Billions of nearby habitable planets

Why you gotta make me be Debbie Downer? :P

Thank heavens it's not getting front-page headline status. Because it's just a couple of scientists talking about something they're excited about. It's not anything based on a peer-reviewed scientific publication. It hasn't gone through the rigors of the full scientific process. Look, I don't discount the expertise of the two people interviewed (via email); no doubt they know WAY more about the subject than I could even pretend to. However, science is skeptical, and for good reason.

Science is done by humans, and humans are human. Seeing as how imperfect humans can be, nothing is really accepted in the scientific community until a WHOLE BUNCH of other humans have nit-picked at it, tried to replicate the results, having reached the same conclusions. The things stated in this article do not come even close to meeting those standards. This is pulp science, fun to talk about and imagine the possibilities, but nothing more (at the moment).

Besides, they're stating that the nearest Earth-like planet is "only" 13 light-years away. Great! All we have to do now is figure out how to travel at the speed of light! :lol:

By the way, do a google-search of the headline. See if you can find a single reputable news-source.
 
Yeah I agree with you funk but still it's friggen awesome. I mean I feel like it would make sense but we shall see in the future.
 
I think the reason it's not bigger news is that even though there are billions of habitable planets in our relative backyard, the technology doesn't exist to get us to any of them in less than 150,000 years. So, it really doesn't affect us all that much...
 
It's irrelevant to us because we will never be anywhere near to living on in our lifetime. And people seem to forget that Earth still has so many areas and secrets still undiscovered. Maybe we should focus on Earth and what it holds rather than other planets.
 
The distance doesn't make this irrelevant, at all!!

Who's to say that a more intelligent lifeform than ours doesn't inhabit one of those planets? Who's to say they haven't figured out faster-than-light travel? Who's to say that they aren't planning a huge scale invasion of our planet, as seen in numerous sci-fi flicks??

Just sayin'. :)
 
It makes me think how little we actually know about anything. Telescopes often miss a lot of things huh.

I can dream that there's life on those planets right?
 
Bad news for indie filmmakers though. You think it's hard to get your film noticed now that everybody with a DSLR is a filmmaker? Just wait until you've got to compete with billions of other filmmakers from billions of other planets....
 
We all knew I'd be in on this one, right ;)

Cracker Funk said:
By the way, do a google-search of the headline. See if you can find a single reputable news-source.
Click to expand...

...Cracker, come on. A google search? That's not how you check facts. Go to the source: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html Pretty neat to check out the Discovery chart as well: http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/ Peer review is part of the scientific process, but that's a table of CONFIRMED planets, from the source.

Anyway, 13 light years is not anything that we could possibly travel to in our lifetimes. But communicate with? That's absolutely conceivable. It'd be a long game of telephone, but 26 years round trip for a message is something observable. This is, of course, if anyone else is living out in the galactic boonies like we are.

But that's not the point of all of this anyway. 10 years ago the idea that there are other planets around other stars was just a theory and imagination. It's now been proven. And there's a lot more of them than we think. That's an idea that was science fiction for ages, but isn't anymore. That's exciting! It inspires! It's no more practical than observing other galaxies (which we do), but it's no less science.
 
ItDonnedOnMe said:
Bad news for indie filmmakers though. You think it's hard to get your film noticed now that everybody with a DSLR is a filmmaker? Just wait until you've got to compete with billions of other filmmakers from billions of other planets....
Click to expand...

:lol: But just imagine all the advertising revenue potential! Funny.

Maybe this film is out there and I just haven't seen it or maybe I have and simply forgotten about it (!), but what about a comedy that takes place on one of these planets populated with an advanced alien race that knows all about earth and humans and continues to receive our NASA transmissions of reaching out in order to communicate, but they know what morons we really are and don't want anything to do with us so they just keep ignoring our requests like we're the butt of some interstellar joke. :D Like there's a group of other planets that just doesn't want to deal with us, but somehow, some way, one of the E.T. habitants decides to reply, if only because they feel bad for us trying so hard to find them. Not sure where it goes from there and I'm sure it's been done before in some capacity.

As a pisces, so long as these other planets have water, I should be fine. :abduct:
 
it isn't irrelevant just for the simple fact that the day before this was announced, many people believed "yeah, there may be earth like planets, but there's probably just one, probably so far away, that might not hold life, that might not be intelligent, that might not be spacefaring, that might not wanna travel through space, that might not find us, and so on and so on...

It was thought that the likelihood of a planet that could support life (as we know it) was uniquely microscopic...


