Kepler-62 Has 2 Good Candidate Planets In the Search for Life 79
astroengine writes "About 1,200 light-years from Earth, five planets are circling around sun-like star Kepler-62, two of which are fortuitously positioned for water, if any exists, to remain liquid on their surfaces — a condition believed to be necessary for life. The discovery, made by scientists using NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, is the strongest evidence yet for more than one Earth-sized planet existing in a star's so-called 'habitable' zone. 'We're particularly delighted to find that there are two planets in the habitable zone,' lead Kepler scientist William Borucki, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. 'It sort of doubles our chances of finding that Earth we'd all like to find. When you think about Earth and Mars, if Mars had been a bit larger, if Jupiter hadn't been so close, we'd again have two planets in the habitable zone and maybe we'd have a place to go,' he said." There's also a third planet believed to be a good candidate for hosting water.
Re:That's nice... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know about "never" but you do bring up a point: space is so vast that finding life of any sort of life is going to be a very long process.
I've been let down by sci-fi. In a Star Trek:Enterprise, it was mentioned (Season 4, IIRC) that Vulcan was 26 light years away. In reality, how many planets that may under the most flexible standards support life within that distance?
As far as I know it's zero.
In sci-fi at "Warp" whatever, the universe is teaming with life.
IN real life even if we could travel at Warp speeds, there's hardly any planets - that we know of today - that can support life within a lifetime of Warp travel. Eight times - TEN times the speed of light is not good enough, I'm afraid.
We need THOUSANDs of times the speed of light to have a Star Trek or Star Wars type of intergalactic society.
I'm afraid that humanity is going to be alone for a very very long time - maybe we will never see life on another planet.
I really hope I'm wrong because I think it would be the coolest thing in the World to find life on another planet and my hopes are on Mars - bacteria or something.
Re:That's nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Human beings are never going to get outside the solar system, the distance is just too great to get them to even the nearest star as bags of cells in water. But there is a reasonable chance that we can both transmit and receive information from other civilizations - all be it completely asynchronously. If we get really good at robots we might be able to seed a few local stars with self repairing robots with a range of science fiction purposes, but we will probably never know if they make it. Our current lifestyle is more likely to lead to human extinction before such grand objectives are attainable however, we are doing a lousy job of ensuring our own long term viability on the earth currently and it doesn't look likely to change soon. Heck its good fun though!
Re:That's nice... (Score:4, Insightful)
If i were an alien i wouldnt stop here if it was the last out post on life in the universe, except for to steal the precious species that are not like us on this planet. Futhermore if we as so much get out of our solor system i be they would send a big rock toward us or blow up our sun
What makes you so certain that intelligent, technologically capable alien races don't go through the same problems that we do? At a minimum, it is likely that interstellar travel requires mastery of nuclear energy and metallurgy across the entire periodic table, with all of the environmental risks that implies. Additionally, just to get to the point where they could develop nuclear power would likely require a period of industrialization using cruder organic sources of energy. It's very hard to imagine accomplishing this without any environmental degradation. Given the number of possible ecological catastrophies that could happen along the way, I think we're actually doing reasonably well so far.
Re:H2O Obsession.. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you can come up with some other chemistry that works, go on and tell us. We're all ears. Tell us how liquid methane can form complex compounds. Believe me, you'll have a Nobel prize in record time.