New Planet Discovered, "Earth's Bigger Cousin"

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exactly... people are so concerned with "are we alone?" to think of things like "hang on, maybe if we arent alone, they dont have the same physiology.. i mean, hay, they live the other side of the ****ing universe" >_>

i guess its the human condition, we think we are so great, that if we arent alone, they have to be like us >_>
 
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Mad_AxMan said:
i guess its the human condition, we think we are so great, that if we arent alone, they have to be like us >_>
Amen..
The entire reason why i've always thought start trek was retarted.. :S
Each and every alien species has the same fysical build as us.. 2 legs, 2 arms in the same way we have em, with almost the only difference being an ugly head with antenna's and stuff on em..

Now.. i'm not a trekkie, so perhaps i'm not entirely right, but most of em do.. :rolleyes:
 
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That's true, but that was Gene Rodenberry's dream: other humanoid cultures. Two arms, two legs, two eyes, a head... He wanted creatures that the population could accept and relate to.

I don't think it's fair to bash a fictional show because you don't like the way the creator thought... You may think it's "retarted," but that doesn't make it wrong.

I agree, our race is stuck-up, unimaginative and restricted only to what they know for "a fact," but that has nothing to do with a friggin' TV show.
 
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Wolf Devil said:
I agree, our race is stuck-up, unimaginative and restricted only to what they know for "a fact," but that has nothing to do with a friggin' TV show.
I don't think we're unimaginative and stuck-up, but I do agree that we are restricted to what we know. We don't know of any other organic model than carbon chemistry. Since we cannot prove another base for life than carbon, we cannot believe in creatures that can miraculously exist with another element as its base. This CAN change. That's why scientists have open minds. They do not condemn such beliefs as impossible, but they cannot say they are true because there is no available evidence (at least, not in our little nook in the galaxy).

However, pertaining to the original topic. I've been learning about exo-planets for a little while, as I took 2 planetary science courses this past term at university. I find it incredibly interesting that terrestrial planets are being found near other stars, suggesting, perhaps, that our system was not as much an exception as we originally thought.

However, I am more intrigued to hear what Terrestrial Planet Finder and Kepler will discover when they are set in motion. Both, I believe, are supposed to look for planets in the "habitable zone", which stresses the temperature of the planet as well as its atmospheric composition. What you really have to consider, though, is that we need to be more specific than that when it comes to the "habitable" planets that are found. One like the terrestrial planet mentioned by DragonDude is simply too large. Even if the temperature were nominal the size isn't. A planet that massive would hold onto too much of an atmosphere for humanoid life (or so we speculate). A planet too small (.5 Earth radii) would lose too much of its atmosphere, and, again, would not be conducive to humanoid life (again, "or so we speculate").

I really have to admire the intricacy that is going into these exo-planet searches, as well as some of the current findings (like how the hell a Jupiter-sized gas giant can exist closer to its star than Mercury is to our Sun...aboslutely intriguing!).
 
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I take it evolution would work the same way on that planet if the conditions were the same as here. If that was the case, then the organisms would look a lot like us.

But seeing how the planet is rather different from ours, in terms of temperature and landscape. Life would look very different there.
 

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EVIL_GOKU said:
Randy....nothing can survive 200º-400º Celsius
anywayz I was looking at the photo and saw something weird

and here it is with a little brightness

those lines or what ever they are look like the ghost's from Final Fantasy 8th spirit
This is how you know you've played too much FF...
 
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Wolf Devil said:
our race is stuck-up, unimaginative and restricted only to what they know for "a fact,"
Well, that'll definately change when we do discover other life in the Universe. Whether it means our end or theirs (Ender's Game?), something's gonna change.

Majin_You said:
I don't think we're unimaginative and stuck-up, but I do agree that we are restricted to what we know. We don't know of any other organic model than carbon chemistry. Since we cannot prove another base for life than carbon, we cannot believe in creatures that can miraculously exist with another element as its base. This CAN change.
Great statement, Majin_You. I get the feeling that lots of people are saying scientists and researchers aren't being imaginative and creative, looking for life under every rock on planets that we've only detected by the wobble they induce on their sun. We have no other model of life, so what else are we supposed to look for? There's infinate other possibilities, science isn't about throwing a dart at a wall and saying "let's look for that one." Our definitions change, and what we believe is possible changes, but not overnight.

For the people who don't believe that there is other life in the Universe, intelligent life able to communicate across the stars, check out the Drake Equation. One of the important things about this new discovery is that it increases the value in the Drake Equation, fp, the percent of stars that have planets around them. It's estimated to be from 20% to 50%, and this new discovery pushes more towards 50% than anything before. Perhaps even more than half of the stars in the Universe have planets, and are not mostly binary star systems, incapable of forming planets, as we previously thought. If anyone has wondered what the the table of numbers in my signature is, it's a ranking of my contributions to SETI@home, and a few other projects. SETI@home is a program you install on your computer, and it helps the SETI institute scan radio telescope data in hopes of finding a signal from intelligent, communicating life like ourselves.

The problem with that method, and just about any other method, is the vastness of our Galaxy, and the Universe. Say, for example, tomorrow SETI finally finds their golden signal. A signal that is proven without a doubt to be an interception of an alien signal. They pinpoint it to an identified star 5,000 light years away. If we were to point our telescopes to this star, we would see it there, hanging in the sky. However, we would be receiving the light that emanated from this star 5,000 years ago! The radio signal would be from even longer ago (the speed of radio signals vary, but they're certainly much slower than the speed of light). By the time we're getting these messages, the alien civilizations that sent them could have risen and fallen ten times over.

