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

Re:NASA needs to latch onto this.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Finding a "twin" earth, no matter the distance (assuming if we can see it, we can get to it at some point in the future) is possible _the_ most important thing for the continuation of the human race.

No it isn't. Humans are built for here. We are an evolving species and once the oil is gone and the metals we've dug up oxidise and wash into the oceans, we'll be right back to our neolithic lifestyle - you know - the one that worked for hundreds of thousands of years.

Industrialism will disappear and we we relocalise and eventually evolve into something else. If we prize certain features, such as intelligence and co-operation, to deal with changes in our environment, we might become a "better" species. If we prize violence and competition, then we will become something else. Likely, it will be a bit of both.

The stars will still be there, but they are not for us.

Wrong planet.

RS