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Scientists Find an ‘Earth Twin,’ or Perhaps a Cousin
- rhizome 12y agoSad, but the first thing my sci-fi mind thought of was whether Earth would be able to establish relations with a perhaps-society there without establishing military superiority first, just starting off with a Cold War.
- spcoll 12y agoAny planet harboring intelligent life would likely be several hundreds (like this one) if not thousands or millions of light years away, making any contact impossible at human scale. Even with this relatively close example of a possibly habitable planet, communications would take 1000 years to go back and forth. As for actual contact... many earth civilizations would rise and fall before a spaceship going at even 2% of the speed of light could reach such a planet.
- rhizome 12y agoWell sure, that's the sci-fi part...
- lugg 12y agoUs humans, so self centered. What you say doesn't mean we can't send a probe that simply says hey what's up and you're not alone but probably are by the time you read this.
- camillomiller 12y agoThat's what we did, more or less, with the voyager
- joe_the_user 12y agoYou're making the mistake of confusing totally unknown with very unlikely. We simply do not know enough to prognosticate one way or the other. Perhaps every habitable planet develops life but only our plant has developed intelligent life. Perhaps only our planet among all the planet in the universe has life. Perhaps every planet develops civilization life and all such civilizations destroy themselves within about 10,000 years, leaving only hunter-killer robots. In any case, interstellar space is so vast we couldn't practically other civilizations even if they turned out to be quite common in other solar systems.
- V-2 12y agoThere's also the possibility that not all intelligent life goes on to develop high tech civilization.
- Houshalter 12y agoAnything could be "The Great Filter". The best candidates for Great Filters are things which took a long time to happen on Earth (suggesting it may be a fluke or statistically rare event.) Conversely things that happen quickly, or things that independently happened multiple times suggest they aren't rare or unlikely events. On Earth, high tech civilization appeared relatively shortly after humans evolved. Agriculture was independently invented half a dozen times in different places, and cities and civilization at least twice in the new and old world. We were also moving in the direction of science and technology even before we discovered coal power so the "other planets don't have fossil fuels" doesn't seem like a great candidate either.
- clef 12y agoPeople can be wary of new neighbours, i don't see why it wouldn't apply to space neighbours. On a brighter note, maybe we should welcome with open arms anyone, after all, better be nice than not nice!
- Houshalter 12y agoI'd be more concerned the aliens would be militarily superior to us, considering the millions to billions of years head start on technology. Or that there are no aliens, raising concerns that most civilizations inevitably destroy themselves. Or that there are, but they haven't made contact because they don't care about us. If they don't care they might wipe us out because they want our resources, or see us as a potential threat.
- gagege 12y agoOr they're just building a highway and Earth is in the way.
- flatline 12y agoOr that long-distance space travel or even communication is simply not feasible for any civilization at any level of technological advancement.
- Houshalter 12y agoIt should be possible to transmit radio signals between planets. Although it's possible we just aren't listening or they aren't doing it frequently enough. Space travel is more speculative but it seems theoretically possible to reach a significant fraction of c even with 20th century technology. Even today's spacecraft could reach other solar systems in a few thousand years, which is reasonable on a geological timescale. If probes are self-replicating, or the mother civilization simply sends a lot of them, they could cover the entire galaxy in a few million years at most.
- jotm 12y agoThere's really no point in either. A radio signal would need to be extremely powerful to travel 500 light years without degrading (not to mention that even the senders may not be able to decode it after 1000 years :-)), and sending spacecraft to navigate 500 light years hoping it will perform all maneuvers correctly and not get hit by something in order to reach a planet without being able to send any useful information back seems naive and pointless. If there's any space faring civilization out there, they're probably content with their own star system and maybe the ones closest to it - there are so many planets and asteroids to mine for resources (plus recycling would be a big thing) they could last for hundreds of millions of years...
- KamiCrit 12y agoI wonder what Kepler 186f thinks of Earth?
- XorNot 12y ago"Smaller, hotter, but in the habitable zone of it's star. Relpek 681f orbits a hot yellow star but far enough out to not be cooked by it. Yellow stars are so hot that they would turn our planet into a barren, semi-molten wasteland at the same distance. Scientists have noted that the atmosphere of Relpek 681f would have to be very thin in order for it to maintain cool enough temperatures, but it's well known that plant life would probably have an easier time dealing with it's solar radiation output..."
- Udo 12y agoThinking about what Earth and its star system look like from the outside is indeed a very interesting exercise, and it gives you an idea how flawed many of our own assumptions about exobiology may be. At these distances, our radio spectrum would be difficult to discern from random galactical noise - even if the radio waves had enough time to cross the distance. And in fact, so far it looks like the more advanced we get the less telling our radio signature becomes. There are no large-scale constructs or artifacts visible that hint at any technological activity in the solar system. Looking at how crowded the solar system is, an onlooker might well assume it's too unstable for life to have developed. The Earth might be seen as too small to support life, its atmosphere too thin to shield against radiation and also too thin to allow for a comfortable temperature interval in which liquid water exists. Due to the difficulties of aerodynamic flight under these circumstances, they can safely assume there will be no winged lifeforms on Earth. They might also think that any plant life on Earth would be extremely sparse and desolate - yet the abundance of oxygen hints at a world dominated by microbial life. The orbital and rotational instability of the planet leads to wild temperature variations which will likely prevent the rise of higher life forms. The presence of several semi-unstable interplanetary debris fields suggests asteroid impacts will be frequent, and likely to extinguish life on any of the planets. The relative proximity and high mass of the Earth's moon (or shall we say: sister planet) makes it likely that the planet will be subject to tidal disturbances and might imply a history of extreme geological instability. Water covers a large part of the Earth's surface, but generally is only present in the form of very shallow oceans tainted with poisonous chloride salts in high concentrations. It's unclear if unchlorinated water exists on the surface and in any case it's doubtful that there's enough water to form a stable cycle able to support any but the most primitive extremophiles.
