'Most Earth-Like' Exoplanet Gets Major Demotion 206
audiovideodisco writes "Last month, the team behind NASA's Kepler planet-finding mission announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planetary candidate ever spotted: KOI 326.01, an approximately Earth-sized planet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star. There was much excitement; one astrophysicist even calculated the value of the new planet as exactly $223,099.93. But when an innocent fact-checker's question sent one of the researchers back to look at some figures, she noticed that the star's brightness was listed incorrectly in a reference catalog, throwing the planet's properties into doubt. After jiggering the calculations, the Kepler team now says that KOI 326.01 is neither Earth-sized nor in the habitable zone, and may actually be orbiting a different star. The Kepler researcher says, 'We're seeing the scientific method playing out in real time.' While this news is a bit of a downer, Kepler is just getting going, and it's expected to find many, many more Earth-like planets."
Real time science indeed (Score:3)
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And these days the next step after hypothesis is to issue a press release touting your amazing discovery.
Re:Real time science indeed (Score:5, Informative)
Just... No. What you are describing is nothing related to science.
What you are talking about may apply to science journalism. That is basically what happens when a liberal arts major gets told that he drew the short straw and has to write a science article instead of sympathizing with starving Rawandan kids or discussing the latest celebrity gossip.
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At least it attempts to explain reality with observable phenomenon instead of the old "God did it, no thinking required" that religion is so fond of.
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s/no thinking required/thinking actively discouraged/
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So being potentially wrong because of ignorance is worse then being wrong because of ignorance because you know for a fact (that happens to be wrong)?
I don't understand what you are trying to say here. Is it that people who do not take the same journey of worship as you do are simply not worthy of an opinion?
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So being potentially wrong because of ignorance is worse then being wrong because of ignorance because you know for a fact (that happens to be wrong)?
Wait what? I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. What he means is that it is better to be wrong and correct your error then to have a 'faith' based on nothing but folktales and tradition. Science isn't static, what we know today can be changed by what we learn tomorrow.
As for religion, how people can still hold on to that in these days is beyond my comprehension, I've tried discussing it with religious people, but they all seem unable to grasp logic the moment it conflicts with their faith.
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it's similar to Asimov's three laws.
faith is a trump card - it has root privileges when reason only has user level privileges.
what science needs to find is the sudo command if we're ever to get through.
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Science and religion have a lot in common in that they both attempt to explain the world (universe) and our place in it. The difference is that science can at least admit that it could be wrong. Falsifiability and all that.
Re:Real time science indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is that science can at least admit that it could be wrong.
Unfortunately, some of the more hardheaded religious folks consider that to be a reason why religion is superior. I can't find the link, but a while back I came across a site that among other things had a series of one-panel comics by a creationist, and one of those comics made fun of science precisely because of its ability to change its mind about things.
"Reporter: A new discovery changes everything you thought you knew about the origin of life.... wait, no, that discovery was just debunked by an even newer discovery."
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1) Why do you belief the bible is right?
Most likely answer: It was written under godly influence
2) If you believe the bible is right, where do you think the older religious texts, such as those from the ancient egyptians and romans come from?
It was made up by people to manipulate/control/seize power
3) Couldn't the bible have the same origins?
Head explodes, goto infinite loop
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That is an unlikely answer for q2.
You are more likely to hear: The devil did it.
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Well many religious intentionally misunderstand concepts like a model being refined. Except for the extremely theoretical lab experiments most of our models are approximations like "planetary formation", "global climate" or "evolution of life". For the most part we've continuously refined our models, sometimes hitting a blind alley or two but we're working out the details. Some just like to pretend that just because we're discussing evolutionary details of when and how X happened, it casts doubt on the whol
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Are you saying that "a god did it" leaves no room to figure out how A god did it or how it could have happened naturally?
It seem that you can't though. You see, God did it doesn't necessarily mean there wasn't a natural mechanism for getting it done. In fact, one could infer that becaus
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I agree with this guy. I have hated science ever since I was blinded by it back in 1982.
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If astronomers tomorrow discovered that the moon orbits 1cm out further than originally measured does the moon cease to exist? In your mind it does....
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There is a difference between a measurement error, and being completely wrong.
But what if the two are the same thing? If you have poor spatial resolution and a lousy spectrometer (like our eyes), then you may very well look at a binary system and say, "look, there's a solitary star." Would I be justified in pointing and laughing at you for being wrong, and claiming that anything you say is as suspect as the FSM cosmology because you failed to identify a ball of fusion hundreds of thousands of times the size of Earth?
