Odds Favor Discovery of Earth-Like Exoplanet in 2013 90
Earth-like exoplanets have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years; it's exciting to think that there's life — or even just life-sustaining conditions — on planets other than Earth, whether near by (on Mars) or much farther away (orbiting Vega). Projects like NASA's Kepler, and the ground-based HARPS, attempt to spot planets outside our solar system of all kinds. These exoplanet discoveries have been ramping up lately, and so has sorting of the discovered planets by size and other characteristics; the odds are looking good, say astronomers quoted by Space.com, that an Earth-like planet will be found this year. Abel Mendez runs the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, and UC Berkeley astromer Geoff Marcy looks for planets as part of the Kepler team; they explain in the article why they think 2013 is an auspicious one for planet hunters.
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Re:Forget about it. (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was a kid, walking on the moon was 'impossible', never going to happen.
Now as an adult, walking on the moon is 'impossible', never going to happen again.
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You want to "seal up some if it's caves"??
It's = it is.
Learn this.
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When I was a kid, walking on the moon was 'impossible', never going to happen.
Now as an adult, walking on the moon is 'impossible', never going to happen again.
Ya, sucks Michael Jackson died.
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Eh, I'd say it's good odds we will have humans back on the moon inside 30 years, even if it is a staggering waste of resources to send people there. My bet is one of the emerging superpowers does it to prove they can, much like we did, but I'd also bet they'd try to one-up us (well, actually much more than one-up) by throwing up tons of supplies first so that their teams can spend a much longer time there.
Much better than focusing on human rated flights (which won't be significantly less expensive until we
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Sure we do (Score:5, Informative)
Getting to other stars isn't actually terribly difficult, as far as we can currently tell. Only getting there quickly presents a problem. Build a large, self-sufficient "space station"/world-ship, accelerate it to say 0.1% of light speed (only about 20x faster than Voyager 1), and then wait for a few thousand years until it reaches it's destination. Sure, accelerating it with current technology gets really expensive really quickly, and it'll be the distant descendents of the original crew who reach the destination, but the only real difficulty is creating a long-term viable self-contained ecosystem. And considering that the one serious attempt we've made, Biosphere 2, was actually remarkably successful for a first attempt, we could probably have that problem licked within a few decades if we really wanted to. All we'd need is some sufficiently motivating reason to do so, which is where the real problem lies.
Quite similar to getting to the moon actually - basic rocketry technology has been around for almost a thousand years, but it wasn't until we got into a technological pissing contest (aka The Cold War) with Russia that we actually got off the planet and eventually to the Moon. We've never returned because, well, why would we? There's nothing there worth the expense of the trip, and until we reach a point where its tactical or strategic value is worth the expense it's only the dreamers and visionaries that appreciate its value, and sadly they don't control near enough wealth to make it happen.
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I was 10yo when they landed on the Moon and like all school boys in the 60's I dreamed of being an astronaut. At that time telescopes could not deal with the random distortions
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it'll be the distant descendants of the original crew who reach the destination
Not if the crew consists of frozen embryos. Millions of them would fit in a litre bottle, and could travel for centuries with no air, water or food.
We would need very advanced technology to gestate, birth and raise them, but there is no theoretical reason that couldn't be achieved within a few centuries from now.
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Actually we don't have much real data on the long-term viability of human cryogenics. Sure we can freeze embryos for years, even decades, but while biological activity stops chemical activity only slows down - it's quite possible that over the course of centuries the embryos would all have degraded beyond viability. And gestating them at the other end of the journey is far beyond any current technology - the uterus and umbilical cord are some of the most sophisticated organs in the body, and we've yet to e
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You've got to be kidding me.
You want to " wait for a few thousand years until it reaches it's destination"?
So, you want to wait until "it is destination", right?
It's = it is.
Learn this.
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Congratulations, you managed to waste space and time calling out minor typo. Are you proud of yourself?
Believe it or not many of us know the difference perfectly well, in fact I used "its" correctly in the same post, but it's just not worth wasting the attention to continuously run high-fidelity grammar check on what I'm typing on a random message board. Typically I'm composing several words ahead of what my fingers are typing and yes, occasionally a homonym slips through. Deal with it. Life's too short
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Getting to other stars isn't that hard; with modern technology we can probably do it in a half-century or so, maybe more. The problem is that this is too long for humans, with our short lifespans; the solution is simple: cryogenics. If you freeze the crew for most of the trip, then they won't age significantly during the voyage. The only problem after that is that hundreds of years will have passed when the crew returns to Earth (if they return at all), but if you pick people without any significant fami
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"Today we have 'impossible' Star Trek tech in our pockets. "
We have a fairly believable simulation of star trek in our pockets. But communicators didn't need any infrastructure to span thousands of miles, even through solid rock [youtube.com]. We've got a long way to go before that happens.
