Earth-Like Planets In Our Neighborhood

goran72 sends in a story out of the Chicago AAAS meeting contending that Earth-like planets with life-sustaining conditions may be spinning around stars in our galactic neighborhood — we just haven't found them yet. "'So I think there is a very good chance that we will find some Earth-like planets within 10, 20 or 30 light years of the Sun,' astrophysicist [Alan Boss]... told his AAAS colleagues meeting here since Thursday. ... The images from those new planets, he added, should identify 'light from their atmosphere and tell us if they have perhaps methane and oxygen. That will be pretty strong proof they are not only habitable but actually are inhabited. I am not talking about a planet with intelligence on it. I simply say if you have a habitable world. ... Sitting there, with the right temperature with water for a billion years, something is going to come out of it. At least we will have microbes,' said Boss."

Comments

impossible dream?

[phantomfive]

Lately I've been really pessimistic about the whole thing, I mean, really, who cares? Even if there were intelligent life on planets that close, we would only be able to exchange communication once every 10 years, not enough to actually learn their language, and we would never be able to travel to visit them, right?

So realistically, there is not much point except for dreamers and space geeks. Might as well spend the effort here on earth. On the other hand, what if we could travel out there? Wouldn't it be COOL? I might actually meet a girl. Just kidding.

I want to believe that we will be able to travel long distances one day, hyper speed and all that, but it's pretty hard to see how it could happen.

Re:impossible dream?

[Jane Q. Public]

Man, you ARE pessimistic. As well as wrong.

Once it became known that a civilization existed in a particular star system... and they knew about us... communication could be continuous both ways, not just back-and-forth like a walkie talkie every 10 years.

Starting with math: primary numbers, Fibonnacci sequence and other natural patterns, on to addition, subtraction, etc... then to logical propositions and conclusions... we could communicate an entire language and maybe even a couple of encyclopedias in the time it took for ONE 10-year round trip of communication.

And with ion drives, or Bussard ramjets (especially if they are Pellegrino-style vehicles that pull instead of push), maybe we could get there in, say, 50 years or so. And spend most of that time in something like cold sleep. There have been advances in that direction, too. Do we have the technology to do this? No. But we might in 10 years, or 20.

Of course, we would have to decide what and how much to send in our communications. There could be very real danger. I do not think most people understand just how deadly we (and by implication, they) could be, given enough time and effort, even to a civilization light-years away.

"Flying to Valhalla", by Charles Pellegrino, is a work of fiction. It is the book in which he introduced a totally new (but perfectly sound from an engineering standpoint) style of interstellar ship construction. As controversial as Pellegrino is as a person, there is no doubt that he is, as the saying goes, "wicked smart". There are some very plausible cautions in his book.

Re:impossible dream?

[meringuoid]

Mind you the chances that we will be in the near vicinity of a civilization that communicates by radio waves that we can pick up is possibly quite slim- we've only been doing it for less than a hundred years.

And how much longer are we going to be doing it, with everything converging onto the Internet? If the earth lights up as a radio source in the early 20th century, but has gone dark again by the dawn of the 22nd because almost everything is now connected to fibre, what hope is there for SETI?

Re:Polluted by life?

[artor3]

Do you have a source for that? It seems hard to believe that Earth could have shed the equivalent of half its current mass in genetic material alone...