- kijin 12y agoKepler 186 is an M1V red dwarf [1]. We don't know how old it is, but red dwarves tend to last tens of billions to trillions of years. (No red dwarf is known to have died of natural causes since the beginning of the Universe.) So this star could be much older than our Sun. The low metallicity of the star also supports the hypothesis that it is older than our Sun. Which means that if there is life on Kepler 186f, it could be billions of years ahead of us. Would that have been a long enough time scale for an intelligent species to emerge, civilize, and develop a way to traverse the 500 light years between us and them? Or did the dim light (less UV ~ less mutation) and lower availability of heavy elements (less iron) in the star system hemper the evolution of life and/or civilization? Will there ever be an answer to questions like this, perhaps in a thousand years, a million years, or even a billion years? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-186 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-186
- wellboy 12y ago< red dwarves tend to last tens of billions to trillions of years. The universe will be dead in 10 billion years tho ;)
- sanxiyn 12y agoCitation needed.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- lutusp 12y ago> The universe will be dead in 10 billion years tho ... Not so. There's no basis for this claim. The universe will continue to expand, and will eventually become much colder and darker than it is now, but there's no mechanism that ends the universe in our current models. More here: http://arachnoid.com/dark_energy http://arachnoid.com/dark_energy
- kijin 12y agoYou're confusing the universe with our solar system. The Sun is expected to have a lifespan of approx. 10 billion years, of which 4.6 billion have already elapsed. As for the universe, see various conjectures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
- jamesfranco 12y agoOMG they find one of these all the time.
- chjj 12y agoI'm surprised this article didn't bother mentioning Gliese 581g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581g
- kijin 12y agoGliese 581g is huge. Its mass is 3-4 times that of Earth. The newly discovered planet is much closer to the size of Earth, which is what the headline is all about. (Of course, mass and radius variations in this range have little to do with habitability, since both planets probably have enough gravity to hold onto an atmosphere.)
- fragsworth 12y agoGliese 581g has a surface gravity estimated to be between 1.1 and 1.7 times Earth's gravity. At 1.1x, it's possibly livable for humans, making it more interesting; 1.7x is probably too rough without some new technology or adaptations.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jswhitten 12y agoAlso, Gliese 581g is unconfirmed, and there is a lot of doubt about whether it exists.
- wavesounds 12y agoWhat is physically stopping us from actually seeing this planet with visible light? Is it that we can't build a big enough telescope? Also would it be possible start broadcasting radio waves or maybe some kind of laser towards this planet incase there's something there that can respond to us a thousand years from now?
- windsurfer 12y agoYes. We haven't build a large enough telescope to pick up the faint reflection of it's star's light on the surface.
- dredmorbius 12y agoResolving power. There are limits to the angular separation a telescope can detect. Even the very largest telescopes on Earth (or more often: arrays of several telescopes, effectively creating multi-thousand-kilometer baselines) can resolve the disks of even the largest stars. It turns out that Betelguese is roughly the same distance as Kepler 186f -- 643 light years (plus or minus 146), and its disk can be resolved, even to the point of detecting surface features. But Betleguese is roughly 1000 times the radius of our Sun, and 4x wider than Earth's own orbit: "If Betelgeuse were at the center of the Solar System, its surface would extend past the asteroid belt, possibly to the orbit of Jupiter and beyond, wholly engulfing Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars." (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse http://www.space.com/7771-spots-sun-revealed-giant-star.html http://www.space.com/7771-spots-sun-revealed-giant-star.html For planets, we're limited to detecting brightness fluctuations in the parent star (how Kepler detects planets), and possibly spectral absorption lines. That last would be hugely exciting, as it allows knowledge of the composition of the atmosphere of a planet. And there's one molecule whose presence would be an almost absolute certain tell-tale of life: oxygen. Ordinarily, free oxygen reacts with other substances in its presence to create oxides. Only if new oxygen is being released will an atmosphere be high in oxygen. So a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere should almost certainly have light. As for beaming radio signals, the challenge is in creating signals which would be strong enough to detect at 500 light years' distance. Signal strength for most broadcast sources would be undetectable even at the nearest star, 100x closer: http://zidbits.com/2011/07/how-far-have-radio-signals-traveled-from-earth/ http://zidbits.com/2011/07/how-far-have-radio-signals-travel...
- mentos 12y agoI wonder where Earth lies on the spectrum between 'Rare Earth' and 'Principle of Mediocrity' [0] Crazy to think that we may have awoken on this planet after an unfathomable amount of time and not appreciate how rare we are. Does our situation get more or less beautiful if we discover no one else is out there? [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis
- jotm 12y agoWe've appreciated how unique we are for a pretty long time. Seeing quadrillions of other planets in the sky really makes you rethink that :-)
- atmosx 12y agoGiven the size of the universe[1], believing there's only one planet hosting biologically evolved organisms, falls a bit short IMHO. That said, it won't change anything knowing there's no one else out there. Actually it would be a little bit frustrating because it would mean that there's nothing more to discover... Biologists might feel limited on this planet alone. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size.2C_age.2C_contents.2C_structure.2C_and_laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size.2C_age.2C_content...
- unclebucknasty 12y ago>it won't change anything knowing there's no one else out there But, we can never know that there's no one else out there, right? We can only discover that there is.
- joe_the_user 12y agoAnother possibility is that this is a "rare moment" in the history of Earth - we've have maybe 3.5 billion years of life while we've had 100K years of being language using animals and 10K years of civilization. Still, perhaps every moment is rare in some way but we have the advantage of having a way to express that.