New Exoplanet Is Best Yet Candidate For Supporting Life

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New Exoplanet Is Best Yet Candidate For Supporting Life

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 2, 2012 @05:31PM from the welcome-to-the-neighborhood dept.

First time accepted submitter uigrad_2000 writes "With all the new exoplanets discovered recently with Kepler, it seemed a sure thing that the first exoplanet in the habitable zone of a star would be found soon. The irony is that Kepler was not involved. GJ 667Cc is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, and lies in the habitable region of its host star, reports Scientific American. It was discovered by comparing public data from the ESO to recent observations from Hawaii and Chile. As opposed to the stars Kepler is watching, this is only 22 light-years away, making it even more interesting."

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22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-02 17:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

"this is only 22 light years away, making it even more interesting."
It's like a price on an estate: as remarkable as this is, it's only 55.3 million! Still unreachable :P
1. Re:22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-02 17:44 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Closer planets are much easier to observe than farther ones. We may not be able to go there in the foreseeable future, but being close means we can study it.
2. Re:22 light years by afabbro · 2012-02-02 17:50 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Visiting this planet is perfectly feasible if the human race wants it.
  I wouldn't say "perfectly" feasible. Visiting the moon is perfectly feasible. Visiting Mars is probably perfectly feasible. But 22LY is a >44Y round trip. I think instead of "perfectly feasible" I would say "probably possible".
  
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  Advice: on VPS providers
3. Re:22 light years by DarkFencer · 2012-02-02 17:56 · Score: 2
  
  It's like a price on an estate: as remarkable as this is, it's only 55.3 million!
  55.3 million what?? miles? not even close...
  The GP was comparing the distance to the price of a luxury estate (55.3 million dollars/pounds/euro/etc). They were not saying it was 55.3 million anything in distance.
4. Re:22 light years by Swampash · 2012-02-02 17:57 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  A 44 year round trip if you travel at the speed of light from start to finish.
  That's a pretty big if.
5. Re:22 light years by Endovior · 2012-02-02 18:16 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  That's what the greater than sign was for. >44 years, because it cannot possibly be less, given our current understanding of the laws of physics. Naturally, just because there's no way for it to be less in no way means that it can't be more. In fact, it almost certainly will be.
6. Re:22 light years by Belial6 · 2012-02-02 18:22 · Score: 2
  
  Perfectly feasible, and round trip have nothing to do with each other.
7. Re:22 light years by Zakabog · 2012-02-02 18:59 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Well 44 years for those of us observing from Earth. Much less time for those of us making the journey (assuming they're traveling at the speed of light or close to it.) Still that is a huge if. Though radio contact with an intelligent and sufficiently technicially advanced species that close would be very possible.
8. Re:22 light years by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:14 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I can't see why a modest improvement in our current technology, say the technology we'll have in 200 years would not allow this trip to be quite feasible at 0.10C, for a roundtrip of around half a millennia. And that's only about twice as long as our current government has lasted, and our culture has been around longer. Our descendants could look forward to the trip report. And assuming biology continues to advance, it might just be our great grandchildren welcoming those who return.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
9. Re:22 light years by symbolset · 2012-02-02 19:18 · Score: 2
  
  Just rechecked. Our own oort cloud goes almost half the way to Alpha Centari A. If that star has one also, there could be water and fuel available almost the whole way. And the star is getting closer, which is a bonus.
  
