Finding Twin Earths Is Harder Than We Thought 161
Matt_dk writes "Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy. 'We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,' said Kaltenegger. 'We will need to add up many transits to do so — hundreds of them, even for stars as close as 20 light-years away.'" The abstract of their paper offers a link to the complete paper as a 17-page PDF; here is a short description from 2007 of the same researchers' work, outlining the type of spectral signature that an Earth-like atmosphere would be expected to show.
Solution: (Score:3, Funny)
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I'm guessing you've never heard of the probability drive.
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Never mind; neither have I :) Correct name is Infinite Improbability Drive. Look it up anyway; it's fun :)
Re:Solution: (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, please. This was superseded by the Bistro drive years ago! It gets rid of all that mucking about with improbability. Much safer.
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Said the joker to the thief.
(Unfortunately, neither seems able to provide much help on FTL travel.)
In effect, what they are saying, is (Score:5, Interesting)
Once we find a sufficient collection of candidate planets using this instrument, we can devise a different device/experiment to narrow down whether they are Earth-like. That should take maybe a few years to ten years.
That is more-or-less the pattern we have been following, and it has been successful so far. I see no reason to change.
Clarification (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In effect, what they are saying, is (Score:5, Insightful)
"...and it has been successful so far. I see no reason to change."
Has it? Can we really be sure that the current method is accurate in ruling out earth-like and non-earth-like?
I'm not really disagreeing with you, just not so sure that it's 100% accurate (which is ideal, but not exactly realistic). To me this sounds like they are intentionally thwarting the idea, so the public will go "well shit, guess we're trapped here for 300 more years" kinda thing.
Current method seems fine, applied to the new equipment. Keep searching, monitor the ones we already assume are earth-like, and when we figure out a way to do something about it (wormholes, etc) we pick the best candidate at that time, and go for it, if that fails, or if it takes longer than the time to build/induce/etc the next method of travel/communication, we head for the second candidate, etc... this "new" method seem to suppose that we won't be able to do anything about it for 200 more years, so we have the time to piss around with hundreds of tests, when we should probably assume it'l be possible next year, kinda like "Year of Linux on the Desktop", may never happen, but why can't it happen next year? Just because you may not succeed, doesn't mean you should't try.
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just not so sure that it's 100% accurate( which is ideal, but not exactly realistic)
"100% accurate" is not the ideal because things that exist are better than things that are not, and no test that exists will ever be 100% accurate, so there will always be a better test: the one that actually exists!
It would be silly to have a test that was "better than ideal", so obviously the ideal test is the best one we can actually build, not the best one we can imagine. Our imagination is not the arbiter of quality.
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The long term
Re:In effect, what they are saying, is (Score:4, Interesting)
From what I can tell in a brief skim, it really does pose a fundamental limit given current technology. The problem is that with the largest mirror we can imagine getting up into space, and with the highest sensitivity sensors, the signal-to-noise ratio is still too low to get a usable measurement without taking hundreds of measurements.
They plan to detect the chemicals in the atmosphere by measuring the absorption bands in the starlight as some of it passes through the atmosphere. This is presumably going to be a lot more sensitive than trying to detect the light from the planet directly, since you have a lot more photons to carry the information. The signal to noise ratio in this case is really limited by the unfortunate fact that light energy is discretized and you can't make finer measurements than a single photon. Thus a large mirror with a high-quantum efficiency (95%) sensor, is really the best you can do.
The only hope to improve this is to either get bigger mirrors, which really depends on improving space access and is unlikely to give order of magnitude improvements, or to implement an as yet unrealized method that is able to get more information. If it were a problem of angular resolution there are plenty of interesting tricks you could use to improve it. Unfortunately I can't think of anything better, and it doesn't seem anyone else has yet either. Of course, that doesn't mean no one will... but its not as simple as just designing the next mission.
Actually... random 3:30 am idea... if you did something in thermal-IR, and measured the absorption of the blackbody emissions of the planet by the atmosphere you might be able to get something working. The intensity would be a lot lower than looking at the stars light, but the dimming due to absorption would be much larger percentage-wise... although it would take some heavy math to show if it would actually give you a better SNR. Of course, there are plenty of holes here: among other things, my knowledge of atmospheric chemistry and absorption is very limited, and this would all depend on being able to resolve the star separate from the planet, and would thus rely on some complicated interferometric methods....... and you'd have to block out the star light to be able to get the planet light as anything more than noise... and probably the number of photons in thermal IR from a planet are too low to be able to even see it on its own... but maybe I'm wrong and it could work, or something else can.
