Odds Favor Discovery of Earth-Like Exoplanet in 2013

Earth-like exoplanets have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years; it's exciting to think that there's life — or even just life-sustaining conditions — on planets other than Earth, whether near by (on Mars) or much farther away (orbiting Vega). Projects like NASA's Kepler, and the ground-based HARPS, attempt to spot planets outside our solar system of all kinds. These exoplanet discoveries have been ramping up lately, and so has sorting of the discovered planets by size and other characteristics; the odds are looking good, say astronomers quoted by Space.com, that an Earth-like planet will be found this year. Abel Mendez runs the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, and UC Berkeley astromer Geoff Marcy looks for planets as part of the Kepler team; they explain in the article why they think 2013 is an auspicious one for planet hunters.

Comments

FRIST POTS!

[Sigg3.net]

I don't want to go first!

Forget about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Face up to reality, we are never going to make it there anyway.
Once we have accepted that we are stuck here on earth and the universe is massively boring - we
can begin to put our collective minds together and focus on simulating realities that are more interesting - and perhaps throw in a few quirks that allow us
to travel - faster than the speed of light (without being obliterated) - wormholes - warp speed - hyper space - take your pick!
We just need to tap into the power source that was passed down from the outer (even more boring) simulation and use that (because thats what I would do).
We also need to be able to fool ourselves into thinking its real.
We also need to be able to pass down THE ONE POWER SOURCE so our little incarnations can use it to create their own powerful simulations.
Because, predictably, they will get bored too and might come up with some better ideas that we haven't thought of.
Its all about having fun you know.
Happy new year in 24 hours.

Re: Forget about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

This power source you speak of, is it coal? I'm heavily leveraged in oil futures and if I need to move it to coal I'll make the leap, but I need to be sure. The markets are closed today so any time today is good, but the sooner the better would really be a big help.

Re:Forget about it.

[SternisheFan]

The impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet. When I was a kid, walking on the moon was 'impossible', never going to happen. Now, mayhap the human race is stuck in this solar system for the next 10,000 years or so, it may be we'll never get out. Still leaves lots to do and explore and colonize.

OTOH, ya' never know. Some theory that's still relegated to the sci-fi class might get proven doable, warping space-time and "riding the wave" looks to be possible. Or,aliens could land and gift faster than life travel to us (if we prove 'worthy' of it, or we could beat 'em up and take it from them!).

Today we have 'impossible' Star Trek tech in our pockets. And amazing tech is coming down the pike in our near future. But to say "it's never gonna' happen", IMO, is a rather short sighted opinion, not unlike past pessimists who couldn't see past their own closed off reality.

Re:Forget about it.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

When I was a kid, walking on the moon was 'impossible', never going to happen.

Now as an adult, walking on the moon is 'impossible', never going to happen again.

Re:Forget about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is as worth reading as the sentence at the end "Happy new year in 24 hours". Think you're missing a day there buddy.

Re:Forget about it.

[CastrTroy]

Going to the moon was never impossible in any living person's childhood. The moon isn't really that far away. as soon as the first plane took off they started making plans to go to the moon. The nearest star is so far away that nobody has any idea how we would realistically travel there in the foreseeable future. we still haven't advanced much far beyond where we were in the 60s and 70s. Sure we've advanced the technologies a little, but we aren't getting.to the next solar system on any of the existing technologies no matter he much we refine them.

Re:Forget about it.

[grumling]

"Today we have 'impossible' Star Trek tech in our pockets. "

We have a fairly believable simulation of star trek in our pockets. But communicators didn't need any infrastructure to span thousands of miles, even through solid rock. We've got a long way to go before that happens.

Re:Forget about it.

[SternisheFan]

When I was a kid, walking on the moon was 'impossible', never going to happen.

Now as an adult, walking on the moon is 'impossible', never going to happen again.

We should. The moon would be an ideal 'jumping off point' to Mars. Seal up some of it's pre-existing caves, now you have large living/storage areas. Convert existing ice for air/power. Low gravity = less fuel needed to launch trips to Mars. Mine out ores from asteroids that have already impacted, build space station from them. Serious space exploration would prove to be a world unifying effort, then maybe us humans can end our hatred, killing each other over resources and imaginary borders. I remain an eternal optimist. :)

______

You can't have everything, where would you put it? - George Carlin

Re:Forget about it.

[Nyder]

When I was a kid, walking on the moon was 'impossible', never going to happen.

Now as an adult, walking on the moon is 'impossible', never going to happen again.

Ya, sucks Michael Jackson died.

Re:Forget about it.

[buravirgil]

I'm unsure why "going there" is so typically the response to news like this. Galileo (16th century) kicked off a method to simply COUNT the planets in our system. By the 20th century, science had methods to determine what COMPRISED those countable objects. Since my childhood, the age and dimension of the universe has ONLY been extended. Given our advancement through WAR, imagine beings beyond such waste and what empirical method grants... Keep Watching the Skies, because it's a sure bet they're Watching You! Moreover (doesn't everyone love to say 'moreover'?), the 20th century SUCKED at describing LIFE. Early biologists used to capitalize the damn concept. Louise B. Young countered this hubris by capitlizating the term 'Form' in her book, The Unfinished Universe, 1986. The pretense of 'sustainable conditions' didn't predict ocean floor smokers. Our understanding of bacteria (the 'third' world) is inane and we've attempted to communicate with dolphins by holding them in what is essentially an echo-chamber. I love the book and movies of Solaris, and I've just told you why. Can we "go" there. Really? What makes you think it would be allowed?

