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NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

nasa.gov

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Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#51

Post by ratsimihah »

ginko wrote: post #31
qrendel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.

It could also be that there was a technologically advanced civilization which destroyed itself.

Maybe we are them. We used to live there, and conditions reached a point when we had to leave, and we came to present Earth. Haha.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#52

Post by sena »

phkahler wrote: post #38

How big is it? They have 2 numbers: >> Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. And then: >> Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger. I noticed the lack of "b" on that second one, but they seem to be talking about a single planet.

Kepler-452b is the planet, without 'b' is the star.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#53

Post by Ripsaw »

phkahler wrote: post #38

How big is it? They have 2 numbers: >> Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. And then: >> Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger. I noticed the lack of "b" on that second one, but they seem to be talking about a single planet.

Kepler-452 is a star. Kepler-452b is a planet.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#54

Post by aruggirello »

phkahler wrote: post #38

How big is it? They have 2 numbers: >> Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. And then: >> Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger. I noticed the lack of "b" on that second one, but they seem to be talking about a single planet.

Kepler-452b is the planet; Kepler-452 is the star around which it is orbiting.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#55

Post by [deleted] »

phkahler wrote: post #38

How big is it? They have 2 numbers: >> Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. And then: >> Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger. I noticed the lack of "b" on that second one, but they seem to be talking about a single planet.

[deleted]

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#56

Post by qrendel »

DuskStar wrote: post #40
qrendel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.

Apparently it has a diameter 60% larger than that of the Earth, and so if we assume it has the same density as the Earth it would have about 16m/s^2 gravity on the surface, and an orbital velocity of around 12km/s @ ~1000km (in comparison to the Earth, where a 1000km circular orbit is closer to 7km/s). This means that merely achieving orbit would be approximately as difficult as launching a probe on a Hohmann transfe…

To colonize or seed life you don't need to launch huge space vehicles with enough life support to maintain a breeding population, though. You can just launch some kind of self-replicating microbes capable of directing themselves into the forms of life you want to encourage over time. The precise ability to do this would depend on your current state of technology, but we're pretty close to developing full blown synthetic biology and genetic engineering ourselves, so it's hard to imagine they'd need to be more than a few hundred years more advanced than us at most. Microbes can be engineered to be immune to most dangers from space travel as well, similar to tardigrades.

To head off the common rebuttal of "maybe they wouldn't have any interest in it," with more advanced technology smaller and smaller groups of individuals would be capable of instituting such a project, to the point where any high school kid with a synthetic biology kit and some toy rocketry kits could colonize the entire universe (owing to relativistic effects). You'd have to assume their society underwent some kind of massive convergence of social norms away from any individuality such that no few members of their species ever had both the capability and desire.

The entire plan is mostly laid out by: http://www.tedxvienna.at/watch/why-aim-for-the-stars-when-th...

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#57

Post by lberger »

ratsimihah wrote: post #51
ginko wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also be that there was a technologically advanced civilization which destroyed itself.

Maybe we are them. We used to live there, and conditions reached a point when we had to leave, and we came to present Earth. Haha.

Good sci-fi material here.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#58

Post by GeneralMayhem »

camikazeg wrote: post #34
uptown wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read: "Where are all the aliens?" http://qz.com/452452/where-are-all-the-aliens/ "We’re rare, we’re first, or we’re fucked."

Can't interstellar travel just be impossible?

That would be a case of the "great filter" being in the future, no?

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#59

Post by evilduck »

ginko wrote: post #31
qrendel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.

It could also be that there was a technologically advanced civilization which destroyed itself.

It could also just be their resources were insufficient and they plateaued or fizzled out before escaping their own planet was possible.

Or that the distances and difficulty of transporting anything very large or complex between star systems turns out to be just too great of an engineering problem for any life form. The energy required to move a life-sustaining amount of mass between stars is mind-boggling huge and beyond our own technological capabilities for the foreseeable future ( we only anticipate interstellar life is a possibility by assuming our technological growth curve will continue unimpeded and then guessing there's life out there further along tha us, which may not be accurate or possible).

Or that they are indeed spreading but doing it in a way undetectable to our technologies we're looking with and we just didn't come up lucky enough to be directly contacted by them in their spread (yet?).

Or maybe they developed a Matrix-like utopia, a self-maintaining and long lasting support system and stopped outward appearing progress?

Or going in another direction, perhaps we really are inside a simulation and $life_bearing_planet is set to 1.

The hypotheticals are nearly endless and not necessarily due to overtly negative outcomes.

Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

#60

Post by ionwake »

lucozade wrote: post #43
mentos wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.universetoday.com/15403/how-long-would-it-take-to...

So best case about 28,000 years. Which is a bugger as I'm out that week.

I think there is a theory that we can travel nearly the speed of light , but yeah even then we are a millennia away :(
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