42 Worlds in 32 Days

Odie writes: "Since the first discovery of a planet around another star in 1995, some 60+ planetary systems have been discovered. That's about one every two month, most of them uninhabitable Jupiter-sized heavyweights. Not much statistics to put in the Drake equation. Recently though, the OGLE team has come up with more than 42 new candidates. Nice in itself, but what is spectacular is that they spent only 32 days finding them! At that rate COROT should soon find plenty of worlds to explore for you budding Starfleet sailors! "

Comments

drake equation = retarded.

[drik00]

Every time i hear about "inhabitable" planets, or "signs of extraterrestrial life," i laugh my ass off, and i laugh harder the more educated that the idiot that mentions these things.

I'm in no way a scientist, hell, I'm a Comm. Studies major, i have had a lot of biology classes, so i'm not totally ignorant either. However, it just seems that if we're really looking for life on other planets/celestial bodies, we need to quit thinking so close-mindedly.

Let's say, for argument's sake, that life evolved much the way some scientists say it did, the whole Darwinian macroEvolution of the many species. What does that teach us when trying to look for other signs of life out there? well, i can tell you it definitely DOES NOT mean that we need to look for other earth-like planets with water and it DOES NOT mean we should say "well, there is an abundance of molecules that could form into DNA" or the presence of carbon means anything.

What we need to look at is the *effects* of otherworldly life, and i'm not talking about the "face of Mars"...i'm talking about other signs, real signs of unnatural form/structure in space. We need to quit anthropomorphizing possible alien life and we need to quit looking for life "as we know it."

Even in a time when new terrestrial life forms are being found in places where these educated scientists said no life could ever exist (undersea thermal vents, etc), the science community tends to want to look like life like us (not human, DNA/carbon based life).

As far as we know, we're the exception, and there are interstellar races 10^6 times larger than we are that exist in the fusion reactors inside stars. I'm citing an extreme example, but my point is this: If there was life so extreme, how would we ever notice them? How would we ever contact them? With radio signals embedded with decodable messages? You could broadcast a voice talking over FM radio into space, and when it reaches an alien race, they never notice it because either they've moved so far past that technology or never had the need to use radio-type waves for communication purposes.

IMHO, the only point in looking for "inhabitable" planets is for future colonization. All else is simply pointless.

damn, that was my last $0.02...

Re:drake equation = retarded.

[s20451]

Although I agree that the Drake equation is flaky science, I can't agree with most of what else you've said. For example:

Even in a time when new terrestrial life forms are being found in places where these educated scientists said no life could ever exist (undersea thermal vents, etc), the science community tends to want to look like life like us (not human, DNA/carbon based life).

Yes, the scientists found organisms that exist in places where they were previously unexpected. However, these forms of life were easily recognizable as such, because they act much like already known life forms -- they exploit chemical energy sources, grow, and (most importantly) reproduce.

I'm citing an extreme example, but my point is this: If there was life so extreme, how would we ever notice them?

We probably wouldn't. But we also have no reason to expect that earthbound life is so terribly unusual, either. There might exist bizarre forms of life, but based on the single data point available concerning life in the universe (ourselves), it's not necessarily ridiculous to start looking for life "as we know it".

How would we ever contact them? With radio signals embedded with decodable messages? You could broadcast a voice talking over FM radio into space, and when it reaches an alien race, they never notice it because either they've moved so far past that technology or never had the need to use radio-type waves for communication purposes.

We might never be able to contact them in any meaningful way. However, that doesn't mean that we can have no knowledge that they exist. Even a highly advanced race would realise that RF technology is simple and robust for many applications, in much the same way that we on Earth still use lighthouses even though GPS is far superior and far more advanced.

IMHO, the only point in looking for "inhabitable" planets is for future colonization. All else is simply pointless.

I don't accept that it's "pointless" to do something simply because it's more complicated that we might first assume -- that's frankly a defeatist attitude. We have to start somewhere, and if life is not unusual, then our form of life is probably not unusual, so it makes perfect sense to look for what we understand as life. Furthermore, the importance of extraterrestrial life is such that finding it would probably have world-changing implications. Then we could start looking for the bizarre forms of life.