Analysis of Spacecraft Data Reveals Most Earth-like Planet To Date

sciencehabit writes: Scientists analyzing data from NASA's Kepler satellite have boosted the tally of known or suspected planets beyond our solar system to more than 4000, they reported at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Most are inhospitable — too big, too hot, or too cold for any conceivable life form. But another team seeking to verify Kepler candidates announced they had identified eight new potentially habitable planets, including some close to Earth in size and situation. Unpoetically named 5737.01, one candidate has an orbital period of 331 days and is 30% larger than Earth, Mullally says. That’s good news, because scientists here reported yesterday that planets more than 1.6 times the mass of Earth are unlikely to be dense rocky worlds like ours — assumed to be the only plausible habitats for life.

Comments

Rather data a femail

[Anonymous Coward]

if I could spell.

Parameter mismatch

[pjt33]

5737.01 ... is 30% larger than Earth, Mullally says. That’s good news, because scientists here reported yesterday that planets more than 1.6 times the mass of Earth are unlikely to be dense rocky worlds like ours

I'm not seeing the good news. If it has a similar density to Earth, it will have a mass about 1.3^3 ~= 2.2 times the mass of Earth.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[AikonMGB]

Why is that a problem, are you concerned about surface gravity? Assuming a similar density to Earth, it would only be ~1.3 Earth gravities, since F_g falls off with r^2.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[Anonymous Coward]

if it is not an iron dense world, it will not be nearly as massive.

although, 2 Gs isn't that bad, though you would a nuclear rocket to get off of it though and planes would be a bitch.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[AikonMGB]

Oops, misread your comment, sorry. Some emphasis on the latter part of the quote would have helped =P

Re:Parameter mismatch

[pjt33]

I ended the quote too early: I should have included the bit

assumed to be the only plausible habitats for life

Re:Parameter mismatch

[Anonymous Coward]

Planes rely heavily on atmospheric density (no pun intended), so if a world with higher gravity has a correspondingly denser atmosphere, planes would still be possible, though lighter-than-air vehicles (like blimps) would be more practical. Mars for example has lower gravity than earth, but also a MUCH less dense atmosphere, and planes there would need gigantic wing-to-mass ratios to provide enough lift to fly.

Dead-on about the rockets though, and if it's not an iron dense world, there's a good chance it's also less stocked with nuclear fuels to make those rockets.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[beelsebob]

I have a strong suspicion that "size" is being used as a euphemism for mass. I didn't think that Kepler could measure the radius of these planets, only their mass.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[Anonymous Coward]

The Kepler spacecraft finds exoplanets by the transit method, looking for drops in light intensity of stars when the planet passes in front of the star. This allows them to measure the radius of the planet relative to the star. So in this case, they usually have the radius, but not the mass, at least without making some assumptions. While sometimes they might have already made those assumptions to make comparisons like this in the news, looking here suggests that it has a radius that is 30-40% larger than Earth, while a mass on the order 2.6 times Earth's.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[jc42]

On the other hand, there are two planets in our solar system with less mass than Earth, but denser atmospheres: Venus and Titan. Venus is only slightly smaller and less massive than our planet, but has a much denser atmosphere. Titan is a lot smaller as well as less dense, but has an atmosphere roughly 50% denser than ours -- and full of organic molecules.

Our kind of life couldn't exist on either one of them, of course, mostly for temperature reasons. But we don't have many samples of the conditions in which life can exist and evolve, so it's sorta presumptuous to claim that we "know" anything about what's possible.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[neoritter]

It's not an iron dense world, the magnetic field would be weak wouldn't it? Meaning that things are being inundated with too much solar radiation; preventing life. Or most importantly, human ability to colonize.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[neoritter]

Just scooting this in here, Titan is a moon.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[jc42]

..., Titan is a moon.

Yeah, yeah; but any classification system that puts Mercury and Jupiter into a single class, while putting Earth and Titan into different classes, is just too silly to take seriously. Lots of astronomers take this sort of attitude, and either avoid using such terms at all, or have a bit of fun trolling the people who take them seriously. Some have also pointed out that it makes a lot more sense, scientifically, to consider the Earth's orbit to contain two planets that exchange positions on a monthly cycle. This might also be considered a sort of trolling, though it does have its serious side, as these two bodies do significantly influence each other through mechanisms like their mutual tides.

