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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

#141

Post by eastbayjake »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #139
eastbayjake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coo…

> 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. Is there something uncivilized about the Arab conquest of Byzantine lands? Had the Kepler…

Not a dig at anyone, especially not the Arabs who basically preserved philosophy and mathematics while Europe entered the Dark Ages. My point was simply that Kepler 452b-ians observing Earth would be seeing lots of war and destruction even though we're currently peacefully collaborating among mankind to discover and explore planets.

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

#142

Post by iso8000 »

throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #27

To help out anyone trying to search for stuff, * This exoplanet is now "Kepler-452b" (kepler_name), * In the "Kepler Object of Interest" catalog, it's KOI "K07016.01" (kepoi_name), * Its star is both K07016 and Kepler ID 8311864 (kepid), * In the broader 2MASS sky survey, the star has the id "J19440088+4416392" Sources (catalog search engines), http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/TblView/nph... https://a…

I really like comments that are made to provide some provenance to a news piece. These facts/references should arguably should have been in the text of the article. Double kudos for providing provenance for your provenance.

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

#143

Post by rogeryu »

angersock wrote: post #108
Zelphyr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sheesh. I can't believe after 6000 years TCP is still in use.

At least 25% of it will be over IPv6!

> At least 25% of it will be over IPv6!

We probably will need IPv10 to connect all the dots in the sky!

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

#144

Post by maaku »

vectorjohn wrote: post #117
maaku wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an unfounded presumption. It's like, nobody has considered that advanced life might not even feel a need to live on planets at all. It's expensive to get resources from, and there's a near limitless supply of easy to get smaller debris. Additionally, the difference a 2 billion year head start could make is hard to imagine. One thing that's not hard to imagine is that they don't live in meat bodies for most of…

We have sensitive telescopes. If there was life out there, we would have noticed. You would have astronomy conferences filled with people trying to figure out what all these weird spectra objects are, or trying to decipher all these structured radio observations.

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

#145

Post by maaku »

lukasm wrote: post #85
maaku wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If there is a intelligent live form millions years ahead of us it's most likely AI that doesn't want to make the contact.

And also doesn't want to use any resources, or perform any heat-generating computation?

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

#146

Post by logicfiction »

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.

Plausible, but what would be explanations for sending ourselves back to the stone age instead of carry advanced knowledge along?

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

#147

Post by cletus »

Personally I find this discovery rather sobering.

It's becoming increasingly clear that solar systems are quite common. As our planet detection abilities increase to smaller and smaller planets I believe we'll find more and more of those too. Some of these (like this one) will be in the habitable zone of a star. Some of those assumedly will develop life. Some of those will develop sentient life.

I just picture a timeline like Earth's projected on this planet, which of course has no basis in fact. But imagine a civilization that's had 2 billion years of life longer than ours?

That's a really long time obviously. It's hard to imagine that such a civilization couldn't develop automated methods to populate the local space around them. This is one of the counterarguments to life being common in the universe of course. At 1% of the speed of light you could populate the galaxy with autonomous robots in a "mere" 10 million years.

So our inability to detect anything like this gives weight to the argument that no such starfaring civilization exists or that they're less than ~10 milllion years old.

Was there civilization on this planet and it died out for some reason? We'll probably never know.

As these planets mount up (as I believe they will), it'll further strengthen the idea that we're basically doomed (ie the Great Filter) and further suggest we are a mere cosmic blink.

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

#148

Post by darkmighty »

Gravityloss wrote: post #111

The significance is this: it's very likely that there are a lot more such planets a lot nearer to us. This is because Kepler can only detect planets which lie in the same plane as earth and the star so the planet occults the star. Assuming random distribution, there's probably thousand fold amount of off plane planets. There are 259 stars within about 30 light years. Communication could be conceivable with such dista…

So what's the current fraction of stars that have habitable zone planets? (i.e. how many stars were surveyed?) That would get us an estimate of how many of those 259 might contain Earth-like planets: we use the fraction of orbital those planets that Kepler detects to estimate the total fraction of planets per star, and multiply that by 259.

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

#149

Post by manachar »

staunch wrote: post #82
eastbayjake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coo…

I hope they were recording the whole time and upload the videos to YouTube. I can't wait to watch Hannibal on the Pyrenees From Space.mp4

Hannibal lived 247 – 183/182/181 BC. That's a few hundred years earlier than 615 AD.

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

#150

Post by Cyph0n »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #139
eastbayjake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coo…

> 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. Is there something uncivilized about the Arab conquest of Byzantine lands? Had the Kepler…

It is more proper to refer to them as Muslims, not Arabs. The whole point of Islam was to unite everyone under the same ideology. That's why it's called the Islamic civilization.

Source: I'm both an Arab and a Muslim.

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