  --
  Help stamp out iliturcy.
10. Re:22 light years by Arrepiadd · 2012-02-02 21:29 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Gee, what could go wrong with that?
  First, the fact that the asteroids would be going at a much slower speed than your ship going at the speed of light. Instead of the asteroids clearing your path, you would eventually hit the asteroids.
  Then, let's forget this tiny detail of E=mc^2 and how that influences the mass of a speeding object. Sure it's a negligible factor at our typical speeds but apply the Lorentz Factor to a ship speeding close to the speed of light (let's say 90%) and the mass increases substantially (to 2.3 times the rest mass). Increase speed even more and mass keeps going up (to roughly 7 times, at 0.99c). Then, when you think a bit more about it, more than the 10 seconds it took you to read that forum you showed while completely missing the post of the guy that says basically what I just said, you start seeing what the problem is with keeping a constant 1G acceleration. It takes a lot of mass (read "fuel"), just to keep speeding up. Then, if you think a little bit harder, you may start understanding why they call the speed of light a "limit".
11. Re:22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-02 23:01 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Note that humans don't survive arbitrarily high accelerations. So you'll need some time to get close to the speed of light, and the same time to decelerate on the other side. But then, when you arrive you'll be fried by the extremely blue-shifted radiation (with sufficiently high speed, even normal visible light will turn into hard gamma rays; now imagine what happens to existing gamma radiation and high energy cosmic radiation particles).
  Indeed, one might ask for the maximal speed before you have to fear that any particle hitting you from the front turns your ship into a black hole. :-)
  Oh, and even if you manage to shield away all that radiation, you'll not have much time to avoid those ultra-relativistic stone chippings on your way ... just think what a small gun bullet can do, and imagine a gun bullet with a million times the energy!
12. Re:22 light years by Terminus32 · 2012-02-02 23:07 · Score: 2
  
  'To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. And yet, this has been chosen as the avenue by which it is assumed contact is likely to occur.' - Terence McKenna
  
  --
  http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
13. Re:22 light years by Dunbal · 2012-02-02 23:07 · Score: 2
  
  what is there from stopping us from reaching an appreciable fraction of the speed of light?
  F = m[(vehicle) +m(fuel)]a. If only there was a way to get rid of the "m(fuel)" part of that equation... You can read fantasy books all you want - it takes energy to accelerate any object with mass, which means you need a source of energy. Unfortunately you need to bring this source of energy with you (if only to slow down on the other side), which means you have more mass, which means you need more energy, etc.
  
  --
  Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
14. Re:22 light years by VortexCortex · 2012-02-03 00:07 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  And assuming biology continues to advance, it might just be our great grandchildren welcoming those who return.
  Well, if biology continues to advance then what's to say it wouldn't be ourselves welcoming those who return?
  I understand that some people don't want to live that long, but my "retirement" plan involves savings for having my organs re-grown...
  For over 20 years (since age 12), I've been developing a machine intelligence "agent" program that has learned my interests from my habits and alerts me to things I might like; Also it performs many other tasks for me -- like email filtering (I no longer see SPAM). My assistant is interested in Slashdot, cybernetics research, Civil Rights, and many other things because I am interested in them. It observes me throughout the day and night (thanks to IR), and can accurately deduce my mood, and current likely relevant interests from my behaviors: Eg: Just waking up, or my posture, or the way I hold my beverage (one drinks beer much differently than coffee) -- Actually, this is incorrect: having no deduction skills at all, its interests I'm alerted to are affected by its "mood" which is simply a direct result of my own physical state and activities -- uncannily similar to how we derive our own moods...
  How far can we take this? We've discovered how to externally recognize decisions in our minds before we're aware of them, we're decoding human word recognition, and we'll be decoding remembered internal speech soon too. At such a point my agent will know my thoughts as instantly as I do -- My machine intelligence already knows my voice and other sounds, recognizes the words I say, and has been taught to read (its got better OCR when it comes to handwriting than I do sometimes). I am able to add new capabilities easily without retraining the whole network because it's a network of neural-networks, taking a page from the human brain & body, I "wire" specialized components together to create a whole.
  The sad thing is that there's a better chance of myself or something very much like me living beyond the time spans you mention than our governments actually launching such a mission. It seems to me that the truly essential and ambitious goals in many areas of exploration will not involve state sponsorship.
  Think of it this way, if the Dinosaurs had a sufficiently advanced space program they wouldn't be extinct right now...
  ( They achieved flight and rested on their laurels tempting fate with all the time in the world. )
  Eventually my machine intelligence will be fully autonomous. Having its own physical state and activities it will be capable of creating its own "mood", able to affect and explore its own interests, and will be much more sturdy than our frail frames are -- Esp. when it comes to the harshness of space. The only problem is that if we launched such intelligences to distant interesting worlds, they may decide never to return. At least then our Human drive to create and explore won't be completely extincted by the asteroid that IS headed for us Right Now.
  P.S. It's a misnomer to call machine intelligence "AI"; There's nothing "artificial" about its very real intelligence. Though not as smart as you are, its intelligence is as real as that of a fruit fly, rat, bird, cat, or ape. True, MI is artificial in that it was created by man, but you don't call clothes "artificial garments" if they include synthetic fibers... It's truly just an intelligent machine.
15. Re:22 light years by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-03 00:40 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  I would not be so worried about Doppler shifted radiation. I would be more worried about the 3 foot tall super strong midgets who would live on a planet with 4.5x our gravity. They would undoubtedly be able to break a human man in half with little effort.
16. Re:22 light years by butalearner · 2012-02-03 01:21 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I would not be so worried about Doppler shifted radiation. I would be more worried about the 3 foot tall super strong midgets who would live on a planet with 4.5x our gravity. They would undoubtedly be able to break a human man in half with little effort.
  Actually, the planet's radius is probably going to be quite a bit larger than our own, since (reportedly) there are fewer heavy metals in that system. If the radius is 2.1x Earth's radius with 4.5x the mass, the gravity would be the same as Earth.
17. Re:22 light years by necro81 · 2012-02-03 01:26 · Score: 2
  