Re:Forget about it.

[Grishnakh]

Getting to other stars isn't that hard; with modern technology we can probably do it in a half-century or so, maybe more. The problem is that this is too long for humans, with our short lifespans; the solution is simple: cryogenics. If you freeze the crew for most of the trip, then they won't age significantly during the voyage. The only problem after that is that hundreds of years will have passed when the crew returns to Earth (if they return at all), but if you pick people without any significant family ties this shouldn't be a big problem. For instance, if there were such a mission being set up, and the odds for success were good (and the cryo technology really worked that well, so I wouldn't age during the voyage), I'd probably be happy to join the mission as long as my wife came with me. I don't have any other family that I care much about who'll be around that much longer anyway, so I won't be missing much. I'm sure there's plenty of other people just like me out there in today's Western culture.

Re:Forget about it.

[Grishnakh]

Our communicators may not have the range that Star Trek communicators did, but they have far more functions than just talking like a walkie-talkie: full-color touchscreens, text messaging (so the other party doesn't have to drop what they're doing to engage you in conversation), internet browsing, looking up various information (I have a weather application on mine I use a lot to see the forecast and current temperature), voice mail, playing music, watching videos, playing games, turn-by-turn navigation, etc. ST communicators couldn't do any of those things, they were just walkie-talkies that could supposedly communicate over long distances and through rocks, and perhaps help the ship establish your location. The only thing our smartphones are missing out of that is a radio channel as effective as "subspace".

Re:Forget about it.

[cheesybagel]

You do not need a warp drive or propellantless drive or whatever if all you want is to get to Alpha Centauri or Tau Ceti.

Nuclear pulse propulsion or anti-matter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion is good enough. The problem is it takes a really long time to get there e.g. 100 years to Alpha Centauri. You have to spend time accelerating then you need to decelerate once you reach the target. However you could have waystations along the way to make each leg of the trip shorter: e.g. the Oort cloud is a spherical shell of icy bodies supposedly nearly a light year away from the Sun. The destination may have a similar cloud of its own. There may even be a rogue planet, brown dwarf or some other large mass en route.

Once a viable destination exists it is only a matter of time before a probe is sent. It will be a challenge to make it have the necessary longevity but it is certainly not impossible. If the probe detects anything worthwhile there I am pretty certain someone will find a way to get there even with current technology.

Re:Forget about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or,aliens could land and gift faster than life travel to us (if we prove 'worthy' of it, or we could beat 'em up and take it from them!).

I'm not sure if I even want faster than life travel. Sounds a bit sketchy to me.

Re:Forget about it.

[SternisheFan]

Or,aliens could land and gift faster than life travel to us (if we prove 'worthy' of it, or we could beat 'em up and take it from them!).

I'm not sure if I even want faster than life travel. Sounds a bit sketchy to me.

Yeah, I re-read my post a couple hours later and said, "Doh!" to myself. Never post until the first cup of coffee fully kicks in. :-/

Re:Forget about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're missing the point. We will get there quicker in a simulated universe. This concept isn't so far fetched and one that we are just beginning to explore thanks to the technology that we do have. (hint CGI).
Even if we could travel at the speed of light - we shouldn't. The craft would get obliterated. And the energy required to power the "energy shields" - would it not be to much to fathom that the energy required to deflect billions of particles would be far greater than the energy required to even propel the craft?

Sorry to break the bad news to you, but everything else is science fiction theory, with little or no practical hypothesis to consider.

Hanging onto the idea that "Aliens" will come down and give us their tech is ridiculous - there is no evidence of off world intelligent alien life either. However, believe what you want to believe.
The idea that IF we are visited by "other" intelligences as manifestations of beings from the outer simulation is far more intriguing, but not for the faint of heart, as it gives rise to the probability that "all this" is a simulated experiment - but the same applies to their reality aswell.
Recursive simulated realities, where each is an enhanced and/or modification of the parent simulation (and so on).

Everything else is becoming even *less* probable (light speed, warp drive, wormholes, aliens) and practical than what we can *make* *possible* in a simulated enviroment.

Are our imaginations for what *might* be possible to much for our current *reality* to accommodate? If true, can we improve it?

Re:Forget about it.

[SternisheFan]

I think you're missing the point. We will get there quicker in a simulated universe. This concept isn't so far fetched and one that we are just beginning to explore thanks to the technology that we do have. (hint CGI). Even if we could travel at the speed of light - we shouldn't. The craft would get obliterated. And the energy required to power the "energy shields" - would it not be to much to fathom that the energy required to deflect billions of particles would be far greater than the energy required to even propel the craft?

Sorry to break the bad news to you, but everything else is science fiction theory, with little or no practical hypothesis to consider.

Hanging onto the idea that "Aliens" will come down and give us their tech is ridiculous - there is no evidence of off world intelligent alien life either. However, believe what you want to believe. The idea that IF we are visited by "other" intelligences as manifestations of beings from the outer simulation is far more intriguing, but not for the faint of heart, as it gives rise to the probability that "all this" is a simulated experiment - but the same applies to their reality aswell. Recursive simulated realities, where each is an enhanced and/or modification of the parent simulation (and so on).

Everything else is becoming even *less* probable (light speed, warp drive, wormholes, aliens) and practical than what we can *make* *possible* in a simulated enviroment.

Are our imaginations for what *might* be possible to much for our current *reality* to accommodate? If true, can we improve it?