See, there you go (Score:2)
If there are limits to the tech of certain ways to find out things, we will just change the tech... or find a different way.
For example: one well-known way to overcome the limits of mirror size is to use multiple mirrors, spaced a good distance apart. We already use this technique in other areas of astronomy. It allows better resolution than the sum of the individual mirrors would indicate... almost
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Using multiple mirrors is great for increasing your angular resolution, I know, its what my graduate thesis is about. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as good at increasing your light gathering capability. 6.5 meters is the size of the JWST, so if you wanted to improve your SNR by a factor of 10, you'd have to have 10 JWST's, and funding that is just not going to happen at this point, not without a drastic drop in cost of access to space.
The gravitational lensing concept that others suggested is valuable be
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Yes, its possible, but the way it will be possible is through drastic reduction in launch costs that can get you far more aperture or the ability to get a JWST sized scope out to a 500 AU orbit for gravitational lensing. I have a lot of hope for that, I'm involved with organizations working to make it happen.
However, there really is no way to develop a new instrument capable of doing so without incredible infrastructure or discovering a brand new kind of physics that allows it. The developments of the pas
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I don't know if this is valid but, what about 10 devices doing the same job?
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Better yet, 10 devices working 10 different targets. When one is found that is particularly interesting, the other nine drop what they're doing and chip in.
Mal-2
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Just because it's hard doesn't mean that we shall give up trying.
This field is still a very young field, and the methods used to find planets will be more and more refined over time.
But it's also important to not count out stellar systems that may not look like they are going to contain earth-like planets. Even a negative answer is an answer giving usable data in this case.
Earth is the only speck of dust in the universe where we are certain that there is life. If it's intelligent enough to prosper in the lo
Re:In effect, what they are saying, is (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is being limited much more by funding and physical constraints. Current ground based telescopes are operating very near the quantum limit and space based observatories are expensive to the point of making them infeasible.
All in all I think that pointing a few telescopes at a given object for long periods of time for a total cost far exceeding that of building a better solution is the path that is being (and will continue to be) pushed on the scientific community. The prices tags for what we want to know are so large and budgets tend to be sabotaged by political agendas as to make it appear that we are incapable of doing science for a reasonable price.
But, see... (Score:2)
Not much more than 20 years ago, the very idea of trying to find earthlike planets telescopically would likely have been laughed at.
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I am half-astrophysicist. I sympathize with your need for much more money for what you want to know, I am the same way with sex - very very curious and a deep need to know.
I guess I need to point out that most Americans also need much more money. Not to (ever) mention the rest of the world.
And so your dream is not likely to be realized by wanting much, much more money. So, like me, you'll have to find clever ways to accomplish your need to know that don't require much, much more money - using your imaginati
As much as I'd love to find another Earth... (Score:3, Funny)
Wow! (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no logical reason to assume similar development, barring further evidence. That could be a good or bad thing.
But your second sentence... wow! Where do you get off making an assumption like that? First, if they have anything like "a pervasive machine intelligence", then their technical development would be VASTLY beyond ours. We are not even remotely close to anything like that.
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "les
Simple explanation (Score:3, Funny)
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "less distressing"??
This is Slashdot, and you're wondering how someone decided that a machine would be easier to deal with than a living creature. Hmm...
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I love people. I'm what you might call a highly social nerd, someone who really enjoys the company of others in a variety of social contexts. Yeah, I also enjoy sequestering myself in my home office and writing code for a couple of days at a time, but there comes a point where human contact is critical for me. I have frie
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I did indeed mean it in jest. And to be honest, most of the nerds I know have more diverse social lives than the non-nerds, though their activities may not be the popular idea of fun. That just makes them more interesting to be around, IMO.
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First, if they have anything like "a pervasive machine intelligence", then their technical development would be VASTLY beyond ours. We are not even remotely close to anything like that.