But billions nearby (astronomically) not a couple... billions

I know chances are we'll never explore one in my lifetime unless we invent some new technology that allows faster than light travel... which probably would be second or third page news, since by that time, Jersey Shore spinoffs will number in the hundreds.

It is still major news
 
Any of ya'll wanna take a flying guess as to state of humanity... oh... say... 10,000 years from now?
How about 100,000 years away?
500,000 years?
1,000,000 years?
10,000,000 years?

A hundred million years is geologically/astronomically nothin'.

I mean seriously, what's the point of trying to figure out WTH is going on a planet that'll take any of us millions of years to parse the distance within a reasonable scope of travel time?

Earth's how old?
Life's been cropped up here for how long?
Mass extinctions happen with what frequency?
Any wild guess as to the frequency of such on other planets?
Any wild guess as to what a mouse thinks of space travel?
THAT'S the mental gap either between us and "them" - or - us and "us" by the time we could get... anywhere.

I wonder what life forms would evolve from a single billion year period of no mass extinctions resetting the evolutionary clocks back to one or two.
 
considering that einstein's old "Faster than light travel is impossible" theory is outdated, and that the nearest one is supposed to be 10 LY's away, it seems to be just a matter of developing better technology.

And you gotta admit, it's certainly bigger news than "Ohmahgarsh! The power went out at the Super Bowl!"
 
Cracker Funk said:
By the way, do a google-search of the headline. See if you can find a single reputable news-source.
Click to expand...

I'd say NASA's a pretty reputable source, man.


Cracker Funk said:
Because it's just a couple of scientists talking about something they're excited about. It's not anything based on a peer-reviewed scientific publication. It hasn't gone through the rigors of the full scientific process.
Click to expand...

Non-sequitar! your facts are uncoordinated! (someone needed to reference star trek at some point in this thread)

So, anyway, this is something they've been studying for years. They've just now announced it.

They originally found these red dwarf stars to be a nuisance, things that got in the way of studying further, brighter stars. they looked at the nuisances more closely and discovered 75 billion of them. i believe 6 billion of which contained planets in the "sweet spot" distance, like the way earth is to our own star, only closer because red dwarves are smaller, and therefore burn longer, though not as bright.

it's also worth mentioning that these stars and planets have likely been around longer than our entire solar system
 
rayw said:
Any of ya'll wanna take a flying guess as to state of humanity... oh... say... 10,000 years from now?
Click to expand...

Even 1,000 years from now is probably completely beyond our comprehension. It's even possible that the next 100 years will put as big a gulf between us now and that mouse, and us then.

But that's the thing with technological advancement - it appears to progress at an exponential rate. I don't see much reason to believe that that would be different among these billions of potentially habitable planets. So there may be many of them that have no life, or have primitive life, or many that have evolved life only to have it wiped out - multiple times even. But that still leaves plenty that could have reached the threshold we appear to be on right now, where our evolution accelerates beyond the physical and natural limitations that have shaped it in the past.

So is it likely that we could physically visit any of these planets soon? Of course not, but maybe we don't have to. For instance, quantum entanglement is something we're just beginning to get a handle on in the lab right now - it's often discussed in the media as 'teleportation' but what it really involves is the instantaneous transfer of information from one particle to another with no physical connection - and at faster than light speed. It presents a possible avenue for real-time communication across interstellar distances. Will we get there in the next 100 years? It's hard to imagine - but so is us having this conversation right now, among a group of people scattered around the world, who have never met, seen or spoken to each other, for someone from 100 years ago.
 
ItDonnedOnMe said:
For instance, quantum entanglement is something we're just beginning to get a handle on in the lab right now - it's often discussed in the media as 'teleportation' but what it really involves is the instantaneous transfer of information from one particle to another with no physical connection - and at faster than light speed. It presents a possible avenue for real-time communication across interstellar distances.
Click to expand...

No it doesn't! You are confusing the word "information" with the term "quantum information", two completely different things and there is no way (even theoretically) to convert between the two. Quantum information is more like information about information; in an extremely vague sense, a bit like the difference between the metadata in a file and the actual data contained in the file. In fact, quantum teleportation expressly forbids instantaneously transferring "information" as to do so would require breaking Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and effectively disprove the whole theory of Quantum Mechanics in the first place! We may find some interesting uses for quantum teleportation "However, it does not immediately transmit classical information, and therefore cannot be used for communication at superluminal (faster than light) speed" - wiki.

G
 
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