You know, I had my bags all packed and everything!.So the more we learn about space the more we see how isolated we are, huh. Great. :(

Still doesn't mean it won't happen, something out of left field, like inter-dimensional doors. (No, I haven't just been watching a Doctor Who marathon), and there may be up to nine dimensions, all existing in the same space.

And it is interesting that statues made thousands of years ago depict people wearing what looks like spacesuit helmets. Long before Star Trek, so what was the inspiration for that? Weird.

We're just starting out with exploring beyond our spaceship Earth, just baby steps (for us) getting taken now. It'd be interesting to come back in a thousand years and see how far we got. Until then, enjoy the ride...

Re:Forget about it.

[meetpi]

And it is interesting that statues made thousands of years ago depict people wearing what looks like spacesuit helmets. Long before Star Trek, so what was the inspiration for that? Weird.

So, out of all the different millions of riffs on a theme of stylised human depicted by thousands of human cultures across the millennia, what are the chances that one later culture would look back at the work of an earlier culture and see something familiar (perhaps mystical) in the depiction?

(the answer is: somewhat less improbable than visitations by a humanoid alien species who are advanced enough to cross space-time, but still wear 1960s-era Earth spacesuits.)

Re:Forget about it.

[SternisheFan]

Maybe they were into 'retro'?

Re:Forget about it.

[hazydave]

Not to mention FTL "subspace" communications... our real devices are limited by the speed of light, obstacles (the relative position of the Enterprise versus on-planet communicators never seemed to be an issue... your body can drop a cellphone signal by 10-20dB), as well as our lack of Star Trek's advanced power sources -- anything capable of powering a tiny Phaser-1 wouldn't be hard pressed to deliver on much more range and battery life in a smartphone/communicator. Sure, the pocket device evolved in dozens of ways not imagined by Roddenberry and crew... that's how things happen in the real world.

Re:Forget about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people want to go to Mars now - especially that Elon Musk guy - dont miss out on his work.

The guy is crazy enough to do it.

Re:Forget about it.

[thesandtiger]

Eh, I'd say it's good odds we will have humans back on the moon inside 30 years, even if it is a staggering waste of resources to send people there. My bet is one of the emerging superpowers does it to prove they can, much like we did, but I'd also bet they'd try to one-up us (well, actually much more than one-up) by throwing up tons of supplies first so that their teams can spend a much longer time there.

Much better than focusing on human rated flights (which won't be significantly less expensive until we can make humans more robust) would be what we're doing now - relatively (compared to human rated flights) inexpensive robots going there. As robotics tech and AI gets better we'll be able to do a lot more for less expense than we do now. Couple that with private industry and hobbiests getting much more involved - SpaceEx, the space mapping (then mining) consortium, cubesats ($10,000 USD per cubesat, putting it well in the reach of small groups!) and it's a pretty good bet that Earth/Moon/Mars is going to get really busy fairly quickly.

For longer range stuff - thinking Voyager here - for the same money we spent back then we can have MULTIPLE probes that are vastly more capable and, with the propulsion systems coming on line that provide lower but constant thrust, much faster than those previous efforts.

The initial justification for sending humans into space - other than just "because it's there" - was because we did not have remotely the same kind of automation capabilities that we do now, and what we can do now will be massively eclipsed by what we have in 10-20 years from now. I don't mind it if we don't send people back to the moon if it means we'll be focusing space resources on something that, at least in practical terms, was nothing but an EXTREMELY expensive parlor trick.

Re:Forget about it.

[azav]

You want to "seal up some if it's caves"??

It's = it is.

Learn this.

Re:Forget about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's is also used for the Possessive.

The moon has caves. The caves belong to the moon. It has caves. It's caves are good.

If your going to be an English troll, learn how to use a apostrophe.

Re:Forget about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

However, possession is never shown with an apostrophe:

'The Moon's caves' is correct

But:

'The Moon has caves. It's caves are good.' is incorrect

'It' is indefinite, it cannot posses anything. So the troll was actually correct, but for the wrong reason, while the troll-caller was correct, but wrong in this case. Oh, the wonder of the English Language...

Re:Forget about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

However, possession is never shown with an apostrophe:

So now the cycle of in-correctness continues. What I of course meant was that 'possession is never shown with an apostrophe when using "it"'. The irony.

Wellll, ya know,

[Runaway1956]

since we can see farther and clearer than ever before, it's kinda likely that if there's a habitable world out there, we're more likely than ever to find it.

Meanwhile, in other news, farmers announce that if it's not to dry, not to wet, and just the right temperatures, they could harvest bumper crops this year.

Please stand by while we compile a more complete list of inane almost predictions.

Re:Wellll, ya know,

[IrquiM]

Everyday, we're one step closer to finding it!

Re:Wellll, ya know,

[gopla]

It is not like farmers predictions. The progress we have been making is quite impressive, as there are 800 know exoplanets by now, and more are getting discovered.

Scientific discoveries come in batches. There is nothing for a long time, then suddenly the lull ends and a breakthrough is achieved. Lot of similar discoveries occur simultaneously. This prediction is from people who know their stuff. Even though they may not come true this year it is still good prediction.

Re:Wellll, ya know,

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyday, we're one step closer to finding it!

Very true, but it will take the US Congress years and years to disagree on how to pay for further research and exploration. By the time they get it all squared away norther alien race will have moved into the new planet and we'll be left out in the cold again. That interstellar version of Craig's List is no joke.

Re:Wellll, ya know,

[BSAtHome]

One more inane prediction then: Humanity will die out in the near scale at geological time.

