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Kepler-62 Has 2 Good Candidate Planets In the Search for Life
astroengine writes "About 1,200 light-years from Earth, five planets are circling around sun-like star Kepler-62, two of which are fortuitously positioned for water, if any exists, to remain liquid on their surfaces — a condition believed to be necessary for life. The discovery, made by scientists using NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, is the strongest evidence yet for more than one Earth-sized planet existing in a star's so-called 'habitable' zone. 'We're particularly delighted to find that there are two planets in the habitable zone,' lead Kepler scientist William Borucki, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. 'It sort of doubles our chances of finding that Earth we'd all like to find. When you think about Earth and Mars, if Mars had been a bit larger, if Jupiter hadn't been so close, we'd again have two planets in the habitable zone and maybe we'd have a place to go,' he said." There's also a third planet believed to be a good candidate for hosting water.
There are other methods, which can find planets at any orbital inclination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_extrasolar_planets
As I said above, the current transmissions we may be receiving puts them somewhere in the beginning of the middle ages. We have only been transmitting stuff out that may be strong enough to be detected for ~100 years.
The Pioneer's have a transmitter of about 8W and are 0.001 lightyears away and one of them is dead, the other is barely discernible. If we take a very generous estimate and say maybe 5kW can be detected at 1ly - you will need several TW to be detectable that far. Not necessarily impossible but very unlikely.
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IN real life even if we could travel at Warp speeds, there's hardly any planets - that we know of today - that can support life within a lifetime of Warp travel. Eight times - TEN times the speed of light is not good enough, I'm afraid.
We need THOUSANDs of times the speed of light to have a Star Trek or Star Wars type of intergalactic society.
Warp factors in Star Trek are not linear. The actual scales very a bit, and they're not always consistent between episodes and given distances + ETA, but if you take a look at the TNG section, warp 1 is the speed of light, but warp 2 is the 10x the speed of light, warp 3 is roughly 39x the speed of light, and by the time you get to warp 9 we're talking 1,516x the speed of light. So, with Star Trek, the scientific advisors to the writers know that.
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