In my view, I have good reason to believe we're much closer to that than most people would like to accept. Many reasons, actually. It's probably a normal side effect of human vanity that we take comfort in our present position at the top of the intelligence curve, but I think it's an inescapable fact that future historians (in whatever form they might take) will describe humanity as a species that was destined to outdo itself. To me, what occurs after that will be the most interesting chapter in the history
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If you are referring to anything like human-level intelligence, machines are just about as stupid as they were in the 1960s. More hardware and software (and therefore more sophistication) can fit in a
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Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "less distressing"?? One does not follow from the other.
Well, duh. If they have advanced AI, they probably have internet as well. Which means we can view alien porn while we're being wiped out.
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First, if they have anything like "a pervasive machine intelligence", then their technical development would be VASTLY beyond ours. We are not even remotely close to anything like that.
When you take into account the speed up of technology, and the way we are able to build off the previous generation of technology to help us with creating the new version, you might realise that we are probably not nearly as far out as you think(perhaps that should be "as you hope"). From the lowest estimates from the likes of Kurzweil at about 10-20 years to the highest estimates of slightly less optimistic thinkers at only about a hundred years, it is likely to come fairly soon.
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Please tell me ONE major advance in whatever field you work in.
It doesn't really work like that. Very rarely in science is there some major advance that you can specifically point to. Everything we had back then in AI we still have, but it is so much better. The neuroscience side of things is progressing, we are getting better data about the brain. Developing practical applications [numenta.com] based on that. Voice recognition is pretty good now, automatic translation is better, computational vision is better, autonomo
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In my opinion, voice recognition and language translation are irrelevancies. They make input and output somewhat easier, no more. I do not believe they are essential characteristics for intelligence.
And I
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Re:As much as I'd love to find another Earth... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm fairly certain that the little green men, ticked off after years of being depicted as scrawny, bug-eyed, space-faring bobbleheads, will just come in rayguns blazing, but the machines, prizing efficiency and precision above our human failings, would probably arrive and play muzak with a pre-recorded voiceover telling us that our death is important, and would we please wait.
Is being blasted into your component molecules by unimaginably powerful energy beams really more distressing than being put on hold?
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Nonesense. Even if computational efficiency approaches infinity - which is pie in the sky anyway - other actions like moving around, extracting raw materials and producing useful things from them are still bound by the laws of thermodynamics.
P.S. exponential isn't a fancy word for "a lot".
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As for your notes on the work "exponential," wow, you don't say. You must some kind of college degree or something.
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Why anyone would think that an advanced machine intelligence would need to compete with human beings for resources is beyond me.
Me too, since I wrote nothing about competing for resources.
What I did suggest was that machines would prize precision and efficiency; by that measure we barely qualify as an intelligent species. Individuals may be precise and efficient, but as a group we aren't, and a single machine intelligence with many nodes looking for intelligence that resembles itself may not even realise th
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You've absolutley no idea what an alien machine might prize so deciding it would be precision and efficiency is an enourmous assumption. Even if it was true I've no idea how a species can be said to be precise, I think thats pretty much meaningless but as for efficiency I think any alien observer would conclude that humans are in fact very efficient in the way they interact a
Little green men? (Score:2)
... the little green men...
Back in the 1960's Captain Kirk couldn't swing a dead cat around his head without hitting a "Class 'M'" planet every week. Can't NASA lure him back out of retirement?
. . . and his little green men were always platinum blond chicks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:STGameTrisk.jpg [wikipedia.org]
I nominate "Shahna" as the official Slashdot mascot, because she is wears a tinfoil bikini . . . and she wields a giant can-opener.
Now, where is my "rogue" source code? Does a giant can-opener do more damage than a two-handed
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. . . and his little green men were always platinum blond chicks
Maybe not men*, but some were definitely green [wikipedia.org].
*At least that we know of. I always had questions about why the young, naive Chekov was the navigator...
Bullets vs. Energy beams (Score:3, Interesting)
Bullets hurt people because of human blood circulation (loss of blood) and the size of our organs (heh). If robots were built differently or little green men evolved differently, bullets would most likely be ineffective. There is no reason that there is only one wire connecting processor to leg and opening one loop should not hurt the other parts of the circuit. Also, there is almost no reason why the processor needs to be 15 cm big, or the leg motor has to take up the whole length of the leg. There is
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Well, that plan fails if the number of heads doesn't equal one.
What complete disintegration lacks in finesse, it makes up for in certainty.
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That's fine.
Our germs will take care of them, ha.
Or computer viruses created on a 1995 laptop. For sure.
