First Earthlike Exoplanet Found

[Sasaki Kojiro]

And it'll only take us several thousand years to get there. Quick, stock up on clones and babies for the mothership!

Just install a "light speed" button.

[Crazed Rabbit]

The ambassador for the rabbit people would like to note that a rabbit requires much less sustenance than a man, and more rabbits could be supported in a ship for the resources it would take to support humans.

Also, we have an almost ready giant laser on the moon and we'll blast anyone who tries to get there before us.

CR

[Hepcat]

Well it would be cool if we could reach it sometime in the next 80 years so I would be able to know for sure. But after I discussed it with my science teacher he said that sure, there probably is, has been or will be intelligent life like ours somewhere in the universe. But the chances of them being at the same evolutionary stage as us and of all the planets in the universe us actually choosing the right one, doesn't make for very good odds.

So who knows, maybe they are still single celled life forms on that planet and it won't be another million years or so before they reach the stone age, or maybe they had a massive nuclear war or a plague and have all died out. Or that could just be the wrong planet.

It'd be cool if it could happen but I don't think any of us will live long enough to see any contact with aliens

[Redleg]

Cool find Lemur

[Don Corleone]

That is really neat, but being 13 times closer to it's radiatant star is bound to make for some radioactive environments. Not to mention, if there is sentient life there, evolving under 2g means they could kick our ass!

[spmetla]

Great find, I needed some good news to drown out the bad in the world. I'm all for the generation ship, drones as well. We need to bombard those Gliesians with radios, lights, and drones right away so when we eventually meet we can win the we saw you first argument. Now if only we could reach anywhere near the speed of light...

Heck if we send a ship now, by the time it reaches there I wouldn't doubt our having technology that could get there in a single lifetime. Our future spaceclowns will probably think the inbred offspring on the generation ship as the victims of a bunch of suckers as they whizz by us, probably mooning us as well.

[Gregoshi]

I was skeptical of the article at first because it seemed to be lacking the usual stuff you see in scientific articles - discovering scientists and their universities for example. Then there was nothing about this at my usual astronomy websites, nor at the SETI webpage - and one of their scientists is quoted in the article. Even a Google search yielded little. I did find a similar article at space.com though, so I'm happy it is true.

As for the travel time to the new planet, I think we should fire off a shipment of Twinkies right away as a peace offering to whoever or whatever is there. At least they will be fresh no matter how long the journey takes. Knowing our luck though, when we get there, the planet will be inhabited by giant mutant sentient Twinkies bent on revenge.

Joking aside, if we manage to even detect circumstantial evidence of life, it could spur interest and money to begin serious development of interstellar vehicles.

[doc_bean]

That is really neat, but being 13 times closer to it's radiatant star is bound to make for some radioactive environments. Not to mention, if there is sentient life there, evolving under 2g means they could kick our ass!

It would depend on the radiation the star sends out (don't know much about that) and the amount of radiation that atmosphere can block. Due to it's higher gravitational pull it would have a thicker atmosphere than earth (I assume) and perhaps that could mean it coudl block out more radiation ?

However, this planet in itself might not be so important, but the following conclusion is:

The real importance is not so much the discovery of this planet itself, but the fact that it shows that Earth-like planets are probably extremely common in the Universe.

There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone and many astronomers believe most of these stars have planets.

The fact that almost as soon as we have built a telescope capable of detecting small, earth-like worlds, one turns up right on our cosmic doorstep, shows that statistically, there are probably billions of earths out there.

Even if only 10 billion stars are in a 'good' segment of the galaxy of the galaxy, if only one in ten of those have planets, if only one in ten of those have earth like planets and if only one in ten of those are capable of sustaining life (for whatever other reason the others can't) we're still looking at 10 million possible earths...

[edyzmedieval]

I can see my alien relatives!!! Yeeey! Haven't seen them since the Earth was born!

[Ja'chyra]

The Earth-like planet that could be covered in oceans and may support life

Seems to be a whole load of assumptions and no real evidence of what they are claiming.

There is no possible way humans could ever travel at light speed

and may be covered with large amounts of water - necessary for life to evolve -

I like how we base our assumptions on our limited knowledge and say that it must be so.

[KukriKhan]

That is really neat, but being 13 times closer to it's radiatant star is bound to make for some radioactive environments. Not to mention, if there is sentient life there, evolving under 2g means they could kick our ass!

There's a thought. After taking 4 generations to get there (and just imagine the nature of the politics on-board that ship, across 100+ years), our traveling descendants find it hard to even move around on Nova Terra's gravity.

Then, turning the ship around to travel back to Sena Terra with our new-found friends, 200 years have passed, and out of that ship emerges Superman, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound...

The mind boggles.

[Samurai Waki]

If the Gravity is higher, wouldn't that just mean the likelihood of evolution would mean all the creatures would be pretty squatty and rotund compared to Earth Creatures?

[Agent Miles]

Actually, the “Goldilock’s Zone” is a rather outdated idea. If the Earth orbited in the giant star Betelgeuse’s GZ, then our seasons would be 60 years long. Venus and Mars were originally in the Sun’s GZ. Also, since we started looking for life out there, we’ve found organisms down here near undersea geysers that would melt lead and below the Antarctic snows, even in the radioactive furnaces of nuclear power plants. Life may be all over the universe. Life is necessary for intelligence to arise, however, intelligence is not necessary for life. There have been perhaps a trillion species on Earth. Only a handful could make a campfire.
As for going there, it’s actually quite practical. An orbital laser, powered by the sun, can propel a “light sail” spaceship with the pressure of light rays. Accelerating gradually for about a year, the ship would reach 10% of the speed of light (c). Thus in two centuries, we could travel to this new world.

If we slowly colonized even just one other star every thousand years, and these colonies did as well, then we could populate the entire galaxy in a few thousand centuries. There are no uninhabitable regions. People in Dyson rings could live anywhere there is light from a star and space rubble to build with.

Similarly, since no one else has colonized our star system, this means that there is no intelligent life in the galaxy that is at least a half a million years ahead of us (or they would be here). There are also no lesser civilizations in our immediate region either, for the same reason.

[Ironside]

That is really neat, but being 13 times closer to it's radiatant star is bound to make for some radioactive environments. Not to mention, if there is sentient life there, evolving under 2g means they could kick our ass!

It also emitts way lower levels of UV-radiation so I'm not sure exactly what kind of radiation they're talking about.
To put it differently, even without an ozone layer, it would be very hard to get sun-tan on Gliese 581 c.

[Don Corleone]

I understand it's got a lot lower levels of upper band electromagnetic radiation. But my point is that the intensity of energy experienced by a target receiving waves of said EMR decays with the square of the distance between them. So, if it's 13 times closer, it receives 169 times the energy, assuming a similar source. Your point is that UV and other upper band EMR will be lower intensity at the source is valid, but is it enough to counteract that scaling factor? There's going to be some gamma emission from Gilese 581. Would you want to be 6.2 million miles away from it when you could be 93 million miles away?