--
If malice isn't enough to describe the outcome, revert to stupidity

Re:Wellll, ya know,

[cnettel]

For Kepler among others, time itself is of the essence. To get a sure signal, they need several occlusion events (in the plane towards us). If a planet has a long orbital period (year-like), it will take a few... years before a really strong signal of several repeated events is recorded.

This year...

[Thantik]

Is the year of linux on the desktop!
Has a high likelihood of finding earth-like planets!
We'll be able to 3D print an entire car! ...all predictions that are made every year. What other predictions are we going to repeat?

Re:This year...

[loufoque]

an entire *flying* car

Poor definitions

[gr8_phk]

Sure they'll find one. But being the correct distance from a given star doesn't really make it earth-like. Seriously, Mars qualifies as earth-like but it doesn't seem to have life even though the planet next to it does.

Re:Poor definitions

[B1oodAnge1]

I think many people don't understand how tilted the odds are against life.
It's likely that we would need to search billions of "earth like" planets to find one that had any life potential, let alone one where that potential has given rise to complex organisms.

Re:Poor definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

A planet can be Earth-like in many aspects. It can have an Earth-like orbit, an Earth-like mass, an Earth-like atmosphere, an Earth-like composition, an Earth-like biosphere, etc. Right now, we can only "easily" measure the two first, so those are the aspects of Earth-like we usually refer to. We can try to look for closer resemblances after we have some rough resemblances to start from. This is a field of science which is only 17 years old.

Re:Poor definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

The rarity of life (as we know it), based on which samples? Planet earth and its moon? Its way too early to be sure either way. If there is life, even intelligent life that managed to thrive for millions of years, nothing is stopping humanity from ruining this world. I'm with Ridley Scott on this one.

Re:Poor definitions

[rossdee]

Mars may have had life once, it seems to have had liquid water, but it wasn't big enough to keep a decent atmosphere, and was on the outer edge of the habitable zone. Venus could have supported life, but it had a runaway greenhouse effect.
Of the two rocks that orbit between those to edges of the habitable zone, one is way too small to have an atmosphere ever,, so we are down to one habitable planet in this system. (It clearly supports life, though whether there is any intelligence is not certain (a sample of the TV emissions suggests otherwise.)

Re:Poor definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason I always had it in my head that Mars was larger than Venus.. maybe 3/4ths the size of Earth... but it's actually 1/10th the size of earth. the second smallest in the solar system. http://www.universetoday.com/14888/mars-mass/

Re:Poor definitions

[grumling]

Isn't the reason Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere because it doesn't have a magnetic field to deflect solar wind?

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast31jan_1/

Re:Poor definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

Mars has 1/10th the mass of Earth. Saying Mars is Earth-like is like saying the Moon is Mars-like. The Moon is only 1/9th the mass of Mars.
http://www.digipac.ca/chemical/mtom/contents/chapter1/marsfacts.htm

Re:Poor definitions

[dkleinsc]

Actually, we have no idea how tilted the odds are against life. What we do know:
- On the conditions that existed on Earth in its early history, forming organic compounds was more-or-less inevitable.
- Life exists on Earth under really unusual conditions, like highly acidic underground lakes.
- There's some evidence (but no conclusive proof) of there once having been microbes on Mars.

It's quite possible life is rare. It's also quite possible life is common. We simply have no way of knowing one way or the other right now.

Re:Poor definitions

[Immerman]

In fairness having an Earth-like atmosphere is probably a pretty good indicator of life more-or-less as we know it. Free oxygen is highly reactive and unlikely to be present in large quantities in an atmosphere unless something is continuously producing it. And as far as I know photosynthesis is the only known process that would continue producing free oxygen for hundreds of millions of years, any more transient process would be vanishingly unlikely to be happening just as we happen to look.

Re:Poor definitions

[Immerman]

That is probably the larger contributor, but even without the solar wind it's atmosphere would likely be much thinner - it only has ~1/3 the surface gravity, and it falls off much faster with altitude. It's smaller size probably also contributed significantly to faster cooling and the associated shut-down of its magnetic dynamo subsequent exposure to the solar-wind. Evidence suggests that Mars did in fact once have a substantial magnetic field. Getting a massive chunk of (presumably) cold material embedded in it's mantle probably didn't help things either - Olympus Mons appears to be the result of the shockwave from a truly massive impact on the opposite side of the planet. Lets all thank Mars for taking the bullet for us, it would've made "the dinosaur killer" look like a pea-shooter in comparison.

Re:Poor definitions

[redmund]

If I remember rightly, it doesn't have a magnetic field because it was too small to keep its core active, and it has mostly solidified. At least that was the speculation at the time I heard this.

Re:Poor definitions

[Grishnakh]

Mars is not earth-like enough to support life. It can't even hang onto an atmosphere; IIRC its atmosphere is about 1/100 as dense as ours. It has no magnetosphere to protect it from solar winds. It's also a bit too small, and only has 1/3 of earth's gravity (which may be another reason it can't hold its atmosphere). Maybe Mars had life at one point, but it's a dead, barren world now.

Re:Poor definitions

[Grishnakh]

It's probably because the popular media talks way too much about Mars but then never actually discusses its physical characteristics much. Venus is almost the size of the Earth, and has 0.9g gravity. Mars is quite small, and only has 1/3g gravity. It's really not that much better than the Moon. If Venus weren't so inhospitable, we wouldn't even be wasting much time on Mars (the USSR sent some robotic spacecraft to Venus back in the 70s, and they only lasted maybe an hour before they were rendered inoperable by the extreme conditions on the surface there).