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Or maybe our technology took a different road [wikipedia.org].
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I wouldn't rule that out, but it would have ruined the gag.
Interesting link, BTW. I'll have to check that one out.
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Maybe they've already made the jump to a pervasive machine intelligence...
They've had Conficker-gate too?
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Not at all sure why you find machine intelligences less scaring than biological ones. Both can chew up resources very quickly.
To put it simply, the more advanced a system becomes, the less resources it tends to require per cycle of computation (not the best way of putting it, but hey, I've had a few beers). Now, there comes a point in the acceleration of intelligence where virtually everything in sight has some sort of information processing capacity associated with it, and everything's linked in a pretty mesh-like way. That's where things get interesting: the convergence of increasing efficiency in computation, with a simultaneou
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Wrong Approach? (Score:3, Interesting)
IANA Astronomer, but perhaps it may be prudent to start looking at the more obvious candidates in terms of how conducive they are to human habitation and evaluate them in terms of what it'll take to make that possible. If an alternate habitat for humans is a moderately serious concern, why bother looking at worlds whose characteristics are under heavy risk of changing by the time we get there? Have we even found a better candidate that one of Jupiter's moons or Mars?
Cheers!
Re:Wrong Approach? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think the idea is to find a new place for us to live. Obviously, our ability to take advantage of such a planet is incredibly limited.
Rather, its to understand what the possibilities for life outside our planet are. Putting it in simplest terms, its working to get experimental data for some of the coefficients in the Drake equation.
Columbus Effect (Score:2)
In the near term, certainly.
But imagine discovering a 1G +/- .2G planet, temp range -35C-40C, 75%N 25%O. Doesn't matter how far away; imagine finding one.
I'd bet we'd start spooling up our manned spaceflight capability pretty darned quickly after that, and actual money would start being spent on solving the distance problem (propulsion techniques, suspended animation, longevity, generation ships...)
When all that is "out west" is the edge of the earth, why bother? But as soon as the New World is discovered,
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As it stands, we're never ever going to get there.
For interstellar colonization you need either: 1. Artificial wombs and frozen sperm/eggs 2. Colossal generation ship (impractical and very depressing way to travel) 3. Cryogenic storage of humans 3. Self-reproducing sentient robots (humanity wouldn't be spread, but intelligent life would).
And the ability for humanity to spend ass loads of money on something which they certainly won't see a return on in their lifetimes.
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You left out the answers of:
4. Human lifespan expanded to over 1,000 years. Frankly, this is easier and more likely to do than #2 or #3.
5. Many many set of short hops. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away. An antimatter powered ship can reach 0.1 C. It only takes 40 years to get there. That is one generation, not multiple ones.
6. FTL travel. Sorry, but no I don't fall for the "we don't know how to do it, so it must be impossible" stupidity that prevented people from trying
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I'm afraid I call stupidity on you, sir.
0.1 C as a peak velocity does not equal 40 years travel time to go 4 light years. Can you figure out why?
Short hops would be a pretty stupid way to travel for the same reason.
Additionally, antimatter is not a feasible fuel source given the immense cost, and the output (getting momentum out of hard gammas), and the storage difficulties. I'd like a source that shows antimatter can be contained using less energy then can actually be extracted from it - it's not clear tha
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If you're traveling at a tiny fraction of c, time dilation is negligible.
The point is that traveling at a tiny fraction of c is probably the best we can hope for.
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I need your clothes, your boots and your planet (Score:2)
'We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,' said Kaltenegger.
Governer Kaltenegger continued.... "It is not until this time that we can begin the search for Sarah Connor."
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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I think if someone had a solid path to go down for developing FTL travel they would have no trouble finding funding. In fact I think that would have the effect of encouraging more missions like Kepler, so we would have good places to go once we got it working.
I'd venture a guess (I'm not involved in anything similar to that kind of physics) that the kind of results that would lead to a radical new form of propulsion wouldn't come from a heavy focus of funding, but rather continued support of seemingly impr
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yaha another planet to poop on ...