In any case, none of these heavenly bodies care at all what we call them, and nothing we say can influence their properties or behavior.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[neoritter]

In any case, none of these heavenly bodies care at all what we call them, and nothing we say can influence their properties or behavior.

Except, it being a moon informs about the potential properties and behavior of the object. A moon has properties that decreases the likelihood of life forming on it.

Re:Parameter mismatch

[jc42]

Except, it being a moon informs about the potential properties and behavior of the object. A moon has properties that decreases the likelihood of life forming on it.

That's also hard to take seriously. Extrapolating a sample of one to a universe with billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, is just silly. Not that I'm saying you shouldn't do it, of course. I'd be tempted to answer by arguing that an Earth-size "moon" around a gas giant may be more likely to have life, but of course that would be extrapolating from a sample of zero. (Unless we discover life on one of Jupiter's moons, or on Titan. ;-)

Without a lot more evidence than we have, conjectures about the possibility of life in/on various astronomical objects are just conjectures. This is fun, and a lot of scientific work is based on such conjecture, but there's not a chance that we can accurately calculate the probabilities with what we know now.

Remember folks

[rossdee]

It used to be said that Venus was an 'Earth-like' planet

Re:Remember folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, but my wife came from there....

Re:Remember folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Is she dense and rocky?

Re:Remember folks

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just hot.... I'm from Mars though so I'm pretty dense and rocky...

Re:Remember folks

[T.E.D.]

Mine insists the book has it wrong, and I'm from Mercury. What does that mean?

Re:Remember folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Hot on one side and not at all hot on the other

Common sense space exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

I think rather then wasting millions on near to us planets with little or no hope of sustaining human life. We should invest in technology that would actually give up a chance to explore a planet with at least some hope of a similar life to Earths. Otherwise, nobody really wants to live in a environment hostile to human existence or live in protected housing in weightlessness and have to go outside in a spacesuit to survive.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

Have to crawl before you can run.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[bobbied]

Problem is that with current knowledge and technology we would NEVER be able to get out of our solar system alive, much less actually make it to the nearest star. We *might* be able to send probes, but we are talking about missions that will have to last multiple decades on internal power supplies and whatever fuel they start with. There is no way that humans would survive the trip on any craft we could hope to construct in our lifetimes.

The exploration of "space" we do will be limited to our solar system by physics and our biology and without some kind of break though in getting things moving faster than light, it is within this solar system we and our offspring will all die.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[nealric]

Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work. Our current understanding of physics provides no plausible mechanism for a living human to travel to these planets. Unless there is a fatal flaw in relativity, it is possible (if not probable) that practical interstellar travel is essentially impossible.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[netsavior]

Blame religion.

It is perfectly possible to build a generation ship to reach for the stars and colonize planets thousands of years of travel away.

Just not in the way that we think of generation ships...

Cryo-sleep is how science fiction solves this problem, but the only known state of human that can survive cryogenic freezing is the human embryo. a crew of around 6 females, and 40,000 frozen embryos, a new generation of females is implanted via ivf and then born through live birth every 25-30 years.

Long story short, spreading humanity out across the stars with our current technology would require massive shifts in how humanity sees morality.

Building a colony on mars, populated with people who have free will, and not risking the wrath of the religious right, sure... that's easier.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[bobbied]

Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work. Our current understanding of physics provides no plausible mechanism for a living human to travel to these planets. Unless there is a fatal flaw in relativity, it is possible (if not probable) that practical interstellar travel is essentially impossible.

Totally agree, but you are attacking the SyFi culture where it's just expected that Captain Kirk can just order up "warp 8". Einstein pretty much condemned us and our offspring to die with the confines of the Solar System and the chances he was wrong do seem pretty remote so far.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[bobbied]

Not even close to being able to work. Radiation is sure to kill all living things on any space ship short of the size of a small planet, likely before you could get such a massive object out of the solar system.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[nealric]

Even a generation ship like you describe poses technical problems that may very well be insurmountable.