We've been an intelligent, communication civilization for about 60 years. So if there are any civilizations within that distance listening for radio signals, they'd be receiving radio transmissions of the original War of the Worlds, war reports of WWII, and anything up until now, depending on how far away (if they're in that range) they are from us.

Despite those problems, radio signals has been thought of as the best way to detect (intelligent) life for awhile now. Certainly with these great distances, sending humans is completely impossible. Anyone up for a 3,000 year-long voyage? Cryogenics is an option, but even that doesn't stop aging completely, if I remember correctly. And radio signal detection solves the identity crisis of what intelligent life truly is, which is what some of you have been debating, I see. It doesn't matter what the creatures look like, what their body structure is based upon, or how the radio signals they sent form their language (though that would pose a problem once a signal is proven to be unnatural and alien in nature), just that they develop any form of radio communication technology.

Atleast with the discovery of new planets, planets like this one, when and if SETI recieves the indisputable signal, we'll be able to pop the coordinates into a computer and go, "Oh, yeah, the second planet from star Gliese 876, we know that one!"
 
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Wolf Devil said:
Yeah, I never really did like thinking about that... It's like every time we look into the sky, all we see is the past...... Which is scarey, and only proves how limited humans are, in spite of this new discovery.

Randy, NASA isn't going to "beam" anything... It's already proven that transporters will never exist.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3811785.stm

Take a look at that.

Anyhoo..

Statements like "our race is unimaginitive" have no meaning, because we are our own frame of reference. We are the most imaginative, intelligent, and selfless race that we know of.

Anyway--astronomy is similar to computer science. It's insanely hard to predict things for a fact to any significant timeframe, because we constantly make leaps and strides in our understanding/technology.
 
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The thing is, STAR TREK Transporters are impossible, because after something is dematerlalized, as in the atoms are broken down at the base level for transport, we have nothing that allows us to put it back together correctly. Some theory or other. Also something about the guy who said this couldn't be done as having a fictional component that actually allows for the device to work the way you see it work. But nevermind that.

Other forms of teleportations and stuff, read above in Alea's post. There's plenty of stuff. Crazy Quantum theorys, String Theory. All kinda crap. Alot of math, so my brain ain't up to it...But it's still cool to consider.

All sorts of FTL(Faster Than Light) ideas too. Wormholes & ****. Using High levels of gravitational force to bend space itself around a ship, essentially Warp.

Maybe an Inertia base propulsion system. I dunno, theres are ALOT of possibilities.
 
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Sentient said:
Amen..
The entire reason why i've always thought start trek was retarted.. :S
Each and every alien species has the same fysical build as us.. 2 legs, 2 arms in the same way we have em, with almost the only difference being an ugly head with antenna's and stuff on em..

Now.. i'm not a trekkie, so perhaps i'm not entirely right, but most of em do.. :rolleyes:
And thats why i like star trek voyager, its different, its not only 2 legs and 2 arms, some look alot different

and who says teleportation is impossible in the future?
 
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Or wives.... *big neon sign overhead saying "hillbilly"*

Thank you, Arthros. That's exactly what I was saying. We wont ever be able to beam up people from the surface of a planet, however we are likely to get something similar only it'll be for holograms and such (which are likely to be real.. in the non-tangible sense, anyways, ala Darth Sidious figure in the prequals).
 
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It's silly to say "This is impossible," "That is impossible," because it's been said countless times before about things we "could never do," but do now. Maybe you can't forsee it, but I can guarantee you in a hundred years, our great grandchildren will be doing things we never thought anybody could.
 
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SailorAlea said:
Maybe you can't forsee it, but I can guarantee you in a hundred years, our great grandchildren will be doing things we never thought anybody could.
Indeed. Who ever thought we'd be discovering planets light years away when we were only just discovering Neptune?
 
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SailorAlea said:
It's silly to say "This is impossible," "That is impossible," because it's been said countless times before about things we "could never do," but do now. Maybe you can't forsee it, but I can guarantee you in a hundred years, our great grandchildren will be doing things we never thought anybody could.

Well. I shoudl have Clarrified by saying "Currently Impossible."
 
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DragonDude said:
Indeed. Who ever thought we'd be discovering planets light years away when we were only just discovering Neptune?
Which, if I might add, is still considered, by many, to be one of the biggest triumphs of modern physics. Neptune wasn't observed by chance like many of the other planets were (a la Uranus). It was proposed that a planet might be affecting the orbit of Uranus. Through a physical model, the position of Neptune's orbit was calculated and then, though I think this part is obvious, Neptune was observed as predicted by the model.

Science is always developing - that much should be clear by the fact that you can carry around hours and hours worth of music in a device that is smaller than your wallet. That's science, too. So, if you can see how quickly the electronics industry is evolving for the every-day person, why not have that apply to theoretical physics and extra-terrestrial exploration?

Having said that, there is a clear increase in the quality of the instruments used in the exploration of space. I'd highly recommend checking out the pictures Cassini is taking of Saturn. There's never been any better. Bear in mind, of course, that Saturn, on average, is somewhere around 1.3x10^9 km from Earth (it's likely more than that). That's 1.3 billion kilometers, and we're recieving crisp images of storm activity on Saturn, as well as new close-ups of the complex ring system.

Now, tell me that's not scientific development!
 

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