  Since there is little friction in space what is there from stopping us from reaching an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? I was reading that we might attain lightspeed in about 1 year at 1G acceleration rate
  What stops us is: 1) we have no way to produce sustained thrust anywhere near that high 2) even if we had a means, it would take something on the order of the entire power output of humanity to propel an interstellar craft at 1 G for that long, 4) to build and supply such a spacecraft would require a significant portion of the GDP of humanity for decades, and 4) special relativity dictates that as you approach the speed of light, your mass increases, which requires more power to accelerate, etc.
18. Re:22 light years by butalearner · 2012-02-03 01:34 · Score: 2
  
  I would say "absolutely, completely, utterly impossible with current technology." Come on. Just shooting a laser would take 22 years to hit it and if anyone were there they wouldn't even notice because we are just a speck in their sky too. Not to mention that if you ever got there, you're probably looking at 3G gravity at the surface. I'd go from 160 lbs to 480 lbs. How the hell are you supposed to be a conquistador when you weight 3 times as much as you are accustomed to after spending your entire life weightless? Please.
  An unmanned, multi-generational mission might be feasible. Maybe.
  There's no info on the radius, but as long as it's greater than 2.1x Earth (I believe it's quite likely since they say heavy metals are scarce in that system), surface gravity will actually be less than Earth's.
19. Re:22 light years by butalearner · 2012-02-03 01:42 · Score: 2
  
  FYI, for comparison look at GJ 1214 b, which is about 6.5x Earth mass, but 2.7x the radius, which gives a surface gravity of 0.91g.
20. Re:22 light years by Nadaka · 2012-02-03 05:01 · Score: 2
  
  That only works if you have a propulsion system capable of accelerating you to near c in a matter of weeks/months/years and enough reaction mass to do so.
21. Re:22 light years by DaleSwanson · 2012-02-03 06:57 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I read somewhere (I wish I could find it now) That if you were to accelerate at a constant 1G - The time dilation would allow you to visit the known visible universe within a human lifespan.(Well for the traveler anyway) - I really wish I could remember where this came from, I would really like to know if it was true or just something out of someone's ass.
  Accelerating at 1g allows you to get just about anywhere in about 10-25 years (in your time frame).
  100,000 LY (diameter of Milky Way) 11.8 years
  2.6 million LY (nearest galaxy) 15.0 years
  46.6 billion LY (radius of observable universe) 24.5 years.
  