One issue is small particles in space (micrometeorites). While the space station may have managed to avoid catastrophic impacts over a decade, the probability of a major impact on a ship traveling for centuries at even a very small fraction of the speed of light hitting *something* in space becomes extremely high. At those speeds, a golf ball size object would slice through any known material like a hot knife through butter and could easily breach every single pressurized chamber on the ship. You would need some sort of powered force field- a technology that does not exist and has no known theoretical basis for its existence.

Another issue is food and biology. Previous attempts and creating a small closed ecosystem (biosphere) were miserable failures. It may very well be that there is a minimum size for such an ecosystem to be sustainable- a size that may not be feasible for a spacecraft.

A third issue is propulsion and power. The generation ship proposes relatively slow travel as a solution to the tyranny of the rocket equation. But even the generation ship must provide power for centuries. Even using nuclear fuel, the amount of fuel required to power the spacecraft essentially indefinitely would become extreme. Plus, getting the spacecraft up to even a very low cruising speed (by interstellar standards) of .01c would require a huge amount of any known type of fuel, and an equal amount of fuel to slow to a speed that it could orbit the new planet. What happens if it turns out the destination planet is not actually habitable? There would be no fuel left to choose an alternate destination. At that point, the generation ship offers no advantage over a colony on the moon.

A final concern is one of need. Interstellar travel proponents often use the argument that the Earth may one day become too small to support the human population and/or uninhabitable, requiring a new planet. But until the sun starts to begin its decay in billions of years, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where interstellar travel is more feasible than simply fixing earth. Human population size will likely decline as birth control becomes ubiquitous (the developed world already has a birthrate below replacement). Any civilization with the technology to create a closed ecosystem with an indefinite lifespan for a generation ship could just as easily create such an ecosystem on earth or bio engineer a solution to what ever disaster has befallen earth.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

> Einstein pretty much condemned us and our offspring to die with the confines of the Solar System and the chances he was wrong do seem
> pretty remote so far.

I don't agree. If anything, general relativity predicts that much can be in principle done with the space-time fabric to circumvent the speed of light barrier.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[nealric]

Adding to my comment above: a generation ship consisting of six individuals supervising embryos in perpetuity ignores the entropy associated with human psychology. A certain percentage of the population are psychopaths. What happens when one of the six decides a few generations down the line decides to murder the other 5? Perhaps that can be avoided with careful genetic engineering, but even that ignores the foibles of human psychology. Is it really realistic to expect someone to live with 5 other humans for an entire lifetime cooped up in a tin can with no hope for an escape from the monotony of maintaining the ship? All it takes is for one generation to fail to fulfill their duties and the ship is toast. You could have the ship all robotized and only embryos, but it's unclear whether it's possible to rear a healthy adult from a child who has never had adult human contact.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[itzly]

Also, when sending probes beyond our solar system, it will get harder and harder to keep in contact with them, especially if you want to have a reasonable bandwidth to send a bunch of pictures.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[itzly]

Blame religion. It is perfectly possible to build a generation ship

The people of the generation ship will probably start a new religion before they get there. Or more likely, they'll start several religions and then fight each other over them.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

If you mean the "warp drive" that shows up in the news every so often in the last couple years, GR is pretty damning there too, predicting things like it is not steerable, requires help from the outside (so more like a railroad), and produces extremely large amounts of radiation within the bubble when you approach or exceed the speed of light. Not to mention it assumes the existence of a material property not know to exist.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

A few 10s of meters of water would block the vast majority of cosmic rays. While there are higher energy ones that would penetrate that, they also penetrate Earth's atmosphere (or create a shower, which actually allows more of it to interact with people on Earth than a single high energy particle would). You could block a lot of that with ~100 m of rock.