If we could figure out a way to start a terraforming process on Venus, it'd be a perfect place to establish human colonies. But they need to get rid of the thick atmosphere and stop the runaway greenhouse effect. Perhaps seeding the atmosphere with some kind of microbes would do it.

Re:Poor definitions

[taiwanjohn]

Plate tectonics also play a role. Atmosphere gets fixated and precipitated by various geo/biological processes. We wouldn't have much atmosphere either if the Earth's crust weren't getting constantly recycled. Still, the ultimate cause is the same; Mars's core is not active enough.

Re:Poor definitions

[dryeo]

When you consider dry land area, Mars is only slightly smaller then Earth.

Re:Poor definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

So you just keep hanging on to those outdated Space Age fantasies, eh? When you finally figure out that the lifeless rock you worship turns out to be a dead ball in space, you turn your attention to an even deadlier rock.

I hope 2013 brings you functioning neurons and the desire to rid yourself of decades-old space age memes that never made any sense to begin with.

Re:Poor definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

I take your Space age fantasies, and raise you a cyberpunk era one. Venus would be perfect for an upload civilization, due to having a tremendous amount of spare energy in it's atmosphere by wind and thermocouple exchange with it's crust, A thick atmosphere for aerobraking and radiation protection, and no biosphere or hydrosphere to muck things up.

Why bring 200lbs of meatbag and all it's food and oxygen, when 2.2 pounds of silicon hooked to a thermocouple will do the same thing.

Then again, mars has the upside of not having a stupidly high gravity well and a retrograde orbit, making it a pain to get to and away from.

Re:Poor definitions

[jonadab]

I think if I year the phrase "earth-like planet" one more time, I'm probably going to vomit. It's been overused so much that it has lost all meaning. It's like, hey, yeah, this planet is more massive than Jupiter, or it's closer to its primary than Mercury, or the star is eleven times hotter than the sun, or the planet has no atmosphere to speak of, or it rotates on its axis three three times an hour, or maybe several of those things, plus as far as we know it hasn't got a moon or any significant amount of liquid water or anything even remotely resembling a biosphere, but we think the planet might have a solid surface, possibly, so we're going to call it "earth-like" so the media may actually run a story on it, because that way we can hope to be semi-famous for almost three minutes.

I mean, seriously, if you want fame that badly, all you've gotta do is strap a couple of cheap skateboards to your feet and videotape yourself falling down and hitting your head while trying to skate off a ramp. Post that on YouTube, and you'll get way more attention than you can get by calling the planet you discovered "earth-like" when it is, in fact, nothing whatsoever like Earth.

If we restrict the phrase "Earth-like planet" to mean "planet where humans could actually live, without significant terraforming, if we could manage to survive the trip", the odds that anyone will discover an Earth-like planet in 2013 are approximately the same as the odds that Microsoft will release the complete Windows Eight source under the Artistic License (i.e., the one Perl uses). It is not technically impossible that it *could* happen, in some kind of wacky alternate universe somewhere, but back here in the real world you probably shouldn't hold your breath.

Odds

[JustOK]

What do the evens favor?

Re:Odds

[loufoque]

the heavens favor the believers.

Re:Odds

[Anonymous Coward]

What do the evens favor?

Evens? Steven.

The final front ear

[PsyMan]

When we find a few earth like planets (can we patent ours and sue theirs? I digress), even if we can't travel there, we could always send off a payload of stuff to them to get evolution started and encode it with our own DNA to ensure sentient, monkey type beings eventually evolve. Then of course leave a message on earth after we have gone for all who evolve to discover. I have an idea for a TV Show....... Oh wait... Bugger

Plenty of time

[C0R1D4N]

Human civilization is only a few thousand years old, and we have a few million to sort stuff out (barring any major disasters). We may never need warp drive to explore the universe, developing generation ships or becoming immortal cyborgs so the travel time is not an issue.

Re:Plenty of time

[Nyder]

Human civilization is only a few thousand years old, and we have a few million to sort stuff out (barring any major disasters). We may never need warp drive to explore the universe, developing generation ships or becoming immortal cyborgs so the travel time is not an issue.

Human civilization is over 100 thousand years old, recorded history is only like 4k or so old.

Re:Plenty of time

[C0R1D4N]

The human species and what most people refer to as civilization are very different things. This is semantics though.

Re:Plenty of time

[Tagged_84]

Modern humans have existed for around 50-200 thousand years depending on how specific you wish to get. Human civilization is around 15 thousand years. My personal favourite statistic is the estimated 7% of all humans that have ever existed are alive today!

Earth-like lights

[grumling]

From what I understand of the process, astronomers measure the drop in light as a planet passes between a star and us to determine its size and distance from said star. So what happens in the case of an Earth like planet with an advanced civilization, or perhaps if there is a lot of volcanic activity? Wouldn't that alter the expected result, and screw up their calculations?

Re:Earth-like lights

[Will_Malverson]

Learn some science.

Neither volcanoes nor streetlights put out .01% as much light as the sun.

Re:Earth-like lights

[FarField12]

Learn some science.

Neither volcanoes nor streetlights put out .01% as much light as the sun.

Which according to your comment would mean that the light difference is only 20dB down in power from the starlight.
Additionally, the planet's light spectra would be different than the light spectra of the star.
Combine these two facts and I believe his question still stands even if he doesn't "know science".
Would the sensor be able to detect the difference?
If background noise at the telescope is at -120dBm (or less with cooling), then is it possible to detect a difference at a specific frequency?

