Hey, I’m a history geek; the quest for discovery and understanding are essential to who we are, and I eagerly look forward to every new revelation. There’s just a poignancy, for me, in the realization that there may be, or have been, beings just enough like us that there might have been meaningful contact between us if not for that cursed time/space thing. But I admit that I have a bit of the five-year-old fantasist in me. And my feelings are no doubt colored by my powerful but necessarily unrequited love for Peter Abelard.
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If scientists found one planet similar to our Earth Planet then there must be tens of billions more in other universes that we have no clue about and never will. Let’s take care of the only planet we have.
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It is not clear if Kepler-452b can actually support life. It orbits a G2V-type star, like our own Sun, with nearly the same temperature and mass. However, this star is 6 billion years old, making it 1.5 billion years older than our sun. At this point in its star’s evolution, Kepler-452b is receiving ten percent more energy from its parent star than Earth is currently receiving from the Sun. If Kepler-452b were the same mass as Earth, it would be subject to, or on the verge of, a runaway greenhouse effect.
Sounds more like Venus’s bigger cousin. Though I suppose there could be a planet further out in the same system that might be better suited for habitability.
But Kepler-452b is also 5% further away from it’s star, compared to our Earth-Sol distance.
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And that, perhaps, is a good thing, because it likely would be just as impossible for them to get here.
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In 1.5 billion years earth too will be on the verge of a runaway greenhouse, so in that sense it is indeed earth’s bigger and older cousin.
The closest in size to earth of any exoplanet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. We had already discovered several explanets even closer to earth in size in the habitable zone of stars substantially smaller than the sun.
To put it more succinctly:
SCIENCE!
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People who think we’re ever going to travel beyond the galaxy, don’t understand the vastness of space, the smallness of our habitable environment, the limits of human compatibility, etc, etc.
We are creatures of earth and part of the earth. We can no more migrate elsewhere in the universe than we can resurrect ourselves from death. Yes, we should explore everything technologically, but the chance of ever contacting, let alone meeting another planetary civilization is vanishingly small, hopes and dreams or not.
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I disagree. I think it is inevitable that we travel outside our solar system, and populate the galaxy. Now whether or not we leave the galaxy… that is another question. But we are talking long-term goals here. The people who talk about the life-time of the explorers are thinking to small. I think that we will build large colonies that will drift through space, entirely self-sustaining. If it takes us a thousand years to get to where we are going, that’s fine. So it will take us 30 generations to get there, big whoop. You build a ship big enough, and you have a couple thousand people on the ship with strong recycling programs and population controls, and it’s doable.
Now what would the humans who arrived there be like? No idea. A thousand years is more than enough time for new religions to rise and fall. Factions and war can develop. Maybe the ship will arrive devoid of life. Maybe, because of reduced gravity, the humans will turn into giant balls of fat, incapable of moving on a planet’s surface. Or maybe we develop super cool organic exoskeletons to counter that effect. And then we become the aliens from Independence Day. Maybe the galaxy’s first interstellar war will be between two groups of humans who colonized different planets. I don’t know.
But I do believe that it is our species’ destiny to colonize space. Time and space matter only to the individual, not to the species.
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Adam Wu:
In 1.5 billion years earth too will be on the verge of a runaway greenhouse, so in that sense it is indeed earth’s bigger and older cousin.
Yes, probably. I wonder if we’ll be on Mars, or in another planetary system by then.
Or if, as is most likely I suppose, we’ll be a dead species with no descendants. I mean 1.5 billlion years is longer than any multi-cellular species has been alive on earth, and despite the teeming variety of life here, the sad truth is that vast majority of species have died off without leaving any direct descendants.