Neither of those are anywhere near impossible to construct a spacecraft with, and the need for a generational ship to be self sufficent would give you a much larger lower bound on size. It is definitely impractical financially in the foreseeable future. But if driving by some cultural reason to do so, a large nation/civilization could work to building such things on a human timescale. The issue isn't that it is physically impossible, but that there might never be a large enough group of people interested in doing so. As technology progresses, the needed size of such a group will shrink, but so might the desire to leave the solar system.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

At those speeds, a golf ball size object would slice through any known material like a hot knife through butter and could easily breach every single pressurized chamber on the ship.

A golf ball sized rock at 1% of c has a kinetic energy equivalent to about 10 tons of TNT (the standard conversion kind of overestimates the explosive power of TNT too...). That is not impossible to stop by physical material, especially considering a generational ship would be pretty large already. Putting some thought into design helps to spread that energy over larger areas too. A lot of work into protection from micrometeorites already shows that a relatively thin shield can thermalize a lot of that energy, so as long as you have space for separating layers of shield, especially when traveling in one direction, it becomes more manageable. It would still be an impractically expensive, massive project, that was already expected.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[nealric]

It's practically impossible to stop by physical material if all of the energy of that 10 tons is concentrated into a impact zone the size of a golf ball. Just like your skin won't be pierced when it is hit by a 10lb hammer, but a 10lb katana swung at the same speed will cut you in half. The micrometeorite research done to date is examining impacts occurring at a tiny fraction of the speed envisioned here. At the very least, protecting from such impacts would require an exponential increase in the mass of the space ship- further exacerbating the tyranny of the rocket equation.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[neoritter]

I'm confused how religion is to blame here? It seems, financial cost, will power, and a host of more basic/physical restrictions prevent this.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

The micrometeorite research done to date is examining impacts occurring at a tiny fraction of the speed envisioned here.

The same principles apply though, that while initially very focus, the energy doesn't remain so after interacting with material. A few percent of c is slow by radiation standards, and even the mess of material created with the first surface would be opaque to the incoming particles, meaning they will all interact considerably and gain horizontal momentum. The energy in the above example is only one and half orders of magnitude of the stored energy in the LHC beam, which is considerably more focused than something golf ball sized and much higher momentum per particle, but still uses a 7 m thick material beam dump.

At the very least, protecting from such impacts would require an exponential increase in the mass of the space ship- further exacerbating the tyranny of the rocket equation.

There is no exponential increase from the rocket equation, as the total mass is only be linearly proportional to the non-fuel mass. The only exponential component to the rocket equation is from what velocity you want to achieve relative to your engine's specific impulse, and that factor would be the same once a final velocity is set, shielding or not (although a larger ship would give more opportunities to improve specific impulse).

Re:Common sense space exploration

[netsavior]

Humanity is doomed because we will never get past the human rights/religious obligation thing when attempting a large-scale rescue of the human race. Removing free will from the generations of host females, and treating tens of thousands of embryos as volatile memory for the human genome will never get past the religious views that tie up significant portions of the capital both political and physical that would be required to spread the human race to other planets. Hell today, in fertility treatment, gender selection is "controversial"... Embryo disposal is "controversial"... This is that times a million.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[angel'o'sphere]

Where exactly should such a radiation come from? Oh, the sun? That is easy shielded. Beyond Mars orbit there is not much to fear anymore anyway.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[bobbied]

Cosmic Radiation comes from LOTS of things out there and it's not just the rate of exposure that's the problem here, but the *duration* of the exposure during the trip.

The nearest planet in the "goldilocks zone" is something like 1,000 light years away. The nearest neighbor star something like 10 light years. If we could get something going at say 50% of C, that means we have a 20+ year round trip to the nearest star or a 2,000+ year round trip to the nearest possible habitable planet and back.

The background cosmic radiation exposure rate might be less than we see in LEO or on the Moon, but it's still there. Living though 20 years of constant exposure just isn't a viable option, not to mention that 20 years of weightlessness would be a SERIOUS health issue. Even a year is difficult with today's technology. Doing 2,000 years of all this is a sure way to sterilize any practical conveyance we could build of any and all kinds of life that might find it's way onboard.

No, we and our offspring die here, in this Solar system.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

but the *duration* of the exposure during the trip.

