Discussion for article #238702
“The earth? Oh, the earth will be gone in just a few seconds.”
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“NASA scientists said that the planet, Kepler-452b, is the most similar planet to Earth that they’ve found.”
To which Donald Trump immediately responded:
“When Kepler-452b sends its humanoids, they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good multi-tentacled organisms.”
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So the similarity is it is the smallest exo-planet yet discovered? We don’t know if it is rocky or gaseous. It is bigger than the Earth. What is the similarity they are talking about exactly?
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This is really amazing stuff. I am not a scientist, but my son is in aerospace engineering and they are “over the moon” (please forgive the pun) with excitement about the future possibilities. Yeah for science!
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Earth probably could have gone onto Ancestry-dot-com and found this info for a lot less money.
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It is the closest in size to the earth of any exoplanent in a habitabal zone where pooled water could form, has the same temperatures as the earth, and takes nearly the same amount of time as the earth to orbit its sun, among other things:
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-kepler-mission-discovers-bigger-older-cousin-to-earth
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The bummer is, it that the Kepler-452 system is 1,400 light years away.
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Not really. Whether or not it’s 5 or 1400 ly, we’ll still never be able to get there. At the speed of the New Horizons probe it would take well over 100,000 years to reach a star 5 light years away. However, a closer planet could possibly be directly imaged, it’s spectrum analyzed, and we could learn a great deal more about it–especially it’s atmosphere. I think the TMT (30-meter telescope) in Hawaii will be able to do that. That is, if the protesters ever let construction begin.
Not necessarily. We can theoretically build sub-light vehicles that could realistically travel for 30-40 years to get to some of the closest star systems within the lifetime of the crew aboard it, such as Project Daedalus and more recent variants of it.
But yes, it is a serious challenge to come up with any viable form of interstellar travel.
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Engineering wise, for Daedalus we’re probably were 10th millennia BCE people were when they contemplated flying like a bird. Very large spaced based telescopes would probably bring us the answers we seek, and are actually doable with current technology–if not current funding.
What real investment in science compared to the latest National Squirrel though?
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And now that we have acknowledged it as a cousin, Kepler-452b will probably want to borrow money from us.
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That’s just 2,800 years for an e-mail exchange–not bad.
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Why not just bend space time? Wormhole, faster than light speed, be there in a couple of seconds. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
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Perhaps they have good cellphone service.
Time bandits know where there are some.
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At that mass and distance from the star, it couldn’t be gaseous.
Comparable to e-mail delivery times between points on Earth by people who use AT&T.
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Sigh; this. What you and @imkmu3 touch on makes me feel as if we’re somehow more isolated than if we knew we were truly alone in the universe. Knowing there could just possibly be life, perhaps even intelligent life of some kind, so far away, or so long ago, that we’ll never be able to make actual contact sort of fills me with sadness. I know, I know, maybe they’d be poisonous to us, or see us as food or just targets of conquest or enslavement or whatever sci-fi nightmare fantasy smart authors or ignorant children could come up with. But it just feels like finding thousand-year-old writings and realizing, as you read them, that the long-dead writer was your soul mate.
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Well I think it should be humanity’s purpose to leave the earth and explore the universe eventually. So I don’t take so “isolated” view of our fate. More of a “why the fuck are we dicking around when we should be focusing on getting started folks?” sort of view.
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