Finding Twin Earths Is Harder Than We Thought

Matt_dk writes "Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy. 'We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,' said Kaltenegger. 'We will need to add up many transits to do so — hundreds of them, even for stars as close as 20 light-years away.'" The abstract of their paper offers a link to the complete paper as a 17-page PDF; here is a short description from 2007 of the same researchers' work, outlining the type of spectral signature that an Earth-like atmosphere would be expected to show.

Comments

Solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

Build in a FTL drive and have Starbuck magically... oh fuck it.. what a cop out. :\

Re:Solution:

[collinstocks]

Oh, please. This was superseded by the Bistro drive years ago! It gets rid of all that mucking about with improbability. Much safer.

As much as I'd love to find another Earth...

[palegray.net]

If they're at a similar point in the evolution of intelligence, that's kinda scary in a way. Maybe they've already made the jump to a pervasive machine intelligence; that would probably be less distressing.

Re:As much as I'd love to find another Earth...

[Farmer Tim]

I'm fairly certain that the little green men, ticked off after years of being depicted as scrawny, bug-eyed, space-faring bobbleheads, will just come in rayguns blazing, but the machines, prizing efficiency and precision above our human failings, would probably arrive and play muzak with a pre-recorded voiceover telling us that our death is important, and would we please wait.

Is being blasted into your component molecules by unimaginably powerful energy beams really more distressing than being put on hold?

Simple explanation

[Farmer Tim]

Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "less distressing"??

This is Slashdot, and you're wondering how someone decided that a machine would be easier to deal with than a living creature. Hmm...

Re:NASA needs to latch onto this.

[Hognoxious]

A "twin" earth finding us, no matter the distance (assuming if they can see us they can get to us at some point in the future) is possibly _the_ most important thing for the continuation of whatever intelligent species lives there.

FTFY.