  Some important notes: First this would get you to these places travelling at near the speed of light. If you'd like to arrive stopped you'll have to roughly double the travel time, as half would be spent decelerating. Second, you could accelerate as long as you had a source of energy (and a functioning ship).
  
  As for the claim you could visit the observable universe in a human lifespan, you couldn't reach all the points of it. But you certainly could reach the edge.
  
  http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html
The universe mocks us by istartedi · 2012-02-02 17:39 · Score: 5, Funny

The universe mocks us.
Here's silver candy,
It doesn't make you fat.
It'll get you girls and all of that.
It only sells for a modest fee.
A quintillion dollars
Or exceeding C.

--
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
1. Re:The universe mocks us by hantms · 2012-02-02 18:37 · Score: 2
  
  Hello, it's 22 light years. It may take up to 22 years to get there, but you don't need to exceed c.
  The biggest problem I see is that you fly away from Earth going close to c, you will never communicate with anyone back home.
  Or to put that in another way: you will never get any new TV shows. You'd launch mid-season of American Idol and 20 years later you still won't know who won it.
  Screw that.
2. Re:The universe mocks us by istartedi · 2012-02-02 19:02 · Score: 2
  
  You're quite right that you don't need to exceed C. I decided to take the lazy way out to analyze this problem. Please note, that site has a crappy interface. There are probably better relativistic trip calculators out there.
  What's interesting is that you can subject both the earth and the ship to a fairly long wait time (we're both in it together) or you can give the ship a reasonably short wait time if you can get to 0.99c. The aforementioned lack of sync with Earth is still a problem of course. Single digit years on the ship, multi-decades go by on Earth. I don't know if that calculator takes into account the fact that you have to accelerate to some fraction of C and then decelerate to orbit. Having the deceleration fail would be a world of suck too, not to mention the kinetic energy of a dust particle at relativistic velocities.
  Anyway, it was a bit of doggeral I banged out on a whim. If you can come up with some good rhyme and meter that's also good physics, have at it.
  
  --
  For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
3. Re:The universe mocks us by MrZilla · 2012-02-02 19:24 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  May take up to 22 years?
  It will guaranteed never take less than 22 years. Never mind that even getting close to c is a wild dream at this time.
  But if you did manage to get close to the speed of light, the trip would take ~22 years from an earth point of view, but for the people on the ship/whatever, the trip will be quite short. If you actually hit c (never mind that it is physically impossible), the trip would be instantaneous from the point of view of the travelers.
  A more realistic scenario, if we pour a lot of money into propulsion research, might be to fly away at 10% c. That would lead to a trip take takes 220 years in earth-time, or 198 years in ship-time. Not exactly an easy trip to plan.
  
  --
  mov ax, 4c00h
  int 21h
4. Re:The universe mocks us by PwnzerDragoon · 2012-02-02 20:06 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  You'd launch mid-season of American Idol and 20 years later you still won't know who won it.
  I already do that. Am I an astronaut?
5. Re:The universe mocks us by sneakyimp · 2012-02-02 20:31 · Score: 2
  
  The poetry is great! Your physics sucks. You neglect to address the amount of energy/mass it would take to accelerate someone to 0.99c. Hint: it's a fuckload.
6. Re:The universe mocks us by Tsingi · 2012-02-03 00:58 · Score: 2
  
  Hello, it's 22 light years. It may take up to 22 years to get there, but you don't need to exceed c.
  You'll need to exceed it, or change the "up to" to "more than"
  
  The biggest problem I see is that you fly away from Earth going close to c, you will never communicate with anyone back home.
  Or to put that in another way: you will never get any new TV shows. You'd launch mid-season of American Idol and 20 years later you still won't know who won it.
  Screw that.
  I've never watched American Idol for more than a minute. I'll go, you stay here and stay current with what's important.
If we can find them... by Brad1138 · 2012-02-02 17:40 · Score: 2

in just the last few years (or so it seams) we can now identify "earth like" planets. A more advance race could probably do it much better. All the sudden the thought of ET's finding us isn't so far fetched.