Re:Earth-like lights

[grumling]

I'm trying to, asshole. Why do you think I'm asking a question?

Re:Earth-like lights

[CyberBill]

It doesn't make much of a difference to Kepler.

Kepler measures the light level over time, and uses the amount of obstructed time to make most of it's calculations. It does also use the total light output difference to determine the size of the planet (really the ratio of the size of the planet to the size of the star) - but the error bars are pretty big anyway, way more than the total light output of dark side of the Earth.

The only way that Kepler would miss the planet all together was if the alien civilization made their planet put out as much light as their star.... Not very likely. An advanced civilization might want to make their planet as bright as daylight all the time, but that would be much less bright than the star.

Re:Earth-like lights

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the neatest thing to do (if an extrasolar planet can be resolved enough) is to get a spectrograph of that planet's atmosphere if and when it happens to pass in front of it's star.

If there's lots of free oxygen, you've got plant life or something very much akin to it. Not much in nature produces reactive oxygen like that other than photosynthesis. Otherwise that oxygen would be tied up in carbon dioxide or some other chemicals. Of course the plant life producing all that oxygen could all be microbial agae like stuff. But hey, at least something alive has formed over there.

Now if there's certain artificial chemicals like various flourocarbons that nature doesn't produce (at least by any means we know of), then hey! Odds are there's somebody clever over there! (Advanced life on par with ourselves.) Their level of tech (at least in chemistry) would be comparable to what we had in the 1930s. (Some of those chemicals didn't get produced until decades later, but think of what's actually needed to produce those chemicals.) Would be worth it to occasionally try beaming some focused radio and see if they also have the tech needed to respond. (They might not advance on all tech-trees the same way we did.) Even if they don't ever respond, at least we would know there's something rather interesting over there worth keeping an eye on.

I'm sure there's some other things (particularly if you can resolve to see continents and measure minute changes in albedo not caused by the parent star), but at least there is something we are closer to doing in regards to observing "earth-like" planets with our current astronomy technology.

Re:Earth-like lights

[meetpi]

There are actually a few ways that planets are detected. The dimming of the star as a planet passes in front of it is one method. This only works if the planet passes exactly between us and the star while we're looking. This can only happen is the planetary system is aligned the right way (more or less side-on) to us. It also tends to favour detecting larger planets with fast orbits (an alien looking at our solar system would have to wait one year to see the Earth pass the sun twice, and decades for some of the outer planets).

Another method is to detect the 'wobble' of the star as its planets orbit it. Even though stars are very big and their planets very small, the gravity of planets orbiting a star does pull the parent star around a little, and we can detect that. This tends to favour bigger planets that are orbiting close to the host star as well.

Another is to look for microlensing effects (as an object with a large mass, like a planet, passes in front of a star it can act like a lens, bending the light and causing a brightening effect on background stars). Again, this is biased towards larger planets.

To answer your question, though, in principle, if the planet that's passing in front of the star is very bright it would throw off calculations. However, for it to have enough an an effect to be noticeable it'd have to be very bright, because stars are VERY bright. A planet covered in street lights would still be essentially black when compared to the light emanating from its host star, and eve if it were covered with lava, the lava glow wouldn't make much of a difference, either.

In fact, if you think about it, a really bright planet would be even more detectable. The problem with seeing planets orbiting their stars is that their stars are so bright, the planets get lost in the glare of their star. If a planet was bright enough to throw off the calculations, it might be bright enough to be seen!

The odds are pretty good

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Can I see your math?

Between this & SETI? Intelligent life too

[Anonymous Coward]

I always felt the years I put into SETI on "Team Microsoft" will one day help as a form of "stellar cartography" & helping to identify where we *MAY* find life much like ourselves (hopefully to learn to solve OUR problems from those that may have already), why/how?

Well - since it may help 'zero-in', via signal tracking potential, on life not only like our own (which earth-like planets, odds are, should bear, then evolution does the rest ala 'form fitting function' & what-not), but that has great intellect & accomplishments!

Between the 2, & things "yet to come" (that I probably will not live to see, nearly 1/2 a century old here now)? I think it has great potential... not only for technological, if not spiritual, growth of the human race, but also better chances overall for survival!

(Hopefully we don't meet up with those that are morally/ethnically like Dr. Who's "DALEKS" though!)

APK

P.S.=> Between the 2, SETI & things like this article shows? I also *think* we're seeing the "dim beginnings" of 'mapping out' (hence my 'stellar cartography' references above) where it is we will FIRST want to go to, out there...

... apk

Re:Between this & SETI? Intelligent life too

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a retard, your posts are immature and pointless. nobody reads your shit.

Sure we do

[Immerman]

Getting to other stars isn't actually terribly difficult, as far as we can currently tell. Only getting there quickly presents a problem. Build a large, self-sufficient "space station"/world-ship, accelerate it to say 0.1% of light speed (only about 20x faster than Voyager 1), and then wait for a few thousand years until it reaches it's destination. Sure, accelerating it with current technology gets really expensive really quickly, and it'll be the distant descendents of the original crew who reach the destination, but the only real difficulty is creating a long-term viable self-contained ecosystem. And considering that the one serious attempt we've made, Biosphere 2, was actually remarkably successful for a first attempt, we could probably have that problem licked within a few decades if we really wanted to. All we'd need is some sufficiently motivating reason to do so, which is where the real problem lies.