The point is, very small measurement errors can lead to remarkabl
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Read the original paper. Read the citations. Read the tech specs on the telescopes / equipment. Then make up your mind -- that's the beauty of science. If you read the original paper, saw that they were using suspect data and called foul, then you could probably bring about some scientific progress.
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Tell me, why should we trust anything capable of making such a mistake, even once. And yet we do, don't we?
Yet you trust the same creatures when it comes to writing that bible of yours....
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Much of what passes for science is indistinguishable from religion.
Only if you are an idiot. Sure, i couldn't comprehend quantum entanglement (for an example), so i have to take their word for it, but i interpret that knowledge as i interpret all knowledge: Valid until proven invalid.
Only an idiot is unable to change his mind.
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You're saying it doesn't happen in science? That misrepresented "facts" are never taught as "truth" in science? Or is it that you hate it when what passes for science is compared to religion ... well because it acts a lot like religion?
You want an "intractable belief" that is prevalent in science? Here's one ... that science is without bias.
This is a fine case of bias leading to a conclusion that was passed around as true, because science wants it to be true. How else do you explain how far wrong it might
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From the outset, there were scientists who expressed skepticism about the Piltdown find. G.S. Miller, for example, observed in 1915 that "deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgment in fitting the parts together."
In essence it took 40 years for the people who benefited from or were fooled by the fakery to die off. There is a small segment of the population who will never admit a mistake.
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Einstein got his PhD based on theories that he later overturned, in as fundamental a manner as is possible in physics. The same goes for Dirac, Schroedinger, de Broglie, Compton, Heisenberg and Bohr. Should their PhDs all have been revoked because they were found to be based on an inaccurate theory?
I don't think anyone sane claims that scientists are without bias. They might claim "science" (in some unreal Platonic ideal sense) is unbiased, but scientists never can be because no-one ever is. The *data* is u
Re:Real time science indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
You want an "intractable belief" that is prevalent in science? Here's one ... that science is without bias.
Except that's not a prevalent belief in science, unless you mean in the literal sense that "science" is without bias because it is a concept, not a sentient entity.
The prevalent belief is that bias (and other failings) are an endemic property of the humans who conduct science, and it is only through the rigorous application of scientific methods that the effect of these failings can be mitigated, a process which is itself subject to the same human failings.
This is a fine case of bias leading to a conclusion that was passed around as true, because science wants it to be true. How else do you explain how far wrong it might be that the planet they said was one thing, couldn't be further from the truth.
Because there was an error in a reference catalog whose existence predates any knowledge of possible exoplanets, and therefore any possible motivation to "want" that planet to be around that star and with certain properties.
Of course that's still a fuck-up. But it was a simple mistake, not bias, that lead to the conclusion. Maybe bias prevented them from investigating the catalog data prior to someone asking a question specifically pertaining to it, but then I would have to assume that they did do this for other discoveries in planets. Which I doubt. More likely, the real bias was being biased towards thinking their reference information was correct, and that bias applied to every observation, not just the ones they were especially excited about.
My point is, that science is flawed, because people performing it are flawed. It does tend to correct itself over time however, but it cannot nor does it attempt to fix the problems it causes when it is wrong.
Scientists already know scientists are flawed.
And what does that last part mean? Science does attempt to fix problems it causes. A chemical with an unexpected side effect, they try to eliminate it if possible. They miscalculate the trajectory of a probe, they try to correct it if possible. And they try to fix the methodologies themselves to try to prevent the problem from repeating.
For example, I imagine the catalog data they are using will be thoroughly scrubbed before you see another "earth-like exoplanet" announcement based on it.
This has nothing to do with religion except where science acts like a religion while trying to pretend it never does.
The only similarity between religion and science is that they both involve fallible, fundamentally irrational humans. The biggest difference is that science views fallibility and rationality as problems to be worked around, and accepts when those properties resulted in the wrong conclusion.
In truth, this is a perfect example of science not acting like religion.
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It's very simple: When it acts like a religion, it's not science.
If it gets teached as irrefutible fact, then it's not science, it's boiled down for the unwashed masses to be done with it. It never gets teached as irrefutible fact to people who get trained as scientists.