--
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
1. Re:If we can find them... by tiffany352 · 2012-02-02 17:56 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  We have a 75 light year radius sphere of expanding radio signals. If anyone is out there listening, we are the kid knocking over bookshelves in the library of the universe.
2. Re:If we can find them... by afabbro · 2012-02-02 17:58 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  ETs "finding" us has never been far-fetched. Assume we're not the first sentient species to evolve, most species evolve technologically in a similar way, we're not by some bad luck in an incredibly underpopulated galaxy, etc. These are all reasonable assumptions.
  However, it's the contacting us and/or visiting us that is a lot harder to fetch.
  I'm certainly not an expert, but my understanding is that to listen to our own spacecraft at the edge of our solar system (Voyager) requires a giant dish here. Granted, Voyager is a pretty weak transmitter, but it's also a very close one and one we built and understand. A giant transmitter 22LY away...could the signal reach us? Further away? I don't know. So likewise, what about our signals (which are pretty weak at this point, even when we try) to them? My understanding is that it's more about the signal decay over vast distances than about sophistication in listening equipment. Identifying Earth as a high-likelihood life-sustaining planet by some ETs - sure. Listening in on us or contacting us...much tougher.
  ETs visiting us requires a jump from physics we speculate about to science fiction. At this point, faster than light travel may, for all we know, be forever impossible.
  
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  Advice: on VPS providers
3. Re:If we can find them... by hantms · 2012-02-02 18:26 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  At 22 lightyears, you don't NEED to go faster than light to reach it. Just somewhere close-ish to light-speed will do. So turning physicis on its head is not a requirement. What you do need is a really big jump in technology. ;) But that's still a lot more feesible than changing reality as Einstein penned it up.
  Before setting off however you would want to make real sure that it's worth it, and the place actually inhabitable. The 4.5 x gravity will likely be the least of your concerns. And it'll take some dedication; you will be spending your life (and your kid's life) in space.
  Then you land, you find something that looks half-way intelligent, say 'Take me to your leader" and hope it doesn't eat you on the spot.
  So all things considered, I can see why aliens don't bother coming here.
4. Re:If we can find them... by pjr.cc · 2012-02-02 18:49 · Score: 2
  
  ...All the sudden the thought of ET's finding us isn't so far fetched.
  I personally wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Considering the sheer volume of stars just in our galaxy even 10000 exoplanets would be an astronomically small figure besides those we're yet to discover.
  But just discovering an exoplanet doesn't simply mean "finding life". Who knows one of the planets we've already seen might have some form of life on it. ET's (assuming they're anything like us) may "find" our planet but have no idea whats on it.
  All of that also assumes that ET's are behaving something like us. What I mean is that we're trying to find a planet capable of harbouring life based on what we know of life (i.e. our eco system) and hence we're throwing out planets that dont fall into what we believe is a "habbitable location" for life. Without any evidence to the contrary, ET's would probably do something similar. The problem with that is that if life involved in completely different ways (completely alien to us) in locations we wouldn't suspect capable of being fertile are they going to miss us like we're likely to miss them? Are they even interested in finding life on other planets throughout the universe?
  Then again, lets say ET's in some solar system were plausibly capable of developing in some way that meant planets like mercury or pluto were "habbitable" for them (unlikely by our reckoning) chances are they'd be so different that once they started looking for life on other planets they'd look for completely different things. for eg, we might look for a planet that gives off a spectrum suggesting it has water or co2/o2/n2 composition in its atmosphere where they might look for something completely different.
  But assuming they are similar to us and do look for something similar (and chance upon our planet), how are they going to know we're here? The huge amount of radio EM radiation we give off? Well, we've only been doing that for less then 100 years - consider how far that actually reaches (moving at the speed of light) within our own milky way (around 100,000 light years across) - 100 years doesnt go very far really. According to this little calc (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html) that would cover around 15000 stars. 15000 of around 200,000,000,000 stars... Doesn't really cover much.
  Im not saying its far fetched as such cause you'll never know what an ET is capable of until you meet one and they explain it to you - but, if they're like us (aside from praying they dont have big guns and are looking for oil) finding "us" has reasonably low odd's.
5. Re:If we can find them... by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:19 · Score: 2
  
