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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
I don't know about "never" but you do bring up a point: space is so vast that finding life of any sort of life is going to be a very long process.
I've been let down by sci-fi. In a Star Trek:Enterprise, it was mentioned (Season 4, IIRC) that Vulcan was 26 light years away. In reality, how many planets that may under the most flexible standards support life within that distance?
As far as I know it's zero.
In sci-fi at "Warp" whatever, the universe is teaming with life.
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.
I'm afraid that humanity is going to be alone for a very very long time - maybe we will never see life on another planet.
I really hope I'm wrong because I think it would be the coolest thing in the World to find life on another planet and my hopes are on Mars - bacteria or something.
Their sun is 7 billion years old which puts the at a more developed state than our 4.8 billion year old system
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
All of that assumes that life developed there like it did here, and started at the same time. For all we know their intelligent species could have been going for 10 million years before hominids showed up here. Those planets might as well be a billion years older. Maybe the planets have far more natural resources than Earth, and they never entered large wars like we did here. There's no reason to assume that we are looking at a planet that has a civilization on it equivalent to our civilization 1200 years ago, just because it's in the habitable zone of its star.
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How long is it, if ever, before we are going to have a telescope that can definitively tell us that a planet has an atmosphere containing oxygen and large amounts of water?
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Interesting question. I'll try: we're just barely able to detect the signal from Voyager 1, which is currently about 18.4 billion km, or 0.0019 light-year away. I couldn't find the exact emission power from the antenna, but the Wikipedia page mentions that the electric generator has around 250W of power. Let's say 200W of that go in the antenna. Translating this to 1200 ly, using the 1/r^2 rule, gives about 76 TW.
That's a lot, about 5 times the total average energy consumption of the World, but not out of the realm of possibilities. So if there was an advanced civilization with a lot of energy and a very big, very directive antenna that desperately wanted to talk to us, we might just be able to pick it up.
Life based on liquid water is the only one that we know of. Maybe other forms of life are possible, but we don't know what they are, so we can't search for them.
Just take the flux limit of the telescope you are using. Multiply by 4*pi*distance^2 (the area of emitting sphere), and the duration of observation, and you have the power you need to put in at the emitter (assuming an uncollimated emitter, without any atmospheric loss -- which is acceptable in radio).
Lets assume 15 mJy for the Allen Telescope Array used by SETI, and 1 hour of observation. That gives you 70 MW to emit. The Arecibo Message sent in 1974 was 1 MW, others are at the 150 kW level.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
If the civilization is older than ours it may have detected our planet long ago and have a narrow beam width signal directed at us, a laser for example. This might affect the calculation about input power somewhat. Perhaps we should be thinking more about what power input we would need in a laser directed at them to be detected in 1200 years time using a laser? After all at 1200 light years distance they are never going to make it here using public transport to sell us fizzy drinks.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I've been let down by sci-fi. In a Star Trek:Enterprise...
Well, there's your problem right there.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Human beings are never going to get outside the solar system, the distance is just too great to get them to even the nearest star as bags of cells in water. But there is a reasonable chance that we can both transmit and receive information from other civilizations - all be it completely asynchronously. If we get really good at robots we might be able to seed a few local stars with self repairing robots with a range of science fiction purposes, but we will probably never know if they make it. Our current lifestyle is more likely to lead to human extinction before such grand objectives are attainable however, we are doing a lousy job of ensuring our own long term viability on the earth currently and it doesn't look likely to change soon. Heck its good fun though!
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Saves on IT costs.
And even looking at them now would put them at the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Byzantine (when Christianity became more of a cult) to give you a reference point. We probably won't be receiving any radio transmissions (which would be the most likely evidence of an intelligent species) from them for another ~1000 years and that's if there is even an intelligent species there that developed as quickly as we humans did and even if they are sending out radio transmissions, would it be coming from the right direction, have enough power and linearity to be differentiated from background noise.
You're forgetting something. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old, but the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. That means there should be planets out there that are much older than Earth. So, you could have a planet that evolved at the same pace as Earth, but started millions (or hundreds of millions) of years earlier.
Technically, planets don't evolve, they form. But regardless, whether or not there is life on a planet does not depend on how old it is. Mars and Earth are both the same age and both in the goldilocks zone and yet one has life and one does not.
It is far simpler ot come up with all the obstacles to life evolving on a planet than the likelihood of all the right things happening at the right moment for life to actually evolve on a planet. Obviously, we are here, so it can happen, but it is not as simple as a rock in space with some water on it.
If i were an alien i wouldnt stop here if it was the last out post on life in the universe, except for to steal the precious species that are not like us on this planet. Futhermore if we as so much get out of our solor system i be they would send a big rock toward us or blow up our sun
What makes you so certain that intelligent, technologically capable alien races don't go through the same problems that we do? At a minimum, it is likely that interstellar travel requires mastery of nuclear energy and metallurgy across the entire periodic table, with all of the environmental risks that implies. Additionally, just to get to the point where they could develop nuclear power would likely require a period of industrialization using cruder organic sources of energy. It's very hard to imagine accomplishing this without any environmental degradation. Given the number of possible ecological catastrophies that could happen along the way, I think we're actually doing reasonably well so far.
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"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." --Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923
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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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Or, they could use a star itself and modulate the light coming from it, like stellar semaphore.
One method that has been proposed http://www.iterate.com.au/SETI/SETI.htm uses a swarm of self-replicating robots. Given raw materials to work with it could in time create a large enough structure or cloud in front of the star so as to be able to send a signal to a large percentage of the heavens. This would be detectable over much greater distances than 1200 ly.
If you can come up with some other chemistry that works, go on and tell us. We're all ears. Tell us how liquid methane can form complex compounds. Believe me, you'll have a Nobel prize in record time.
Giselle 581 is about 20 light years away.