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Our communicators may not have the range that Star Trek communicators did, but they have far more functions than just talking like a walkie-talkie: full-color touchscreens, text messaging (so the other party doesn't have to drop what they're doing to engage you in conversation), internet browsing, looking up various information (I have a weather application on mine I use a lot to see the forecast and current temperature), voice mail, playing music, watching videos, playing games, turn-by-turn navigation, et
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Not to mention FTL "subspace" communications... our real devices are limited by the speed of light, obstacles (the relative position of the Enterprise versus on-planet communicators never seemed to be an issue... your body can drop a cellphone signal by 10-20dB), as well as our lack of Star Trek's advanced power sources -- anything capable of powering a tiny Phaser-1 wouldn't be hard pressed to deliver on much more range and battery life in a smartphone/communicator. Sure, the pocket device evolved in dozen
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You do not need a warp drive or propellantless drive or whatever if all you want is to get to Alpha Centauri or Tau Ceti.
Nuclear pulse propulsion [wikipedia.org] or anti-matter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion is good enough. The problem is it takes a really long time to get there e.g. 100 years to Alpha Centauri. You have to spend time accelerating then you need to decelerate once you reach the target. However you could have waystations along the way to make each leg of the trip shorter: e.g. the Oort cloud [wikipedia.org] is a sphe
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And it is interesting that statues made thousands of years ago depict people wearing what looks like spacesuit helmets. Long before Star Trek, so what was the inspiration for that? Weird.
So, out of all the different millions of riffs on a theme of stylised human depicted by thousands of human cultures across the millennia, what are the chances that one later culture would look back at the work of an earlier culture and see something familiar (perhaps mystical) in the depiction?
(the answer is: somewhat less improbable than visitations by a humanoid alien species who are advanced enough to cross space-time, but still wear 1960s-era Earth spacesuits.)
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Wellll, ya know, (Score:2)
since we can see farther and clearer than ever before, it's kinda likely that if there's a habitable world out there, we're more likely than ever to find it.
Meanwhile, in other news, farmers announce that if it's not to dry, not to wet, and just the right temperatures, they could harvest bumper crops this year.
Please stand by while we compile a more complete list of inane almost predictions.
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It is not like farmers predictions. The progress we have been making is quite impressive, as there are 800 know exoplanets by now, and more are getting discovered.
Scientific discoveries come in batches. There is nothing for a long time, then suddenly the lull ends and a breakthrough is achieved. Lot of similar discoveries occur simultaneously. This prediction is from people who know their stuff. Even though they may not come true this year it is still good prediction.
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One more inane prediction then: Humanity will die out in the near scale at geological time.
--
If malice isn't enough to describe the outcome, revert to stupidity
This year... (Score:1)
Is the year of linux on the desktop! ...all predictions that are made every year. What other predictions are we going to repeat?
Has a high likelihood of finding earth-like planets!
We'll be able to 3D print an entire car!
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an entire *flying* car
Poor definitions (Score:3)
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I think many people don't understand how tilted the odds are against life.
It's likely that we would need to search billions of "earth like" planets to find one that had any life potential, let alone one where that potential has given rise to complex organisms.
Re:Poor definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, we have no idea how tilted the odds are against life. What we do know:
- On the conditions that existed on Earth in its early history, forming organic compounds was more-or-less inevitable.
- Life exists on Earth under really unusual conditions, like highly acidic underground lakes.
- There's some evidence (but no conclusive proof) of there once having been microbes on Mars.
It's quite possible life is rare. It's also quite possible life is common. We simply have no way of knowing one way or the other right now.
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A planet can be Earth-like in many aspects. It can have an Earth-like orbit, an Earth-like mass, an Earth-like atmosphere, an Earth-like composition, an Earth-like biosphere, etc. Right now, we can only "easily" measure the two first, so those are the aspects of Earth-like we usually refer to. We can try to look for closer resemblances after we have some rough resemblances to start from. This is a field of science which is only 17 years old.