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All the money in the world doesn't allow you to break the laws of physics. And even if you can construct a theoretical possibility of FTL, you will likely have a really hard time implementing it, i.e. for a wormhole you might need two black holes, which aren't exactly easy to come by and then you have to find a way to survive traveling through that thing and all that stuff. So not likely to happen. Much more likely that the Kurzweil's singularity will happen, we will all turn into a cyboard super race and t
If you find an earth like planet.... (Score:2)
with no intelligent life within 100 light years of earth
1) FTL travel would have a purpose not just a science fiction wank-off
2) People with lots of money can tell the collected governments of the world to go take a flying leap, that alone would be worth billions to right people
3) maybe all those people saying "we need a homeland" well there you go.
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In hindsight this entire post is me digressing, but I'm honestly not convinced. The general direction that the progress of the world is taking is one of the people in control locking down and controlling society so to advance their own personal gains as much as possible for the short time they are alive and/or in power. Knowledge of life on other planets and R&D on how to get there, doesn't make money, it only costs money. If possible, I imagine information like this would be censored as much as much as
Important distinction: (Score:4, Interesting)
There's an important distinction between it being hard to find an earthlike planet, and there not being an earthlike planet to find at all.
Our mechanisms for finding planets are all in wobbles in the wavelengths from the light of stars. And because of that, we tend to only see the big wobbles, because small wobbles tend to get lost in the noise.
It would be nice if we could shine a flashlight and get a real look out there, but in most cases, we'd never see what we shone light upon in our lifetimes.
The universe is a HUGE freakin place, filled mostly with stuff we can't get a good clear look at yet.
Entire worlds like ours are are both all we know, but at the same time, are too small for us to even notice in the grandness just outside our atmospheric window.
Ryan Fenton
Twin Earth (Score:2)
Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere?
Also, will they mean the same thing by "water," even if their oceans are filled with XYZ?
</putnam>
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NASA needs to latch onto this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Finding a "twin" earth, no matter the distance (assuming if we can see it, we can get to it at some point in the future) is possible _the_ most important thing for the continuation of the human race.
As for being harder than "we" thought, to me at least (IANAA) it seems pretty damn hard to me. Even if we find a planet that could have human life, would it have life on it? Would that life be toxic to us? etc...
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FTFY.
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No it isn't. Humans are built for here. We are an evolving species and once the oil is gone and the metals we've dug up oxidise and wash into the oceans, we'll be right back to our neolithic lifestyle - you know - the one that worked for hundreds of thousands of years.
Industrialism will disappear and we we r
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possible _the_ most important thing for the continuation of the human race
Wow, and here I was thinking it would be something much simpler: Like us learning how to manage our own planet and resources properly.
Re:NASA needs to latch onto this. (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't have the technology for any type of hibernation space travel now, which is why I think its so important to follow these types of research. Even if it takes 100000 years to travel to a new planet, that's pittance compared to what it took for current level sentient life to develop on Earth.
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I have some doubt about terraforming. With genetic engineering getting more and more common and computers getting faster all the time, I think its much more likely that we simply transform the human race itself to be suitable for life on other planets then transforming the planets themselves. Quite a bit cheaper to engineer a few cyborg colonist then to put a breathable atmosphere on Mars, after all we already kind of done the former, the rovers just need to get a little more clever.
Time difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, it will only be possible to tell if it was Earth-like X number of years ago. Since there are only a few stars within 100 light years, X will usually be more than 100. In the meantime, there could have been a planet killing asteroid, or an advanced civilization could have nuked itself. So, we can only really find "twin Earths" from the past. We'll never actually know what it's like until we go there...
...actually, even that's not true, in the sense that "we" means everybody on Earth. Only the travelers will know it's true. Earthlings will have to wait for the return trip or signal, to tell them that it *was* true. Even then, for most stars it would be your great-great-great.... children receiving the signal.
Bottom line? The Universe's speed limit sucks. Where's the fuzzbuster?
Re:Time difference (Score:5, Informative)
In the range of 20lyrs there are about 100 stars, in the range of 250lyrs about 260000.
See: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/ [atlasoftheuniverse.com]
angel'o'sphere
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Who knows, it may be saving our asses from giant brain-sucking squids from Voltar. In other words, maybe the Anthropic Principle has made space-travel difficult "on purpose".
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Just call it an M-class planet already (Score:2, Informative)
We'll find one eventually (Score:3, Insightful)
And then what? invade it? (Score:2)
Dump all the excessive population of this planet to the new one?
Maybe send the Chinese there? :-)
I hope the planets we find don't have gold or oil though...