And of course science has a bias. What gets explored first, and which sits on the back burner is decided by bias. If one can get to a result on different paths, then the decision for one path shows bias. If two measures give different result
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As for piltdown man, yes, that turned out to be a hoax, but unlike some hoaxes that have been going on for millenia, scientist figured out it was a hoax by applying SCIENCE. Regarding those
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You have just shown that you don't understand science because you don't understand the concept of truth.
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Its not an insult. It is a statement based entirely on the post that you made.
Truth aka Tautology is a fundamental concept of mathematics. Science is the process of proving that untrue things are not true through testing a hypothesis. It only "finds the truth" by the process of elimination.
The great grandparent post you made is full of the inconsistencies you just mentioned yourself.
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Science is the search for truth.
And wrong again. Science is the search of understanding how things work, truth has nothing to do with it, truth is a human concept. Science is basically this:
You observe phenomenon A, you create a model (hypotheses/theory) that explains phenomenon A, you apply your hypothesis to other phenomena and see where/when your model breaks. If the model breaks, you go back to the drawing board. If you (and others!) are unable to break your model, you assume the model is correct, but you never state that it is 100
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And this is what I completely failed to comprehend as a meaningful statement.
Scientists can declare something as "true". So can science journalists and slashdotters. Science is not the sort of thing that can make declarations. Science is partly a philosophy of investigation and partly a body of observations and conjectures, none of which are individually above reinterpretation or revision. Science is not an active individual entity capable of meaningful s
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Oh, but it was Science which discovered it and declared the Piltdown Man as a hoax. Every knowledge is preliminary, until we know better. A scientist knows that. And that's why he is always wary to declare something true - moreso, a large part of a scientific paper is a discussion what could be wrong with the measurements, the results and the conclusions.
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Really .. (Score:3, Funny)
After jiggering the calculations, the Kepler team now says that KOI 326.01 is neither Earth-sized nor in the habitable zone, and may actually be orbiting a different star
"Sooo ... about everything we said, it's actually the complete opposite"
Epic fail.
Re:Really .. (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds more like an epic success for science to me.
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Well, for the scientific method at least.
Being this wrong is seldom considered an 'epic success'.
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Being this wrong is seldom considered an 'epic success'.
Except in Economics.
Steven Wrightism (Score:2)
"Hey! We've found this earth-like planet orbiting a particular star. Wait a minute . . . Wrong star. And it really isn't earth-like at all."
Sound a lot like a Steven Wright.
"A funny thing happened to me this morning. Wait a minute . . . That wasn't me."
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who the hell said 100% sure life exists on this planet? I sure don't remember that. I just remember them saying it is a planet about twice the size of earth in an orbit that would produce an insolation similar to earth.
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"The chances for life on this planet are 100 percent," Steven Vogt, a UC professor of astronomy and astrophysics says. "I have almost no doubt about it."
I and every other research scientist I know (a lot of them) all just shook our heads when we heard that quote.
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That'd be...
CNN
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/30/100-percent-chance-for-life-on-newly-found-planet/ [cnn.com]
Space.com
http://www.space.com/9225-odds-life-newfound-earth-size-planet-100-percent-astronomer.html [space.com] ,and a host of others. This was in mainstream press. Not tabloids.
There are a few scientists around who occasionally say idiotic things. Unfortunately, sometimes they do it in front of reporters. This would be one of those times.
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That'd be...
CNN
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/30/100-percent-chance-for-life-on-newly-found-planet/ [cnn.com]
Space.com
http://www.space.com/9225-odds-life-newfound-earth-size-planet-100-percent-astronomer.html [space.com] ,and a host of others. This was in mainstream press. Not tabloids.
There are a few scientists around who occasionally say idiotic things. Unfortunately, sometimes they do it in front of reporters. This would be one of those times.
I sure wish people would Google before asking such easily answered questions...
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I'd suggest that, from a scientific point of view, the mainstream press is much closer to tabloids than it is to peer-reviewed journals.
To put in another way, when you're an ogre gnomes and dwarfs are all short bastards.
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The fail is that a scientist went out and said he is "100% sure life exists on this planet".
Really? Who said the scientists said that?
You should stop reading news from that outlet immediately, because it's bullshit that makes the Weekly World News headlines like "Space Whelk Poised to Consume Earth" and "Woman's Varicose Veins used as Treasure Map" seem like responsible journalism.
CNN quoted some guy named Steven who supposedly said it http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/30/100-percent-chance-for-life-on-newly-found-planet/ [cnn.com]
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Which, arguably, it was to begin with anyway.
