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Kepler Discovers First Earth-Sized Exoplanets
ananyo writes "NASA's Kepler telescope has reached one of its major mission milestones: finding an Earth-sized planet outside the Solar System. What's more, it has done it twice in the same star system. Whizzing around the star Kepler-20, about 290 parsecs (946 light-years) from Earth, is not only an Earth-sized planet, but also something just a touch smaller — a Venus."
the apparent size of this planet is the same as an object of 0.5 mm on the moon.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
>We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them" ... it's hard not to think that even if it's not what we'd call intelligent life, there's likely more than a few places that have evolved some form of life.
The more we see stuff like this, the more we see just how vast and astounding the universe around us actually is.
And yet, if General Relativity is correct, there's still no conceivable way for a planet 1,000 lightyears distant to have any kind of communication with us, or us with them, without a two-millennia time lag. And that's just for extremely high-power/sensitivity radio signals, let alone any kind of matter-based probe. I for one find that picture of the cosmos incredibly depressing: there's potential neighbours all around, but no possible way to communicate until our civilisation crumbles.
That's really why I hope that General Relativity is not, in fact, correct in its pessimistic assumptions about lightspeed being the final arbiter of causality and that there's some kind of cosmic loophole which would allow interstellar trade and travel for beings with humanlike lifespans.
Otherwise, no matter how many exoplanets or other wonders we find in deep space, the sensible logical implication is that we should ignore them because they could never have any causal impact on our civilisation. (Other than downloading some alien DNA from radio signals and using it to breed an alien-human hybrid Hot Chick, which science fiction tells us is always an excellent idea with no possible complications.)
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
What's most pathetic isn't that the US is totally dropping the ball on this stuff, it's that other nations that have the ability to take over this important work aren't bothering to do so. Why aren't the Europeans doing more space exploration? They have 50% more population than we do, many of their economies are stronger (just look at Germany's economy), so what's the problem? All they can manage is one little probe to the outer planets?
Everyone whines about how America is going down the toilet (which it is), but I don't see anyone else stepping up to fill in, except China (which is much farther behind technologically, so has more ground to cover to catch up).