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In fairness having an Earth-like atmosphere is probably a pretty good indicator of life more-or-less as we know it. Free oxygen is highly reactive and unlikely to be present in large quantities in an atmosphere unless something is continuously producing it. And as far as I know photosynthesis is the only known process that would continue producing free oxygen for hundreds of millions of years, any more transient process would be vanishingly unlikely to be happening just as we happen to look.
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Mars may have had life once, it seems to have had liquid water, but it wasn't big enough to keep a decent atmosphere, and was on the outer edge of the habitable zone. Venus could have supported life, but it had a runaway greenhouse effect.
Of the two rocks that orbit between those to edges of the habitable zone, one is way too small to have an atmosphere ever,, so we are down to one habitable planet in this system. (It clearly supports life, though whether there is any intelligence is not certain (a sample o
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It's probably because the popular media talks way too much about Mars but then never actually discusses its physical characteristics much. Venus is almost the size of the Earth, and has 0.9g gravity. Mars is quite small, and only has 1/3g gravity. It's really not that much better than the Moon. If Venus weren't so inhospitable, we wouldn't even be wasting much time on Mars (the USSR sent some robotic spacecraft to Venus back in the 70s, and they only lasted maybe an hour before they were rendered inoper
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When you consider dry land area, Mars is only slightly smaller then Earth.
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Isn't the reason Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere because it doesn't have a magnetic field to deflect solar wind?
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast31jan_1/ [nasa.gov]
Re:Poor definitions (Score:5, Interesting)
That is probably the larger contributor, but even without the solar wind it's atmosphere would likely be much thinner - it only has ~1/3 the surface gravity, and it falls off much faster with altitude. It's smaller size probably also contributed significantly to faster cooling and the associated shut-down of its magnetic dynamo subsequent exposure to the solar-wind. Evidence suggests that Mars did in fact once have a substantial magnetic field. Getting a massive chunk of (presumably) cold material embedded in it's mantle probably didn't help things either - Olympus Mons appears to be the result of the shockwave from a truly massive impact on the opposite side of the planet. Lets all thank Mars for taking the bullet for us, it would've made "the dinosaur killer" look like a pea-shooter in comparison.
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Plate tectonics also play a role. Atmosphere gets fixated and precipitated by various geo/biological processes. We wouldn't have much atmosphere either if the Earth's crust weren't getting constantly recycled. Still, the ultimate cause is the same; Mars's core is not active enough.
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Mars is not earth-like enough to support life. It can't even hang onto an atmosphere; IIRC its atmosphere is about 1/100 as dense as ours. It has no magnetosphere to protect it from solar winds. It's also a bit too small, and only has 1/3 of earth's gravity (which may be another reason it can't hold its atmosphere). Maybe Mars had life at one point, but it's a dead, barren world now.
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Odds (Score:2)
What do the evens favor?
Re:Odds (Score:4, Funny)
the heavens favor the believers.
Plenty of time (Score:2)
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Human civilization is only a few thousand years old, and we have a few million to sort stuff out (barring any major disasters). We may never need warp drive to explore the universe, developing generation ships or becoming immortal cyborgs so the travel time is not an issue.
Human civilization is over 100 thousand years old, recorded history is only like 4k or so old.
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Earth-like lights (Score:2)
From what I understand of the process, astronomers measure the drop in light as a planet passes between a star and us to determine its size and distance from said star. So what happens in the case of an Earth like planet with an advanced civilization [adafruit.com], or perhaps if there is a lot of volcanic activity? Wouldn't that alter the expected result, and screw up their calculations?
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Learn some science.
Neither volcanoes nor streetlights put out .01% as much light as the sun.
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Learn some science.
Neither volcanoes nor streetlights put out .01% as much light as the sun.
Which according to your comment would mean that the light difference is only 20dB down in power from the starlight.
Additionally, the planet's light spectra would be different than the light spectra of the star.
Combine these two facts and I believe his question still stands even if he doesn't "know science".
Would the sensor be able to detect the difference?
If background noise at the telescope is at -120dBm (or less with cooling), then is it possible to detect a difference at a specific frequency?
Re:Earth-like lights (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm trying to, asshole. Why do you think I'm asking a question?
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There are actually a few ways that planets are detected. The dimming of the star as a planet passes in front of it is one method. This only works if the planet passes exactly between us and the star while we're looking. This can only happen is the planetary system is aligned the right way (more or less side-on) to us. It also tends to favour detecting larger planets with fast orbits (an alien looking at our solar system would have to wait one year to see the Earth pass the sun twice, and decades for som
Outdated technique (Score:5, Informative)
Not really - the atmosphere is an incredibly thin skin around a rocky planet and it's composition can only be detected by the use of *extremely* sensitive instruments. Imagine passing a pea in front of a street light several miles away - it'll be *far* easier to detect the shadow of the pea than the condition of its skin.