  It better hope it doesn't eat you on the spot. The odds of our biologies not being cross-poisonous are low.
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
6. Re:If we can find them... by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:24 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  The good news is that if they are looking for oil, we've almost used all of it up, so conquering our planet won't do them much good. :-)
  
  --
  "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
7. Re:If we can find them... by segwonk · 2012-02-02 20:20 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Serious question though: What size antenna would some(thing) need to hear our radio signals at a distance of 22ly?
  
  I seem to recall from reading somewhere (Physics of Star Trek?) about this. The gist is that this is a non-trivial problem, requiring an antenna unfathomably wide to catch such a weak signal.
  
  Maybe there's an occasional super neat hack, like galaxy/gravitational lensing. But there's no aiming that.
  
  Anyway, maybe we'll catch someone knowledgable about this... Chime in!
  
  --
  - ------ Go 'til ya know.
8. Re:If we can find them... by Kjella · 2012-02-02 21:19 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  According to this:
  
  Project Phoenix, under the direction of Dr. Jill Tarter, who had worked on MOP when she was at NASA, was a continuation of the Targeted Search program, studying 710 Sunlike stars within 150 light-years of the Earth. Phoenix used the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the 43-meter telescope at Green Banks, and the Arecibo dish, searching 70 million channels across a bandwidth of 1,800 MHz. The search was said to be capable of picking up any transmitter about as powerful as an airport radar within 200 light-years. Phoenix was completed in March 2004, with negative results.
  It gets better if you assume we have a dedicated facility on both ends, two Arecibo radio telescopes (305m each) should be able to communicate halfway to the center of the galaxy. But if you're taking about a low-power radio broadcast, then that would take a huge, huge antenna. Then again, they've done some crazy things with arrays of antennas, so who knows. Certainly we're not so silent that we can't get noticed.
  
  --
  Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
9. Re:If we can find them... by hackertourist · 2012-02-02 22:25 · Score: 2
  
  If I'm not mistaken, airport radars are just about the most powerful transmissions we create, so they'd be the easiest to detect.
  And setting up an antenna is the easy part. How are you going to decode the transmissions by an alien civilization?
10. Re:If we can find them... by Kjella · 2012-02-02 23:51 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  And setting up an antenna is the easy part. How are you going to decode the transmissions by an alien civilization?
  2x beep
  3x beep
  5x beep
  7x beep
  11x beep
  13x beep
  17x beep
  19x beep
  *pause*
  5x beep
  *pause*
  7x beep
  *pause*
  35x beep/no beep
  *pause* ...and start over.
  This should be a fairly straight forward way of encoding a pictogram, though it's unclear if they'll interpret 5 and 7 as the horizontal and vertical or opposite. Replace 5, 7 and 5*7 with arbitrary large primes to make detailed pictures. From there you can start sending maps of the galaxy, periodic table with illustration of the elements, everything we'd have in common. Show math with illustrations like you'd do to a preschooler, here's 2+3 = 5 with boxes of 2, 3 and 5 items. Once they understand our number system, show them distances they too probably know like size of galaxy, size of hydrogen atom etc.
  Text and language, yes you'd get to that eventually. Send them them the alphabet then start over again, naming everything like the milky way, the sun, earth, all the elements and so on. For that matter, just teach them like you would a young child, the is s table and chair and book and flower and bird and whatnot. Illustration and text. Somehow I don't see this as a problem, put a US and Japanese kid in the same room and they'll find a way to communicate even though they got no words in common. Hell, we teach sign language to monkeys. How hard can it be to get a conversation going?
  
