Earth to...Earth? Are you there?

jasamaman writes "So far all the planets found outside our solar system have been gas giants. So they are not habitable, and couldn't really hold life as we know it. But "planet hunter" David Charbonneau is looking for another planet just like Earth, and claims that astronomers are "very close"."

Comments

How dose he know?

[red5]

How the hell could he know that we are "very close" to discovering anything?
Did miss cleo tell him?

Re:How dose he know?

[seizer]

He "knows" he's very close, because he *knows* his research budget might be cut soon ;-)

(just conjecture, btw)

Re:How dose he know?

[mshurpik]

For all we know we will have nanites in 100 years (or less) contructing a radio telescope antenna of astronomical proportions from bucky tubes with the information collected examined by a worldwide distributed computing system. You have to look at the entire sphere of the advancement of science.

I'd love to, but my boss keeps telling me, "Put the grill-side of the hamburger FACE-UP on the bun."

He doesn't care about space telescopes, neither do the customers. But at $6/hr, I will eventually save up for a linux cluster and programming classes, which will help the distributed computing effort quite a bit.

if we have to evacuate..

[marijne]

well, we do need some place to evacuate to if the Vogons come to buildt an interstellar bypass and destroy the earth in the process.
Lets find 42 alternative planets earth

Astronomers very close?

[mccalli]

David Charbonneau is looking for another planet just like Earth, and claims that astronomers are "very close"."

That's true. Astronomers are very close. However, where the hell all these planets are is quite another matter...

Cheers,
Ian