Has NASA finally found an Alien Earth?

[Liep]

And it's only 1400 light years away, which is only 900 light years outside of the Valmy-perimeter.

[Valmy]

Presuming we are traveling at light speed. Man can you imagine a human community traveling at light speed for 500 years? I wonder what that would do.

[Eddie Teach]

Won't they experience significantly less passage of time at light speed? 

[Caliga]

?

This shit always gets massively overhyped.  Remember, the guys doing the announcing are massive nerds and it's much more exciting to them than Joe Sixpack.  All Joe Sixpack cares about is:



...and here's the thing: if NASA discovered aliens it would be Obama doing the announcing, not some random press guy at NASA.

[Razgovory]

Yeah if we do find something that would only take 500 years to get to I would consider that a win.

The objects known to be traveling at the speeds I mentioned are subatomic particles that occasionally crash into the Earth.  Nobody knows why the damn things are moving so fast or where they came from.  Traveling as fast as any object that can be seen with the naked eye, it would probably take millions of years.

[Valmy]

Yeah if we do find something that would only take 500 years to get to I would consider that a win.

The objects known to be traveling at the speeds I mentioned are subatomic particles that occasionally crash into the Earth.  Nobody knows why the damn things are moving so fast or where they came from.  Traveling as fast as any object that can be seen with the naked eye, it would probably take millions of years.

I guess when you said ' if you were to travel as fast as physically possible' I thought you meant as fast as I could physically travel. But you were addressing subatomic particles instead?

[KRonn]

Cool stuff though. The planet is a lot older than Earth and maybe a decent chance of having life of some kind beyond microbial? That will be interesting if so, though we won't know for a very long time, or maybe with later tech improvements many years from now then who knows.

[Razgovory]

Yeah if we do find something that would only take 500 years to get to I would consider that a win.

The objects known to be traveling at the speeds I mentioned are subatomic particles that occasionally crash into the Earth.  Nobody knows why the damn things are moving so fast or where they came from.  Traveling as fast as any object that can be seen with the naked eye, it would probably take millions of years.

I guess when you said ' if you were to travel as fast as physically possible' I thought you meant as fast as I could physically travel. But you were addressing subatomic particles instead?

I was addressing physical objects.

[Valmy]

Yeah if we do find something that would only take 500 years to get to I would consider that a win.

The objects known to be traveling at the speeds I mentioned are subatomic particles that occasionally crash into the Earth.  Nobody knows why the damn things are moving so fast or where they came from.  Traveling as fast as any object that can be seen with the naked eye, it would probably take millions of years.

I guess when you said ' if you were to travel as fast as physically possible' I thought you meant as fast as I could physically travel. But you were addressing subatomic particles instead?

I was addressing physical objects.

Yeah I got it now.

[viper37]

...and here's the thing: if NASA discovered aliens it would be Obama doing the announcing, not some random press guy at NASA.

that's what they want you to think!
Obama may already be in contact with Aliens.  It would explain how he came up with the idea of socialized medicine!

[Tonitrus]

I expect lots of presumptions, educated guesses, and no real direct, solid evidence.

Kepler is solid as hell.

Like I said...

NASA finds 'Earth's bigger, older cousin'
By Michael Pearson, CNN
Updated 4:22 PM ET, Thu July 23, 2015

(CNN)NASA said Thursday that its Kepler spacecraft has spotted "Earth's bigger, older cousin": the first nearly Earth-size planet to be found in the habitable zone of a star similar to our own.

Though NASA can't say for sure whether the planet is rocky like ours or has water and air, it's the closest match yet found.

"Today, Earth is a little less lonely," Kepler researcher Jon Jenkins said.

The planet, Kepler-452b, is about 1,400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. It's about 60% bigger than Earth, NASA says, and is located in its star's habitable zone -- the region where life-sustaining liquid water is possible on the surface of a planet.

A visitor there would experience gravity about twice that of Earth's, and planetary scientists say the odds of it having a rocky surface are "better than even."

While it's a bit farther from its star than Earth is from the sun, its star is brighter, so the planet gets about the same amount of energy from its star as Earth does from the sun. And that sunlight would be very similar to Earth's, Jenkins said.

The planet "almost certainly has an atmosphere," Jenkins said, although scientists can't say what it's made of. But , he said, Kepler-452b's atmosphere would probably be thicker than Earth's, and it would have active volcanoes.


It takes 385 days for the planet to orbit its star, very similar to Earth's 365-day year, NASA said. And because it's spent so long orbiting in this zone -- 6 billion years -- it's had plenty of time to brew life, Jenkins said.

"That's substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet," he said in a statement.

Before the discovery of this planet, one called Kepler-186f was considered the most Earthlike, according to NASA. That planet, no more than a 10th bigger than Earth, is about 500 light-years away from us. But it gets only about a third of the energy from its star as Earth does from the sun, and noon there would look similar to the evening sky here, NASA says.

The $600 million Kepler mission launched in 2009 with a goal to survey a portion of the Milky Way for habitable planets.

From a vantage point 64 million miles from Earth, it scans the light from distant stars, looking for almost imperceptible drops in a star's brightness, suggesting a planet has passed in front of it.

It has discovered more than 1,000 planets. Twelve of those, including Kepler-425b, have been less than twice the size of Earth and in the habitable zones of the stars they orbit.

Missions are being readied to move scientists closer to the goal of finding yet more planets and cataloging their atmospheres and other characteristics.

In 2017, NASA plans to launch a planet-hunting satellite called TESS that will be able to provide scientists with more detail on the size, mass and atmospheres of planets circling distant stars.

The next year, the James Webb Space Telescope will go up. That platform, NASA says, will provide astonishing insights into other worlds, including their color, seasonal differences, weather and even the potential presence of vegetation.

No planets have really actually been seen, just indirectly presumed to exist.  And any surface properties are just wild guesses and assumptions.

I am not suggesting that there is no proof of planets around other stars...it would extraordinarily dense to presume otherwise.  I just think NASA is overhyping this "ZOMG alien earth worlds!" angle a bit too much.   

If the James Webb Telescope is actually able to see them...now that will be pretty friggen awesome.

[Monoriu]

So we send a colony ship with a self-sustaining population of several thousand people over there.  After who knows how many years and generations past, they arrive at their destination, only to find a black hole or a gas giant there because somebody's assumptions were wrong...

[Tonitrus]

Well, maybe not a gas giant or black hole.  I will concede they might have a good guess for some kind of roughly earth-size object in the habitable zone. 

Except it could just be "essentially a great rock in space".  Or be completely toxic to humans.  Or full of large-breasted succubi who will enslave our intrepid colonists for breeding.

[viper37]

Or full of large-breasted succubi who will enslave our intrepid colonists for breeding.

Caliga just volunteered for the mission.

[Caliga]

Leather Goddesses of Phobos?