launches.html
Re:That's pretty cool. (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Time_dilation_and_space_flight [wikipedia.org]
Re:And what're we gonna do if we find any? (Score:1, Informative)
The next step is to build or send up more telescopes to analyse the chemical signature of the atmospheres of all those planets. If there is oxygen and methane in similar proportions as on earth we can suspect that they have similar types of life as we have.
Next step is to launch even better telescopes to look for traces of geoengineering or space construction on massive scales. If there are aliens out there they probably have tentacles reaching into space, figuratively speaking.
We will hopefully soon be able to put an upper limit on the amount of neighbours in the sphere of 100 ly from earth.
Intersting Orbit (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That's pretty cool. (Score:4, Informative)
Japan didn't do too badly; once they realised how backward they were they acted quickly to catch up, taking less than ninety years from the Black Ships to Pearl Harbour. A case could perhaps be made for India, whose existence as a unified state rather than countless squabbling principalities is largely a result of the Raj. And awful though the Conquistadors were, the Aztec Empire was a brutal tyranny that enslaved all its neighbours, who were very glad indeed to see the back of Montezuma.
They are after statistics (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA you'll see they are after statistics, not detailed data. They want to estimate the number of planets that have approximately the same characteristics as Earth.
The Kepler will keep monitoring the same 100000 stars during five years. The number of planets detected around those stars will give a rough idea on how likely it is to find earth-like planets.
Re:obvious but worth saying (Score:3, Informative)
Stop bringing this point up as it is for the most part worthless. For starters looking for completely alien types of life is damn near pointless because we would be highly unlikely to recognize it as such. Such life could readily exist on Earth right now but we do not recognize it. Looking for something without knowing what to look for isn't going to be very fruitful. It will be more useful to look for planets and solar systems like ours to look for life like ours. We would be able to recognize it more easily and we can use all of our baselines to determine its characteristics. Not finding a bunch of life like ours will also be useful in letting us know our type of life is not common in the galaxy and then we should look for the more exotic types.
Life on Earth loves carbon and water because both have fairly unique properties among naturally occurring chemicals. As any organic chemistry student will tell you carbon can form into a multitude of configurations each with unique properties of their own. It's far more difficult for silicon to form such long/complex chains so it's less than ideal as a biological base chemical. Water like carbon has some useful properties, its solid form is less dense than its liquid form which means things living at the bottom of an ocean or lake don't necessarily freeze when the temperature drops. Water is also a great solvent without being too damaging and is fairly abundant in the universe.
Narrowing a search for life to something similar to ourselves is not going to miss out on some big picture. There's hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, we don't have to find every bit of life everywhere. We only need to find one other solar system with life to know life is not a unique phenomenon in the universe. Two says we're a little more common, a thousand says we're downright expected. It's fine to skip over the highly exotic life forms because it's highly likely that there's at least a measurable number of solar systems with life similar enough to ours to recognize it as such.