No, the issue is lack of cheap mass in space due to launch costs. A couple metric tonnes of shielding per square meter, even with just random material, fuel or water storage, rock, etc., would reduce radiation levels comparable to average background levels at Earth's surface, and possibly less needed if going with levels at some places with higher natural levels. This came up in a NASA study not to long ago, assuming that a large scale operation were to take place. Of course the Apollo modules or Space Shuttle would not survive such a trip, but if for whatever stupid reason a large fraction of human's resources were committed to it, a ship with plenty of shielding could be made with rock from the Moon. If you look at something on the scale of the Project Orion spacecraft, you would be adding about 1000 tons to a 4000 ton design, which is not trivial, but not obscene, and larger craft would be even more efficient as volume goes up faster than surface area.

Otherwise, it looks like you just have a notion of what you think should be, and are pulling numbers out of your rear or that are irrelevant, while there are studies out there actually trying to address the questions with real numbers.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[angel'o'sphere]

Outside of our solar system is no serious radiation.

The closest solar system is 4 light years away, not 10.

The closest potential earth like planet is 13 light years away, not 1000.

Letting a potential interstellar craft spin to create artificial 'gravity' is likely a very simple thing.

However I agree that it is unlikely that a human ever sets his feet on a planet outside of our solar system.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[Gavagai80]

Who needs to travel? Long distance communication is more than enough to reshape our views of ourselves, our worlds, and to exchange technologies worth untold trillions. Identify enough habitable planets in the sky, monitor and send transmissions, and eventually after trying many thousands you may find a civilization that's listening.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[bobbied]

I don't agree that radiation outside the Solar System is low enough to allow us to travel there for extended periods without significant shielding. Even electronics would require hardening and shielding to survive for the time required.

The stories I've been reading today put the nearest habitable planet outside our solar system at 1,100 light years away. Maybe there is something closer, but that's not what I understand these articles are discussing.

Travel at 1/2 the speed of light would be a minor miracle, even in interstellar space so the travel times I've put out are likely still optimistic, even if I'm a bit off on my knowledge gaps of how far things really are up there.

But in the end, we are not leaving this solar system and although we may visit other planets here, I seriously doubt we will establish any kind of ongoing presence on them.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[bobbied]

Try if you want too, but at a 2000 year round trip for a radio signal, you won't be around to monitor for the reply.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[0111 1110]

Where did you get 1000 light years from? The actual distance seems to be 1833.4 light years. So a round trip time of 3666.8 years.

And yes that is a long time indeed. Long enough that if you transmitted a message in a natural language you would almost certainly need a very cunning linguist to understand the message you originally sent let alone the reply.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[0111 1110]

Problem is that with current knowledge and technology we would NEVER be able to get out of our solar system alive

Orion

I realize that isn't technically current technology, but we could probalby figure out how to use 1950s tech if we wanted to.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[0111 1110]

Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work.

We do. Nuclear pulse propulsion can get us up to nearly 10% the speed of light. Alpha Centauri in less than 50 years. Within the lifespan of an 18 year old astronaut even. It might take 200 years to actually build the enormous nuclear pulse ship and cost trillions, but we have the tech. We just don't have the money. Or if we do we would rather spend it on something more practical like killing a lot of other humans.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[0111 1110]

>The nearest planet in the "goldilocks zone" is something like 1,000 light years away.

Huh? Which planet would that be? What ever happened to Gliese 581c? Did it disappear while I wasn't looking.

The Gliese 581 system is only 20 light years away and could be reachable by a human constructed interstellar ship driven by nuclear pulsed 1950s tech (Orion) in something like 200 - 250 years. A long time, but doable either for a generation ship or for a probe.

Of course I'd set aside another 200-250 years to get the enormous craft built at a lagrange point station.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[0111 1110]

One issue is small particles in space (micrometeorites). While the space station may have managed to avoid catastrophic impacts over a decade, the probability of a major impact on a ship traveling for centuries at even a very small fraction of the speed of light hitting *something* in space becomes extremely high.

Citation needed. Outside of star systems I think the chances are more like fat and slim.