You seriously expect people to be legitimately be selling a planet or part thereof?
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Besides Earth, of course.
I'm sure some cunning linguist will be all over the semantics of that if I don't qualify it.
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Welcome to science. I would deem this a big success!
No, science would be "as a preliminary, tentative finding, the data seem to indicate that this is the case, but we need to double-check all sources of error, look for contradictory information, and even after all that, if we still cannot falsify it, we can say only that it is consistent with our current understanding, something that has changed before and will likely change again". Of course, that isn't as exciting in a press release, hence the problem.
Many people want final ultimate answers on certain que
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I always thought that a similar (and far less verbose) disclaimer was implied by the use of the word 'candidate'.
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This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: "HUGE SUCCESS".
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Epic SCIENCE you noob.
"Oh shit, if that number is wrong then this planet is in a whole different place! Let's check! IT IS! HUZZAH! We know more today than we did yesterday!"
That's science. And you suck.
The eureka paradox. (Score:3)
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How "Earth-like" was it in the first place? (Score:5, Insightful)
When your only criteria are size and distance, you're not doing much to prove "likeness" to the Earth. In fact, you're doing less than 2 parameters/N parameters, since size and distance may have nothing to do with how habitable the planet may be to humans or any life forms.
Stoichiometry and temperature are far more significant. The existence of stabilizing processes in the atmospheric and geological systems are also more significant.
And then there's the little matter of the precise history of Earth, which went through several specific, major eras of development before it had these stabilizing systemic features and could support the formation of the first structures of life and their evolution into the first cellular beings.
And then it went through several more specific, major eras of development to result in large, complex, multicellular plant and animal forms of life, interacting as a (somewhat) stable ecosystem, capable of surviving events that nonetheless mass-extincted whole swathes of species.
The part about guessing wrong about which star the planet is orbiting is just bad astronomy, and is way past where they should be shutting up about its being "Earthlike."
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Size of a planet, distance from its star and the magnitude of that star are the 3 most easily measurable parameters that affect atmospheric chemistry and temperature.
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When your only criteria are size and distance, you're not doing much to prove "likeness" to the Earth. In fact, you're doing less than 2 parameters/N parameters, since size and distance may have nothing to do with how habitable the planet may be to humans or any life forms.
They both certainly have something to do with it, but yes, those two aspects alone are hardly sufficient to prove habitability.
Nevertheless, size (actually composition) and distance (actually temperature in the range for liquid water) are the two criterion astronomers use when talking about "earth-like" planets. That's all it means -- like earth in these two aspects.
For reference, both Venus and Mars are "earth-like". Probably not what you were expecting it to mean, but so it goes. :)
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They shouldn't even mention size and distance if they have temperature.
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Distance, combined with the star its orbiting, is how they get an initial estimate of temperature. And size will help indicate if its a terrestrial planet or a gas giant. Being in the habitable zone, but a gas giant, is not 'earth-like'.
Size and distance are important characteristics of the planet, and the ones that can be most reliably measured with the technique that Kepler uses. So yes, the should mention them both even if they have temperature estimates.
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"Yes sir, I have the distance traveled, the time it took, the sp--"
"Why did you collect all that information!? I just wanted your average speed!"
"Uh... sir to calculate my average speed I need to--"
"Why are you even talking to me about distance or time! I want speed!"
"But I--"
"Stop wasting all that time and space recording down that other shit! If I find out you are keeping track of anything else again I'll have you reassigned to janitorial duty!"
"..
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No, what I sound like is "stop padding your report with what doesn't matter in order to sound like you're important and report what matters."
Or do you want your computer to scroll every value in its registers up the screen while you're loading a page from the web?
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Review First, Then A Press Release (Score:2, Insightful)
'We're seeing the scientific method playing out in real time', eh? How about letting that scientific method play itself out before you release your findings to the popular media? Or was it getting near the end of your fiscal year?
Real estate crisis IN OUTER SPACE (Score:4, Funny)
Real estate crisis IN OUTER SPACE
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Real estate crisis IN OUTER SPACE
Can we here perhaps see the next step for patent trolls when they're done adding ON THE INTERNET to every old inventions?
How many other bad star data? (Score:2)
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hahaha
mod +1 insightful. kepler is fucking *huge* and oddly enough they don't have the money to employ people to go through and double-check everything that appears in it against a few different catalogues and then visually against an image. if they did, people would rightly be making a scene at the enormous waste of tax-payer's money.
