NASA's Kepler Telescope Launched Successfully

Iddo Genuth writes "At precisely 10:49 p.m. EST, NASA's 'Kepler' telescope was successfully kicked off into space, embarking on a mission that the agency says 'may fundamentally change humanity's view of itself.' The telescope will search the nearby region of our galaxy for the first time looking for Earth-size planets, which orbit stars at distances where temperatures permit liquid water to endure on their surface — a region often referred to as the 'habitable' zone."

Comments

Re:That's pretty cool.

[AliasMarlowe]

I've always wanted to travel to other worlds.

It's an appealing thought. But is also works in reverse.

Do we really want the other worlds' explorers coming here? Let's see what we humans have done to new lands: genocide, penal colony, battleground, food resource, or tourist trap. I vote we use Kepler to watch out for the scumballs, so we can prepare to zap them before they arrive.

Aliens will be just like us

[QuoteMstr]

Our species is not a unique and special snowflake. We're likely to see all kinds of convergent evolution. An example from biology: Cephalopods. (Squids, octopuses, and so on.) We can use Cephalopods to test theories about extraterrestrial life like we can use Antarctica to test Mars rovers.

The most developed of these is the Octopus. Not only do these guys have eyes that are better than our own, but they have brains. This is important because our last common ancestor with these guys had neither brains nor eyes, and was as complex as yeast. Yet the Octopus nervous system has quite a few similarities to our own:

The findings emerging from recent electrophysiological studies in the octopus suggest that a convergent evolutionary process has led to the selection of similar networks and synaptic plasticity in evolutionarily very remote species that evolved to similar behaviors and modes of life. These evolutionary considerations substantiate the importance of these cellular and morphological properties for neural systems that mediate complex forms of learning and memory. In particular, the similarity in the architecture and physiological connectivity of the octopus MSF-VL system to the mammalian hippocampus and the extremely high number of small interneurons in its areas of learning and memory suggest the importance of a large number of units that independently, by en passant innervation, form a high redundancy of connections. As these features are found in both the octopus MSF-VL system and the hippocampus, it would appear that they are needed to create a large capacity for memory associations.

Any technological alien civilization would face the same mathematical evolutionary pressures described by game theory, and would develop along lines close to our own. The differences we see between alien cultures and our own will be on the order of the differences between human cultures, and not something radically different.

Why would you suppose that the distance between us and extraterrestrial life would be any greater than that between us and the octopus? We can be reasonably confident that:

1. The laws of physics and the mathematical realities of game theory are the same everywhere
2. Life will be carbon-based, because there aren't really any good alternatives. (No, silicon won't work.)
3. Some kind of organic polymer will be used to encode each orgasm's genetic information, because there really isn't a good alternative. DNA is good choice because it's stable and cheap to make.
4. Carbon-based life will require roughly the same environment we do. For instance, there will be no creatures that require bio-suits kept at the temperature of molten lead because any reasonable enzyme would denature at that point. Some kind of liquid environment will be needed for chemical reactions to take place in, probably water because it's abundant, simply, and is liquid in the right temperature range.
5. Organisms will face roughly the same environment challenges we do, and will produce similar results.

Really, we're not going to see off-the-wall organisms. They'll have eyes. They'll have brains. Anything that required technology will require air, fire, and water. Fire requires oxygen, so our aliens will have roughly the same atmospheric needs we do.

The differences we may see are in the arbitrary choices evolution has made: I think we'll see extraterrestrial life use some of the amino acids that don't occur in nature here. Maybe their proteins and carbohydrates have opposite orientations. But the fundamental structures will be very similar because the problem is similar everywhere!

Also, cultu