Quite similar to getting to the moon actually - basic rocketry technology has been around for almost a thousand years, but it wasn't until we got into a technological pissing contest (aka The Cold War) with Russia that we actually got off the planet and eventually to the Moon. We've never returned because, well, why would we? There's nothing there worth the expense of the trip, and until we reach a point where its tactical or strategic value is worth the expense it's only the dreamers and visionaries that appreciate its value, and sadly they don't control near enough wealth to make it happen.

Re:Sure we do

[TapeCutter]

Glad you mentioned life support, most people gloss over that part and talk about propulsion. Long term life support is by far the most difficult technical problem for an interstellar traveler. A revolution in that technology would not only make interstellar travel "possible", it would also have profound implications here on Earth.

I was 10yo when they landed on the Moon and like all school boys in the 60's I dreamed of being an astronaut. At that time telescopes could not deal with the random distortions of the atmosphere, the largest mirrors were roughly an order of magnitude smaller in diameter, detecting a planet around another star was "impossible", black holes were "mathematical curiosities", Saturn was the only planet with rings, the gas giants had less than half the number of moons, etc, etc.

My dream of being an astronaut met with the real world but I still consider myself lucky to have witnessed a revolution in astronomy that is second only to the invention of the telescope and is to this day still building momentum. Personally I think that revolution is largely due to the millions of school kids around the planet who didn't even realize politics was involved and were simply awe struck by the Apollo project. A lot of those kids grew up and explored the universe in a different, but equally inspiring way. For example anyone who is not immediately awe struck by the Hubble deep field, invariably does not understand what they are looking at. The Moon landing was "special" not because people were in awe of it, it was because you knew (or at least believed) that the rest of the planet was simultaneously experiencing the same thing.

Re:Sure we do

[RespekMyAthorati]

it'll be the distant descendants of the original crew who reach the destination

Not if the crew consists of frozen embryos. Millions of them would fit in a litre bottle, and could travel for centuries with no air, water or food.

We would need very advanced technology to gestate, birth and raise them, but there is no theoretical reason that couldn't be achieved within a few centuries from now.

Re:Sure we do

[Immerman]

Actually we don't have much real data on the long-term viability of human cryogenics. Sure we can freeze embryos for years, even decades, but while biological activity stops chemical activity only slows down - it's quite possible that over the course of centuries the embryos would all have degraded beyond viability. And gestating them at the other end of the journey is far beyond any current technology - the uterus and umbilical cord are some of the most sophisticated organs in the body, and we've yet to even manage better than a crude emergency replacement for the heart, which is one of the simplest. And even if we somehow managed that, then raising the children so that they're human in anything beyond biology would probably require something at least very close to true AI.

So yeah, while there's no theoretical reason to believe it won't eventually be possible, there's also no reason to believe that it ever will be. The gestation technology alone would likely take phenomenal resources to develop and have little other practical value - even if we really wanted to free women from childbearing/render them superfluous to the species, some sort of ape-based bioreactor/axlotl tank would likely be *far* easier to create than a mechanical womb, might not even take anything more than an ordinary female gorilla, but at any rate would be no easier to transport than a living person. As for the AI - well the nursemaids could likely be left turned off until their charges gestated, but you'll also need something to maintain the ship in transit, and can only hope that it's still interested in obeying its original directives after a few centuries/millenia on its own.

Re:Sure we do

[azav]

You've got to be kidding me.

You want to " wait for a few thousand years until it reaches it's destination"?

So, you want to wait until "it is destination", right?

It's = it is.

Learn this.

Re:Sure we do

[Immerman]

Congratulations, you managed to waste space and time calling out minor typo. Are you proud of yourself?

Believe it or not many of us know the difference perfectly well, in fact I used "its" correctly in the same post, but it's just not worth wasting the attention to continuously run high-fidelity grammar check on what I'm typing on a random message board. Typically I'm composing several words ahead of what my fingers are typing and yes, occasionally a homonym slips through. Deal with it. Life's too short to spend it chasing absolute perfection in irrelevant fields, and it sure as *hell* is too short to waste it berating other people over minor imperfections. Go for a hike, drink a beer, talk with friends, or just make actual relevant comments on topics that interest you. There's so many ways you could be spending your life to actually enrich yourself, don't throw it away trying to belittle random strangers.

Year of the Earth-Like Planet in the year 2013:

[Anonymous Coward]

And on that planet will be found the dominant life form using Linux as a desktop....

Re:Year of the Earth-Like Planet in the year 2013:

[Skapare]

But the real question is what their IPv6 address range is. We need to know now since packets will take so long.

Outdated technique

[Immerman]

Not really - the atmosphere is an incredibly thin skin around a rocky planet and it's composition can only be detected by the use of *extremely* sensitive instruments. Imagine passing a pea in front of a street light several miles away - it'll be *far* easier to detect the shadow of the pea than the condition of its skin.

And actually that's a rather obsolete method for detecting planets - you can only detect those whose orbital plane happens to intersect the Earth - a tiny percentage since the alignment is more or less random. More modern techniques detect planets via the wobble they introduce in the motion of their parent star - for example our sun actually orbits a point lying about 1/2 to 2 solar radii away from its center - the barycenter (center of mass) of our solar system, which constantly changes as the massive outer planets move through their orbits. Our own planet introduces a much smaller (since we're far closer and less massive) but higher frequency (since our year is much, much shorter) wobble as well. By detecting similar wobbles in other stars we can make a good estimate about the masses and distances of its planets, and the planet doesn't have to pass directly between its star and us to be detected, allowing us to detect far more planets.