  --
  Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
11. Re:If we can find them... by WrongSizeGlass · 2012-02-03 00:36 · Score: 2
  
  Keep in mind that we're assuming any "ET's" out there are on par with our technology. What if they're just like us, except around 100 years behind us technologically. They won't be listening to the skies. They'll be watching a silent movie about A Trip to the Moon.
  
  Just like everything else in life timing is everything.
12. Re:If we can find them... by houghi · 2012-02-03 00:56 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  To quote Carl Sagan
  
  I am fully aware of the whole quote:
  I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
  The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
  Also: it is a quote and as such a reflection how _I_ feel, not what Sagan thought of the matter. Just wanted to clearify that before people start ranting
  
  --
  Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Re:What if we go there? by c0lo · 2012-02-02 18:08 · Score: 3, Informative

What if we go there? 4.5 G?
Probably less. TFA quote:

The discovery of a planet around GJ 667C came as a surprise to the astronomers, because the entire star system has a different chemical makeup than our sun. The system has much lower abundances of heavy elements (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), such as iron, carbon and silicon.
Good news: the density/mass of the planet may be less, thus a lower gravitation.
The bad news: the lack of carbon (which, BTW, is not that heavy) would make the planet unable to sustain life as we know it.
Other than that, with around 20-something days/year of leave entitlement, living there should be nice, because:

It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star

"The planet is around one star in a triple-star system," Vogt explained. "The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky."

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Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Re:What if we go there? by camperdave · 2012-02-02 18:15 · Score: 5, Insightful

(No, I don't think we'll ever reach it; 22 light years)
We already HAVE reached it... in a sense. We've been broadcasting radio and television signals for all of recorded history (electronically recorded history, that is). Maybe they are mourning the death of The Skipper from Gilligan's Island (Alan Hale Jr.) who passed away 22 years ago. Maybe they're stunned by the loss of the shuttle Challenger, or dismayed by Chernobyl, or the Exxon Valdez. Maybe they're rocking out to Madonna and Michael "Mr Glove" Jackson. Perhaps they have had a Star Wars marathon, and are hoping beyond hope that George Lucas will make those long anticipated prequel movies. Too bad there's no way we can warn them.

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When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Re:not really by niftydude · 2012-02-02 18:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

Life doesn't have to be mobile or sentient.

Your argument doesn't exclude plants, trees, fungus, etc.

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You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Re:What if we go there? by sgunhouse · 2012-02-02 19:10 · Score: 3, Informative

Assuming average density the same as Earth, take a cure root of 4.5 to determine the approximate radius (compared to Earth). Then gravity is M/r^2 which (since we assumed M = r^3) simplifies to r.
Digging out the calculator, 1.651G.
(Jupiter is substantially less dense than Earth, that's why it doesn't work for Jupiter.)
Re:summary fail by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:27 · Score: 2

It's ironic in that no one knows what that word means, and the folks over at Kepler are driving themselves into a frenzy trying to find an earth analogue. They apparently missed one quite nearby.

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"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Re:What if we go there? by Surt · 2012-02-02 19:39 · Score: 4, Funny

Because they aren't stupid enough to broadcast their position to the more dangerous gangs in the galaxy.

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"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Volcan? Vulcan? by Tablizer · 2012-02-02 19:44 · Score: 2

A rocky planet 4.5 times the mass of Earth would probably be quite volcanic because it has yet to "cool down" inside, and because more gravitational pressure would be cooking the core hotter.