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Yes, we'll put all the middle managers and telephone sanitizers into a big B Ark ship. To save them from the giant mutant space goat.
I for one (Score:2)
Life... (Score:3, Insightful)
Twin Earths? (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking of intelligence inhabitants, it would be wonderful if we could detect such, but very unlikely, unless those inhabitants also happens to be at a technological development similar to ours, where they are leaking radio signals all over the place. Good candidates for SETI to focus its search. Maybe even the SETI@HOME crowd can put actuators on that satellite dishes to focus on said planet...
The real killer here is that even if we did find a so-called "twin Earth", we wouldn't be able to do a whole lot about it. Sending a probe there would take thousands of years. Maybe we could do a massive interferometer in space to study the planet in more detail. Forget the manned mission fantasy so many have. We have yet to put a man out past the orbit of the Moon and we're going to travel to a distant star many light-years from Earth?
The physics of Interstellar Travel is daunting, to put it mildly. When I was a kid diddling around with the Special Relativity equations, I was all elated until I realized the ENERGY required to make time dilation a useful thing -- for the travelers, anyway -- is way beyond anything we humans are likely to be able to do now and in the future -- if ever. And all those dreams I had as a young boy of going to the stars died.
Later, I got into the whole Wormhole stuff, and read some of the stuff Kip Throne and others wrote, and got depressed again. Wormholes -- if they even exist -- is far more daunting in terms of energy requirement than even lightspeed travel, by many, many orders of magnitude!!!!!!
Well, wonderful if we can find. But then we'll be more frustrated when we all have to face the realities of physics. Science Fiction lost a lot of its appeal for me because most of it turned out to be simple fantasy, impossible to achieve. My ignorance as a kid is gone.
Meanwhile, we have made tremendous strides in Science and Technology since my teen years, the stuff of Science Fiction 30 years ago. We do live in a marvelous age. It's just that Interstellar Travel will not be a part of it. :-(
We are in a sea of limited thinking... (Score:2)
The question to ask is not weather there are "Earth" like planets out there. The work by Lineweaver's group already suggests that they are there (simply from a proability basis). The question to ask is where they are relative to our state of development? And if one truly understands computer science, and life science, and nanotechnology, then they are out there, they are developed (much further along than we currently are) and they have most probably have evolved into a Matrioshka Brain architecture. Wh
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The work by Lineweaver's group already suggests that they are there (simply from a proability basis). The question to ask is where they are relative to our state of development?
There is little point in asking a question we can't yet answer. Finding one is a necessary precursor to answering that question.
And if one truly understands computer science, and life science, and nanotechnology, then they are out there, they are developed (much further along than we currently are) and they have most probably have
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Worthwhile question. Are we the members of an exclusive club or are we the members of a somewhat more global club?
And the current answer is that we just do not know. The answer is interesting either way. But we have to determine which way it goes.
I am voting on the "more global club" basis simply based on the odds of development and when they took place. But I could be very wrong.
R.
Aren't we missing another possibilty (Score:2)
Is the goal really to find "earth-like" planets (ones are similar, size, dist from star etc) or to find "habitable" planets which could support life somewhat like us or (maybe someday) us.
These planets could very well exist at different distances as moons of gas giants that are closer to the star than our gas giants (which might provide supplimentry heat) and while these would probably be smaller, many gg moons are not much smaller than earth. Needless to say, these are going to be really hard to pick out
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How the heck do they know their "closer and closer"?
Someone not drunk (or less frunk) enlighten me.
Your confusion over homonyms belies a good point. They don't know; they theorize that such things are out there and have built a craft to test this. The article (and summary) strike me as a bit optimistic about the inevitability.
Of course, research is sold to underwriters like business proposals. Funding would be hard to get if the researchers said "Geeze, I dunno. Earthlike planets? Mmmmayyybe. Let's go look! We'll need, eh, how about half a million - Dude! Hey! Hawking! Stop jonesing that telescope and p
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built a craft to test this.
Gyah, what am I smoking? Of course I meant "devised a methodology to test this".
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uhhhhh are you sure you know what a twink is, cuz.....
LOL (Score:2)
LOL! ****, you're right. I didn't... I looked it up. I had thought it was for skinny persons in general... Oh my! ****!
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Better living through Chemistry.
You'll feel better if you stay on your meds.