At 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.
NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
151–160 of 307 posts
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#152Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Therefore inter-species conflicts are resolved by mass/energy available. Any civilization that doesn't expand to interstellar levels of power is subject to the whims of those that do. If you can expand, you must.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#154I want answers to three questions before I get excited: 1. Does it have active plate tectonics? 2. Does it have a working deep carbon cycle? 3. Has its atmosphere hung on to its hydrogen (that is, has it managed not to lose it all to high-altitude UV splitting and solar wind)? If the answer to all three of those is "yes" then this suddenly gets a lot more interesting, whether or not we can see any free oxygen in the…
And if there are billions of them, then what are the odds that some of them would have plate tectonics, a deep carbon cycle and hydrogen?
Seem pretty high to me.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you could accelerate at 1 g , you could reach it in 7 years, in your reference frame.
Wait for the observer... isnt it.... 1800 / 17.... 100 years. So that means, a baby could reach the exoplanet, before it dies of old age, on a spaceship travelling 99% the speed of light, which can theoretically built right now. How did you arrive at your calculation of 7 years? Thanks!
[1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.h...
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#156To 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…
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Any of the hypotheses we discuss in this thread (whether they are over-confidently stated as facts or marked as speculative) are inevitably deficient due to data derived from a sample size of one.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#158Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#159Earlier 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. 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.
If they were observing us today, they'd still see plenty of war and destruction.
It just so happens that a fraction of the worlds population lives under "peaceful" conditions. That's not universally true.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if it only took them 100 years to get to a star system 5 ly away, I would be amazed and impressed by a society that would be okay with investing in and working on at minimum a 105 year mission. Perhaps they live much much longer than we do :)
>working on at minimum a 105 year mission Cathedral building in the middle-ages was a multi-generational 80+ year affair and some of the Pyramids took even longer IIRC. So societies were/are definitely capable of working on ~100 year missions :)
Maybe a generation ship needs to have some sort of 'cathedral-in-the-sky' religion connotation in order for us to commit to building it. Sounds like an interesting idea for a sci-fi plot!