Looking For Earth-Like Exoplanets

Discover Magazine is running a story detailing the search for planets like Earth orbiting other stars. While we've been able to locate a few "super earths" so far, none of them really compare in size or the potential for habitability with our own world. Fortunately, advances in data analysis and new space-based telescopes — such as Kepler, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the already-launched CoRoT (PDF) — have some astronomers predicting we'll find such an exoplanet by 2010, and a habitable one by 2012. Earth-based telescopes are also in the hunt, though the article notes, "even if a habitable Earth-like world is found first from the ground, it will most likely take a space observatory to search for the chemical signals that tell us what we really want to know: Is anything living out there? If the planet is one that can be observed transiting, it just might be possible to provide a hint of an answer in the next few years."

Comments

Any later and it would be hopeless

[Khavanon]

Just in time for the end of the world. Now all we have to do is invent reversible cryostasis, terraforming, and a starship that could support a significant enough portion of the human population to allow for a decent level of diversity in reproduction and carry enough supplies to sustain them, and Holly, our ship's AI with an IQ of 6,000. Not that there'll be any money anywhere in the world by then...