Due to the diameter being 60% larger than Earth's diameter, Kepler-452b's ESI score[0] cannot be any higher than 0.85.
It might not be the most earth like exo-planet as Kepler-438b[1] has an ESI score of 0.88.
NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
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Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#72Earlier 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.
As a counter point, it's always possible that a civilization that developed past where we are now would have been masterful at space travel, but not advanced enough to completely figure out a 1400 light year long journey. We're still having hard times figuring how to get squishy meat sacks to Mars without being irradiated to death or creating a launch vehicle made of lead. Besides the engineering problems there's the…
You don't have to figure out a 1400-ly trip to be here. You just ("just") need to be able to move from one star system to the next.
If they took 100 years to get to the next star system 5-ly away and then 500 years to populate that system enough to start a new colonization, that's just ("just") 168,000 years to be here. Given a 2 billion year head start, that's easy.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#73Due to the diameter being 60% larger than Earth's diameter, Kepler-452b's ESI score[0] cannot be any higher than 0.85. It might not be the most earth like exo-planet as Kepler-438b[1] has an ESI score of 0.88. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-438b
Wow, closer than 452b to us and similar size, have we done any focused listening in its direction yet?
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :(
If you could accelerate at 1g, you could reach it in 7 years, in your reference frame.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't interstellar travel just be impossible?
That would be a case of the "great filter" being in the future, no?
I've always read the "great filter" as some kind of mass extinction. I just think that the Fermi paradox gained popularity when everyone thought that both our travel speeds and our population would continue to grow exponentially, making space colonization both inevitable and necessary.
What if we (and every other intelligent life) just level off when we start reaching the limits of physics and the available resources within our own solar system?
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#76At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.
It's jarring to think that if intelligent life were on Kepler 452-b and observing Earth, we're so far away that they would be seeing our "civilizations" in 615 AD: shrinking global population as the old Roman and Byzantine empires are overrun by barbarian hordes and Arab conquest, with some pockets of human progress in China. They would have no way of knowing that the descendants of those squabbling warlords just cooperated to fling a space probe at 36000 MPH past a tiny ball of rock at the edge of our solar system.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#77At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.
If there was an intelligent life form, like humans, it would have expanded into the cosmos and colonized the entire galaxy within only a million years of developing technology. Since we don't see traces of them everywhere, we must presume they don't exist.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#78Meh, given the hype for this press-release, I was hoping for something more extraordinary frankly. Not that finding other exoplanets isn't amazing, just that we're all waiting to find out whether we are alone or not in the universe. Finding out that other advanced civilizations exist out there would bring such an amazing new meaning to life. If I could ask for one wish, it would be to find out if we're alone or not.…
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."
Or, "We're deaf, blind, and isolated."
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#79So wouldn't a good next step be to point a bunch of radio telescopes at this system and start listening?
IIRC, the amount of radio waves leaking from Earth into space has decreased substantially over the last few decades. I wouldn't be surprised if energy efficiency gets to the point where, if a foreign alien civilization notices radio waves from Earth, by the time they transmit a round-trip back at Earth we'll have long since stopped leaking terrestrial radio waves by accident into space.
True, but our radio telescopes have also been improving. The Square Kilometre Array, under construction in Australia, would supposedly be able to detect "an airport radar system on a planet 50 light years away". I suspect that an advanced civilization 500 ly away would still likely leak enough radio for us to detect it with current or near-future technology.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#80At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.
According to transhumanists, all we find there are running server farms.