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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."
...but it's generating it's own power and is communicating. From http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/mar/HQ_09-052_Kepler_launches.html
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.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Another way to look at this is:
When in human history has encountering a more advanced civilisation ever been good for a less advanced civilisation?
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
This means:
1. THEY don't want the world to know the truth about global warming.
2. THEY know that Kepler will be pointed the wrong way anyway.
Nasa needs to get the facts:
You take the good, you take the bad,
you crash billions of dollars of equipment into the ocean,
The Facts of Life, the Facts of Life.
There's a time you got to go and show
You're growin' now you know about
The Facts of Life, the Facts of Life.
When the world never seems
to be livin up to your dreams
And suddenly you're finding out
the Facts of Life are all about you, you.
It takes a lot to get 'em right
When you're learning the Facts of Life. (learning the Facts of Life)
Learning the Facts of Life (learning the Facts of Life)
Learning the Facts of Life.
Ahh, I never get sick of that old Alan Thicke jingle.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It's a mixed metaphor. Don't throw the blender out with the bathwater.
If it really is near-light-speed, then to the traveler, only a small amount of time has passed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Time_dilation_and_space_flight
I know this is obvious to most people but the "habitable zone" is awfully generous. It's hard to gauge the exact amount of heat given off by a star from as far away as we are. Plus, the atmosphere content is extremely important. Our moon is basically the same distance away from the sun as us and with no atmosphere it goes from like -180 to +200 F or something like that. So yeah, it kinda needs to have an exact amount of certain gases to keep water from boiling and freezing repeatedly, which would probably kill everything organic in it. And how are be supposed to tell if it's 40% as opposed to 50% CO2 in the atmosphere from all the way out here? It's impossible and that could mean a huuuuge temperature difference. So even if they find one that's supposedly perfect from what we can detect, it's still extremely likely that it's not.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
That's why I like film "Liquid Sky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Sky)." Instead of coming to the Earth to help us or destroy us, the aliens came to Earth looking for drugs.
Certainly a welcome break from the usual Hollywood dichotomy.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Instead of a low Earth orbit like Hubble, Kepler is going to use an "Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit with a period of 372.5 days.": http://kepler.nasa.gov/sci/design/orbit.html
Japan didn't do too badly; once they realised how backward they were they acted quickly to catch up, taking less than ninety years from the Black Ships to Pearl Harbour. A case could perhaps be made for India, whose existence as a unified state rather than countless squabbling principalities is largely a result of the Raj. And awful though the Conquistadors were, the Aztec Empire was a brutal tyranny that enslaved all its neighbours, who were very glad indeed to see the back of Montezuma.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If you RTFA you'll see they are after statistics, not detailed data. They want to estimate the number of planets that have approximately the same characteristics as Earth.
The Kepler will keep monitoring the same 100000 stars during five years. The number of planets detected around those stars will give a rough idea on how likely it is to find earth-like planets.
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:
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:
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