At those speeds, a golf ball size object

The chances of hitting a golf ball sized meteorite in the vast emptiness of interstellar space is infinitesimal. The point remains however. It just wouldn't be anything nearly that big. It would be a matter of deflecting tiny particles at around 0.1c. Not an easy task, but certainly doable. Perhaps whatever is used for radiation shielding (lead lined water tanks perhaps) would have enough mass to deflect such small particles. I believe that most of the particles would just be hydrogen atoms. There isn't a lot of matter out there.

You would need some sort of powered force field- a technology that does not exist and has no known theoretical basis for its existence.

That is ridiculous. You don't need imaginary tech. You just need some deflection mass. A large steel plate pushed in front of your ship would probably do the trick.

Another issue is food and biology. Previous attempts and creating a small closed ecosystem (biosphere) were miserable failures.

And of course any task for which there are failed attempts is impossible. We'll figure out the closed ecosystem thing. We'll have plenty of time to do so while we build our enormous spaceship filled with nuclear bombs at a lagrange point.

But even the generation ship must provide power for centuries.

I assume you are talking about maintaining electrcial power for hundreds of years. This is easily done with RTGs.

A final concern is one of need.

The need is the curiosity of any intelligent species. Our need to explore the universe. That is the only need required.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[painandgreed]

Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work. Our current understanding of physics provides no plausible mechanism for a living human to travel to these planets. Unless there is a fatal flaw in relativity, it is possible (if not probable) that practical interstellar travel is essentially impossible.

Well, there is plenty of technology to invest in that would head us down that road that would be useful to our current endeavors. We still need the technology and engineering to build a long term space habitat for things like a manned mission to Mars. Given Apollo level funding, drive, and political will, we are still probably 30 years out from having such. Then there's mining and manufacturing in space to worry about. That will continue past the probably 50 years in getting things up and running in a useful manner. There's easily a century of full time work before we even need to worry about things like not having a warp drive.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[nealric]

It might get out to Alpha Centauri (provided a whole host of technologies required for a spacecraft to travel 50 years are invented and perfected).... which is not where these "goldilocks" planets are. Nuclear pulse won't get us the 100+ light years needed to get to the planets under discussion.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[angel'o'sphere]

The stories I've been reading today put the nearest habitable planet outside our solar system at 1,100 light years away. Maybe there is something closer, but that's not what I understand these articles are discussing.

So you did not even read the linked article this /. story is about :D ?

http://io9.com/the-closest-kno...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Radiation always comes from suns, so if you are far enough away you get no radiation except the occasionally gamma burst.

Re:Common sense space exploration

[neoritter]

But those things aren't controversial simply from a "religious" perspective. You're implicating a general shift in morality here, religion itself has little to do with that when you consider the universal nature of those morals.

In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

All we had to do was analyze data at our computers to explore the universe?

But I was told that we MUST put tst pilots in the upper atmosphere so we can get 400km closer to the stars!

Why not gas giants too?

[Viol8]

They have all the chemical ingredients, saturn and jupiter both have water clouds containing droplets of water and since we don't know how life actually got going it could well be possible for it to start in a gas giant and at least sustain bacteria or virus sized lifeforms. Even in earths clouds there are bacteria floating about as we've discovered in the last decade or so.

Re:Why not gas giants too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the distinction would be intelligent life, which isn't explicitly made in the summary or article, but I think the known assumption about finding earth-like planets is that we're trying to find other intelligent life forms. If we want to prove that life can exist in other places other than earth, we already have several targets within our own solar system, and we'll be able to find life at those sites far sooner than we will at distant stars.

Re:Why not gas giants too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they're looking for the best possible conditions for life. If someone is looking for gold, and you ask "why not dig in your backyard?" you'd be technically correct but not very helpful.

Re:Why not gas giants too?

[Viol8]

Given the exponential difference in volume between a gas giants inhabitable atmosphere and the small inhabitable part of earth on and just below the surface I'd debate whether a rocky planet is the best possible place.

Re:Why not gas giants too?

