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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.
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.
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.
"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." --Dr. Lee DeForest, "Father of Radio & Grandfather of Television."
"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." --Admiral William Leahy, US Atomic Bomb Project
"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." --Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923
http://rense.com/general81/dw.htm
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
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.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
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.