Analyzing atmospheric composition is more challenging, and I believe current techniques are limited to planets that pass directly between us and their star - essentially a planet with no atmosphere will dim the light slightly as it blocks a tiny percentage of it, an atmosphere will also introduce a *very* tiny spectral shift since some of the starlight that reaches us will have passed through the planet's atmosphere and been partially absorbed based on it's chemical composition. Theoretically a similar technique could be used for out-of-plane planets by analyzing reflected light, but our current instruments aren't nearly sensitive enough to distinguish between the miniscule amount of light reflected from a planet and the raging inferno of its star. Even if we could, it would likely be extremely difficult to distinguish between the spectrum shift introduced by the atmosphere and the shift introduced from surface reflection.

Not really outdated, only complemented

[cnettel]

Several techniques have been used, but e.g. Kepler is relying on observing repeated dimming. Considering the massive-throughput approach of Kepler, you can hardly say that it represents an outdated method.

A change of world views

[Hazelfield]

What I think is so cool about these discoveries is, in the words of astronomer Steve Vogt, "the emerging view that virtually every star has planets". Think about this for a while. Look at all the stars in the sky, and imagine every single one of them having a planetary system. Suddenly it doesn't seem to much of a stretch thinking some of them might be habitable, or even harbour some kind of life.

In my eyes this fact, if it gets confirmed by subsequent studies, is the biggest discovery about the universe since the theory of relativity. When I grew up I was taught there were 9 planets in orbit around the sun, and the existence of (or at least abundance of) exoplanets where largely speculative, with the first observations just being confirmed during the 90's. When my kids grow up they'll be taught there are thousands of exoplanets in our very vicinity and millions in the galaxy. And there are free-floating bodies as well, rouge planets that are not gravitationally bound to a star! How cool isn't that? To top it all, we will soon have instruments sensitive enough to measure the very spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere and look for biosignatures. If it finds free oxygen and methane, that's a very strong indication of life as we know it. (Since oxygen is highly reactive, it tends to show up in compounds such as carbon or silicon dioxide. Biologic activity is one possible supply of free oxygen.) The search for extra-terrestrial life, long belonging to the realm of science fiction, has turned to a serious and highly active field of research in just a few years.

Re:A change of world views

[Anonymous Coward]

I think if a habitable planet is found with strong indications of life and is within 10 or so light years this will capture the public imagination. It should give impetus for projects to develop an interstellar probe in the next century or so. So would a break through in fusion power which might propel the probe.

Re:A change of world views

[strikethree]

What I think is so cool about these discoveries is, in the words of astronomer Steve Vogt, "the emerging view that virtually every star has planets". Think about this for a while. Look at all the stars in the sky, and imagine every single one of them having a planetary system. Suddenly it doesn't seem to much of a stretch thinking some of them might be habitable, or even harbour some kind of life.

Odd. Even as a kid, I always thought there were LOTS of other planets out there. If this insignificant star has 9 planets (8 now, classifications change), then surely other star systems must have at _least_ one other planet. I would be pretty surprised to find a star with a thousand planets, but anywhere from one to twenty (roughly) planets should be incredibly common.

reply

[newnewshop]

If really can come true, it will have exciting things. Find the use of the planet, it will reduce the pressure of the earth.

FTFY & you're wrong (proof by the 100's)

[Anonymous Coward]

"You are a retard, your posts are immature and pointless. nobody reads your shit." - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 30, @10:21PM (#42430209)

You're a troll, my posts = on topic (unlike you), & you're wrong as well as using illogical failing ad hominem attacks on myself... lol!

(Wrong badly on YOUR part, no less & as usual for you, hence your ac trolling (Since you KNOW I've dusted you so many times on things technical in computing via debates here, lol, that you DON'T DARE post using your "registered 'luser'" account, vs. myself - that much, is obvious also, along with your FAIL here)):

---

Roughly 235++ of them & I post as AC (hard to get even +1, as /. hides our posts & we "AC"'s start @ ZERO/0 points, unlike registered "lusers", lol!):

+5 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (8):

HOSTS & BGP:2010 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1901826&cid=34490450
FIREFOX IN DANGER: 2011 -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2559120&cid=38268580
TESLA:2010 -> http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1872982&cid=34264190
TESLA:2010 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1806946&cid=33777976
NVIDIA 2d:2006 -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175774&cid=14610147
Ubuntu Linux sends back local disk query strings to CANONICAL: 2012 -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3304601&cid=42234351
Question to Mr. Mark Shuttleworth @ UBUNTU/CANONICAL: 2012 -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3304725&cid=42243467
COMPUTER ASSOCIATES BUSTED FOR ACCOUNTING FRAUD:2010 -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1884922&cid=34350102

----

+4 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (5):

APK SECURITY GUIDE:2005 -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167071&cid=13931198
INFO. SYSTEMS WORK:2005 -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161862&cid=13531817
WINDOWS @ NASDAQ 7++ YRS. NOW:2009 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28571315
CARMACK'S ARMADILLO AEROSPACE:2005 -> http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158310&cid=13263898
What I admire about Theo DeRaadt of BSD fame: 2012 -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3007641&cid=40785151

----

+3 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (7):

APK MICROSOFT INTERVIEW:2005 -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155172&cid=13007974
Linux security failures 2011-2012: 2012 -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3319303&cid=42306663
APK MS SYMBOLIC DIRECTORY LINKS:2005 -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166850&cid=13914137

ok, but exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

what odds are you offering and what kind of money?