[Rinikusu]

Preferably human-like life, with sexual reproduction. And compatible female equivalent bits for interfacing. And hopes that the male equivalents don't have bigger dongs than human males.

I've watched Star Trek. I know how to handle inter-species relations.

Re:Why not gas giants too?

[presidenteloco]

My guess is that for life to form you need a place where common elements are brought together by gravity AND importantly, where solid, liquid, and gaseous phases of at least some common elements and molecules can co-exist.

The reason for the latter requirement is that life relies on at least some fairly solid structures to be able to form and persist for considerable time periods. Life needs a vocabulary and grammar of structures: e.g.
- tubes to conduct low-entropy (organized) flows of liquids and gases for organized energy and material transport.
- hollow spheroids to contain and shield (from outside random environment) metabolism and reproductive mechanisms and as building blocks for 3-D structures.
- semi-permeable membranes (to filter what can get into and out of hollow spheroids, to favour particular metabolic and reproductive processes inside the spheroids)
- layers of adjacent elements (to form surfaces of tubes and hollow spheroids)

- Life also needs liquids for organized material and energy transport within the organism.
- High-energy life like ourselves also needs gasses as a medium of rapid transport of sufficient quantities of high energy reactive materials (e.g. Oxygen).

I do not believe these requirements are just "the way it is done on Earth". I believe they are general to spontaneously originated and evolved life.

Conceivably, such life could then bootstrap artificial life of a different construction (e.g. self-replicating, material and energy hunting robot intelligences) but it is hard to see how that kind of life, which is comparatively rigid and fragile and extremely complex, could evolve itself from scratch, except by means of the squishier, semi-liquid, semi-solid self-evolvable simpler structures.

Re:Why not gas giants too?

[neoritter]

That's a pointless debate. Prove that life can exist there and maybe the debate is meaningful. Further, there's no sense in spending time exploring a gas giant over an earth like one for intelligent life. You go to the earth like planet and find no intelligent life (or life), oh well. But there's still a chance you could colonize it. The gas giant there's no second place for not finding life.

Re:Why not gas giants too?

[R3d M3rcury]

Well, in theory, life can be anywhere. The problem is our ability to detect it.

For example, we've done plenty of studies of life on Earth. We take that knowledge and apply it to Mars to see if we can detect any past or present life. We could do the same thing for Jupiter, but we probably wouldn't detect any life because--if it's there--it behaves differently than life that we know. We'll need some other way to detect it, but if we don't know if it exists, how can we come up with ways to detect it?

That's why we stick with what we know and, yes, that means we're looking for carbon-based life forms that use oxygen and nitrogen the same way we do. Until we find life that is different and figure out a way to detect that life, that's what we're stuck with.

Re:Why not gas giants too?

[T.E.D.]

Since we only have one exemplar to work from, we really can't claim to have any clue what the required parameters are for intelligent life. We don't really know the full requirements for life either, but at least there we have lots of specimens, and know it happens pretty much anywhere liquid water is available. So places that look roughly like Earth and can hold liquid water would be great places to start looking for life.

If there are other bodies we can visit in this solar system that have liquid water, those would be great places to go check (and we've done a bit of that).

Need more colony ships

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I got to get started cranking out colony ships before the Drengin Empire and Dominion of Korx start claiming all of those planets!

I love playing on huge galaxy maps.

Not quite

[wonkey_monkey]

Analysis of Spacecraft Data Reveals Second Most Earth-like Planet To Date

FTFY.

Pointless classification.

[Anonymous Coward]

Colonization - By the time we reach other stars, we'll have learned to colonize Gas giants using Jupiter as an easy nearby test site.

Pre-existing life - What supports the notion that gas giants can't harbor life?

Satellites - Isn't it assumed that satellites aren't an exceptional feature of the solar system? Gas giants can have Earth sized satellites while the identified Earth sized planets couldn't.

Re:Pointless classification.

[neoritter]

Gas giants usually occur outside the "Goldilocks" zone. So those moons would be ice cold. Ignoring that. You have a object that is not always being hit by the sun, as the moon would be going through the planet's shadow. And then, you have that moons tend to be tidally locked to the planet.