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Table-ized A.I.
Lame by Jarnin · 2012-02-02 20:56 · Score: 2

It orbits the star in 28 days. That means it's probably tidally locked. One side of the planet would be boiling, the other side would be freezing. The only habitable area on the planet would be yet another habitable zone near the planets terminator.
Weather on this planet would be pretty crazy, if it has an atmosphere at all, and life? I doubt it. Any life on this planet would have no day/night cycle, which seems kind of important for life as we know it.

And that's why I'm really getting tired of all these sensationalist "We found another Earth-like planet" headlines. Mr. Guillem Anglada-Escude of the Carnegie Institution for Science is being very disingenuous claiming that this is the "Holy Grail of exoplanet research". It could be, but without knowing more about it it's just as likely that it's as dead as Mercury or the Moon. Except bigger.
Science UR failing it by Rogerborg · 2012-02-02 22:21 · Score: 2

"Statistics tell us we shouldn't have found something this quickly this soon unless there's a lot of them out there," [Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz] said. "This tells us there must be an awful lot of these planets out there."
I don't know what's worse, his grasp of statistics, or... no, wait, that's about as bad as it gets.
Please tell me that Vogt is some kind of PR Scientician, not an actual, real, bona fide astronomer.

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If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Re:What if we go there? by ArwynH · 2012-02-02 22:34 · Score: 2

You paint a dark picture my friend,
For if what you say is true, the first thing we will do once we make first contact is to sue thier planet from under thier feet!
How dare those pirating alien scum view our IP without a license!
Re:What if we go there? by WrongSizeGlass · 2012-02-03 00:23 · Score: 2

If they could receive our signals, why aren't we receiving theirs?
Because by now they've received broadcasts of the original Star Trek series and don't want William Shatner to find them.
No base problem by DrYak · 2012-02-03 06:06 · Score: 2

Does that communication system work if they use anything other than base 10 math?
Base won't be a problem, no more than today, when computer count in base 2, most people count in base 10, ans some people count using weird combination (mixed base 20 celtic influence, mixed base 5 with roman, base 12, base 60 in summeria, etc...)
A prime number is a prime number, no matter what crazy writing system you use to write it down. Base systems are just that, encoding ways used to write down abstract number.
To go back to the parent exemple:
base will only start to play a role when we send graphical representation of equation, as in written down in picture form.
once we send "5 + 7 = 12", not as a bip sequence, but as a nice bip-encoded picture. In addition to learning the strange symbols we use to write number, the alien will notice that for some crazy reason, we start to use 2 symbols for anything bigger than a number of 9.
If they count in base 20, they'll probably reply something along the line of "5 + 7 = B", with "5", "7", "B", "+" and "=" replaced with their own local way to represent the concepts, ordered in their preferred way to order their symbols (prefix notation? opposite endianness? etc).
That's why math is regularily proposed as a "first common language", a numbre is always the same numbre, no matter what crazy writting system you use to write it down.

Just curious, because it seems like the only reason we use base 10 is because we have 10 figures (and toes).
Some civilisations have used 20, because that's the total number of fingers+toes.
Some civilisations have used 5, because that's the number of finger on 1 hand.
Some civilisations have used 12, because that's the number of phallanx (finger bones) on the 4 long fingers, and because it is nicely divided by 3 and 4.
Some civilisations have used 60, because it's pretty much easy to divide by quite an impressive number of divisor.
Our civilisations use 2 for computers, because a simple representation between "signal" and "no signal" is the easiest to implement. ...
But you just need to convert value from one system to the other. The maths behind remain the same.

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"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Re:Awesome! by e_hu_man · 2012-02-03 07:47 · Score: 2

i don't really know enough about rockets or telescopes to pass judgement on what you've said. however, there are numerous probes exploring our solar system (voyagers, cassini, etc). from what i understand, no level of ground-based observation could obtain the data they're collecting.

i'm not sure how we maintain a space mission that will last over a hundred years (which is what tfa says it would take to get pictures back) or how you deal with command and control with a 44-yr lag, never mind all the other stuff people have posted about. but, i imagine a probe would provide valuable scientific information that couldn't be obtained any other way.