Finding many more earth-like planets (Score:2)
Or rather, many more mistakenly, earth-like planets
Finding "more" earth-like planets? (Score:2)
When had this project found even one?
By earth-like, I mean a rocky planet, at a distance from its parent star where liquid water could exist, and having a gravitational pull between 0.6g and 2.0g.
I'm not saying that they aren't out there, but I'm pretty sure that none have yet been found, so talking about finding "more" of them is sort of... well... misleading about what's actually been accomplished so far.
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kepler isn't really a project to sit there and find specific examples. i don't even know why they released this one except i guess they thought it of great interest (and wanted publicity, no doubt - which might not even have been the project's idea, the same as the entire cold fusion debacle came from a press release the researchers didn't want to go out but were forced into by the university who were grubbing for publicity). it's a project to collect vast numbers of planets so that we can say that we expec
Why must NASA crush so many dreams? (Score:4, Funny)
Real-Time Scientific Method (Score:2)
'We're seeing the scientific method playing out in real time.'
What the hell is that supposed to mean? In what other time frame does the scientific method normally play out? Dealing with computers, we watch the scientific method play out in real time right before our eyes every day. We can watch the scientific method play out every time someone buys a remote control and goes through the process of setting it up. Hypothesis of which brand/model and entry code match up, test the hypothesis, record the resu
Look for "Ring" (Worlds) (Score:2)
I hope that the Kepler observing team is not automatically discarding observations that don't fit expected profiles.
For example: if a (slighty more) advanced civilization wanted to be detectable by something like Kepler, all they would have to do is put up some (very) large but (presumably) low mass "screens" in orbit around the star. By putting up several of these with the proper spacing; a coded "signal" code could be seen, just like morse code (I'd time it so the intervals would correspond to some prime
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knock yourself out, someone already posted the currently-public data
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2028214&cid=35422006 [slashdot.org]
i doubt you're being entirely serious but i'm going to vent spleen anyway :) despite what people think every large astronomical survey that i've ever heard of makes its data fully public -- sometimes with a year's delay to allow project members to work on the data (which is reasonable; these are the universities that paid to run the damned thing in the first place so they s
Mmm. Lost a planet, Master Obi-Wan has. (Score:2)
How embarrassing. How embarrassing.
I'd be happy to pay a million for it (Score:2)
58 in habitable zone and 6 less than 2 Earth-mass (Score:2)
Universal Mirror (Score:2)
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Translation: I'm a pathetic, visionless stump of a human being who goes on Internet forums to try to convince people that my apathy is somehow equatable to cleverness.
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Translation: I'm a pathetic, visionless stump of a human being who goes on Internet forums to try to convince people that my apathy is somehow equatable to cleverness.
--
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People who see the value in knowledge simply because the unknown is unknown are not
I'm rambling way off-topic (Score:2)
Hey, sci-fi still can be fun sometimes, even though I feel going back to the Moon is pointless given its cost when there's so little money around and so many more important things to do with that (breaking our dependence on Middle-Eastern oil, finally defeating cancer, defeating AIDS would be my three main targets), going to Mars is seriously pointless, going to asteroids is more or less pointless, space escalators will never be built, humanity will never colonise another planet without prohibitively expens
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But you're right, "it's just space", so all we stand to learn from it is how the universe is put together and how it works.
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The only tragedy is that so many geeks are attracted by it as a quasi-religious substitute for the supernatural glory of the heavens.
No, I think the glory we see in space is the reason why so many people are attracted to it. It's not a substitute, it's the reason. It's hard to look at a picture of M51 or Andromeda or the Eagle nebula without getting inspired.
Re:Scientific method or fact checking (Score:4, Informative)
The catalog was wrong, it's not a calculation it's just having the wrong data. Of course a quick look at the picture would have shown the error, but who looks at anything but the table of numbers?
Re:Scientific method or fact checking (Score:5, Funny)
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Also, if you read the article (or knew about Kepler) you'd also know that they deal with hundreds of thousands of these cases -- Kepler isn't about targeting individual stars and finding Earth-like planets, it's about getting weight of numbers on your side to beat down the statistical error. I don't know why they picked this exact case to look at when they admitted themselves that it was a questionable one (maybe because it had turned out so nicely inside the habitable zone with a sane mass?) but that's not
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Unlikely since none of us knows what "Pultoed" means.