Re:Imagine going back in time 15 years and warning

[bobbied]

-The presidential election will be decided by one vote... on the supreme court.

The margin of victory was more than one vote and the outcome of the election was decided on the day the governor of Florida certified the election results the first time. The appeal to the Supreme court was pointless as it had no power to reverse the decision of the electoral college nor change the vote of the Florida delegates. Gore lost on every front, the initial count (the legal one) AND the following three recounts. The supreme court ruling was just icing on the cake of his defeat. Get over it.

-There will be a nuclear terrorist attack on New York, perpetrated by Israel, the Bush administration, and the Pentagon, with obvious evidence right out in the open, and nobody will question it.

If you are referring to 9/11, there was and is zero evidence of a "nuclear" attack and just about the same amount that Israel had anything to do with it. Somebody is pretty fond of their tin foil hat to really believe this line of thought.

-The attack will be used as bait and switch to wage a $3 trillion war against a country which didn't even have anything to do with the patsies, let alone the actual attack.

Now you are just off into La La land.... Most of the rest of your claims are in a similar ilk.

I hope the doctor has prescribed the proper medications and that you keep taking them like you should...

Stop Pointing at them

[TadGhostal66]

Quit pointing out cool planets. I wanna GO there!

Re:Stop Pointing at them

[bobbied]

Quit pointing out cool planets. I wanna GO there!

Like dating the head cheerleader, never going to happen dude..

Physics and Biology pretty much tell us that every human alive and all their offspring will die, here in THIS solar system. No exceptions..

Keep dreaming though..

Re:Stop Pointing at them

[ArcadeMan]

You know why they call her the "head" cheerleader, right? Know what I mean? Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Re:Stop Pointing at them

[Anonymous Coward]

Physics and Biology pretty much tell us that every human alive and all their offspring will die

Physics and biology say it is within the realm of possibility, while economics says it won't happen.

Upon Further Analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

It was concluded that this planet, previous "earthlike" planets, and most probably all future "earthlike" planets discovered are at least inhabited by bulls who feed on corn, because the processed data is mostly bullshit with a few corn kernels of real data mixed in.

What's conceivable?

[jc42]

Most are inhospitable — too big, too hot, or too cold for any conceivable life form.

Whoever wrote this has obviously never read any science fiction. ;-) The term "conceivable" covers a very wide range of planets (and various environments not based on planets) in which intelligent creatures might evolve.

Some years back, I read Robert Forward's Camelot at 30K novel, about a human expedition to an inhabited Pluto-like planet out in the Oort Cloud; the title references the mean temperature of that world. Part of the story was a quite imaginative method that the world's inhabitants used to colonize other large rocks fbig enough to have useful gravity and far enough from any star that their sort of life was possible. That turns out to be most of the galaxy, of course.

Going back even further, to 1957, we find Sir Fred Hoyle's novel about a dense cloud of gas (similar to what's called a Bok Globule) approaches our Solar System, and instead of passing through, settles into a small, dark ring around the sun. As the catastrophic effects on Earth settle down, scientists discover that the cloud itself is an intelligent creature that just stopped by for a meal of photons and assorted small molecules emitted by the sun. It is, of course, surprised to find itself being contacted by intelligent creatures living in such an unlike spot as a planet, since you'd expect true intelligence to evolve only in the rich clouds of interstellar space.

I'm sure that many readers of this forum can list many other literary works that depict life in environments not the least bit like ours. Anyone who can only conceive of life on a planet similar to ours is seriously lacking in imagination. But there are thousands of writers who aren't so mentally crippled, and millions of readers to read their work. ;-)

Standard classifications

[infernalC]

Why can't they report this stuff using the standard classifications of planets? /me ducks

Meh

[ArcadeMan]

None of them are entirely satisfactory: either the climate isn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day is half an hour too long, or the sea is exactly the wrong shade of pink.

(points at cool planet)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hideki!

Re:Imagine going back in time 15 years and warning

[neoritter]

The post is certainly ironic given the first sentence...I'll give him that.