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Kepler-186f: Most 'Earth-Like' Alien World Discovered
astroengine (1577233) writes "About 500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus lives a star, which, though smaller and redder than the sun, has a planet that may look awfully familiar. With a diameter just 10 percent bigger than Earth's, the newly found world is the first of its size found basking in the benign temperature region around a parent star where water, if it exists, could pool in liquid form (abstract). Scientists on the hunt for Earth's twin are focused on worlds that could support liquid surface water, which may be necessary to brew the chemistry of life. "Kepler-186f is significant because it is the first exoplanet that is the same temperature and the same size (well, ALMOST!) as the Earth," David Charbonneau, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Previously, the exoplanet most like Earth was Kepler-62f, but Kepler-186f is significantly smaller. Now we can point to a star and say, 'There lies an Earth-like planet.'""
There was the second season Babylon 5 episode, "The Long Dark" in which a Sleeper ship carrying some early human colonists drifts into B5 space. Frankly, I think if your species develops FTL capabilities, the first order of business should really be to "warp" to all those generational/sleeper ships and pick 'em up.
An engineering problem in the sense that there is not enough matter in the universe to accelerate a spacecraft at 1 g for 2 years using any currently plausible propulsion method.
have known at the minimum that Earth has liquid water, oxygen, and chlorophyll
Chlorophyll doesn't need to be detected - the presence of elemental oxygen alone is evidence of life, as it is too reactive to remain elemental unless some reaction is replenishing it, and as far as we know the only such reactions are biological in nature.