And actually that's a rather obsolete method for detecting planets - you can only detect those whose orbital plane happens to intersect the Earth - a tiny percentage since the alignment is more or less random. More modern techniques detect planets via the wobble they introduce in the motion of their parent star - for example our sun actually orbits a point lying about 1/2 to 2 solar radii away from its center - the barycenter (center of mass) of our solar system, which constantly changes as the massive outer planets move through their orbits. Our own planet introduces a much smaller (since we're far closer and less massive) but higher frequency (since our year is much, much shorter) wobble as well. By detecting similar wobbles in other stars we can make a good estimate about the masses and distances of its planets, and the planet doesn't have to pass directly between its star and us to be detected, allowing us to detect far more planets.
Analyzing atmospheric composition is more challenging, and I believe current techniques are limited to planets that pass directly between us and their star - essentially a planet with no atmosphere will dim the light slightly as it blocks a tiny percentage of it, an atmosphere will also introduce a *very* tiny spectral shift since some of the starlight that reaches us will have passed through the planet's atmosphere and been partially absorbed based on it's chemical composition. Theoretically a similar technique could be used for out-of-plane planets by analyzing reflected light, but our current instruments aren't nearly sensitive enough to distinguish between the miniscule amount of light reflected from a planet and the raging inferno of its star. Even if we could, it would likely be extremely difficult to distinguish between the spectrum shift introduced by the atmosphere and the shift introduced from surface reflection.
Not really outdated, only complemented (Score:2)
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It doesn't make much of a difference to Kepler.
Kepler measures the light level over time, and uses the amount of obstructed time to make most of it's calculations. It does also use the total light output difference to determine the size of the planet (really the ratio of the size of the planet to the size of the star) - but the error bars are pretty big anyway, way more than the total light output of dark side of the Earth.
The only way that Kepler would miss the planet all together was if the alien civiliz
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I think the neatest thing to do (if an extrasolar planet can be resolved enough) is to get a spectrograph of that planet's atmosphere if and when it happens to pass in front of it's star.
If there's lots of free oxygen, you've got plant life or something very much akin to it. Not much in nature produces reactive oxygen like that other than photosynthesis. Otherwise that oxygen would be tied up in carbon dioxide or some other chemicals. Of course the plant life producing all that oxygen could all be microbial
Re:Year of the Earth-Like Planet in the year 2013: (Score:4, Funny)
But the real question is what their IPv6 address range is. We need to know now since packets will take so long.
A change of world views (Score:5, Interesting)
In my eyes this fact, if it gets confirmed by subsequent studies, is the biggest discovery about the universe since the theory of relativity. When I grew up I was taught there were 9 planets in orbit around the sun, and the existence of (or at least abundance of) exoplanets where largely speculative, with the first observations just being confirmed during the 90's. When my kids grow up they'll be taught there are thousands of exoplanets in our very vicinity and millions in the galaxy. And there are free-floating bodies as well, rouge planets that are not gravitationally bound to a star! How cool isn't that? To top it all, we will soon have instruments sensitive enough to measure the very spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere and look for biosignatures. If it finds free oxygen and methane, that's a very strong indication of life as we know it. (Since oxygen is highly reactive, it tends to show up in compounds such as carbon or silicon dioxide. Biologic activity is one possible supply of free oxygen.) The search for extra-terrestrial life, long belonging to the realm of science fiction, has turned to a serious and highly active field of research in just a few years.
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I think if a habitable planet is found with strong indications of life and is within 10 or so light years this will capture the public imagination. It should give impetus for projects to develop an interstellar probe in the next century or so. So would a break through in fusion power which might propel the probe.
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What I think is so cool about these discoveries is, in the words of astronomer Steve Vogt, "the emerging view that virtually every star has planets". Think about this for a while. Look at all the stars in the sky, and imagine every single one of them having a planetary system. Suddenly it doesn't seem to much of a stretch thinking some of them might be habitable, or even harbour some kind of life.
Odd. Even as a kid, I always thought there were LOTS of other planets out there. If this insignificant star has 9 planets (8 now, classifications change), then surely other star systems must have at _least_ one other planet. I would be pretty surprised to find a star with a thousand planets, but anywhere from one to twenty (roughly) planets should be incredibly common.
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