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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

#171

Post by codeshaman »

SneakerXZ wrote: post #161
phantarch wrote: post #5

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.

I am surprised more people don't believe all this is just a trick because we base everything on our knowledge what if something out there is tricking us? We see the universe through a telescope and other sensors. But if something puts something in front of it, you will see different reality. It is like if you use binoculars and I put a fake image in front of you, you could start believing there is something else. It…

Totally agree with you. There are so many possibilities of evolution besides building high tech spaceships and conquering planets and stuff.

Imagine how much more wisdom (besides technological advancement) the average humans will posses in just 200 years (provided things evolve like they have been evolving during the last century minus the wars ).

What wisdom and knowledge will we have in 1000, 2000, 50000 years (again, provided we are still alive) ?

Maybe there is no need to physically travel through light years of space, maybe the 'truth' is much closer - right inside our own minds.

In just a couple of decades we'll be able to build simulations which simulate all our senses and are just as real as our 'current' Universe - enter there and take a pill which makes you 'forget' about this reality and you can basically live another life without knowing about your current one.

What if our current life is the result of such a 'game' which we entered and forgot about the 'outer' life. What if we're level 64 deep in such a simulation within simulation ? :)

So many possibilities, but hopefully we'll somehow figure them out ..

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

#172

Post by pdonis »

phantarch wrote: post #64
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.

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…

> 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.

But we've only been working on that for a few decades. 2 billion years is a lot longer. If there is a civilization there at all, it's extremely improbable that it hasn't figured out how to do exploration on a scale of thousands of light-years.

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

#173

Post by codeshaman »

guiomie wrote: post #165

"385-day orbit" ... Can't wait to have to take into consideration different "year" zone in my code.

> Can't wait to have to take into consideration different "year" zone in my code.

I guess with Kepler you're safe for the next couple of thousand years, unless we find something much closer.

In theory there should be thousands of such planets within 30 light years so who knows, maybe we will have to start thinking about that soon :)

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

#174

Post by codewithcheese »

maaku wrote: post #144
vectorjohn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We just found the first planet that is somewhat similar 1400 light years away... and you think our 'sensitive telescopes' would have definitely discovered all possible life in the universe if it existed???

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

#177

Post by phantarch »

antognini wrote: post #131
toomuchtodo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What would be necessary for a more comprehensive survey?

If the planet is not transiting there are two other ways to detect it: radial velocity measurements, and direct imaging. In the radial velocity technique you measure the wobble of the star due to the gravitational pull of the planet. This also requires that the planet be somewhat edge-on, but the requirement isn't nearly as strict as with the transit method. The difficulty is that Earth size planets have very little…

What kind of resolution is possible with direct imaging at 1400 ly away? I would imagine that it's probably milliseconds of arc within the field of vision of any telescope, so how close could we actually look at the planet?

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

#178

Post by oberstein »

ilurk wrote: post #125

It feels extremely frustrating to know -- not just wonder but to know exactly where -- that there are planets similar to our own, which have a very high probability of harboring life, yet to be condemned to never be able to take a really close look at it. No FTL travel, no working cryonics, no mind-upload tech. Just harsh reality.

Donate to the relevant parties. Unless you're already very old or very sick, it's hard to say you're condemned. A lot can happen in the next 40 years.

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

#179

Post by omonra »

Cyph0n wrote: post #150
tomjakubowski wrote: post #139

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. 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.

Was anybody but Arabs involved in the conquest of the early 7th century? Ie I'm sure other people took on Islam afterwards but he was talking about a specific point in history.

We don't call the Spanish conquest of the Americas a Christian one even though they were Christians who ultimately converted everybody to Christianity.

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

#180

Post by guimarin »

johnchristopher wrote: post #113
phantarch wrote: post #5

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.

There was an kind of on-topic post on imgur about that today: [The Fermi paradox: We're pretty much screwed...]( http://imgur.com/gallery/Wtog9 )

I find myself thinking that the existance of Dark Energy/Dark Matter is the solution to the fermi paradox. there is some kind of energy creating system which creates dark matter. This matter is no good for normal matter so it is transported far away from stars/galaxies and dumped. This would probably be true if we could create a physics model that can explain like 1% of Dark Matter occurring naturaly. Then we just assume that other species have discovered how to create a ton of energy with Dark Matter as the by-product. We haven't been able to observe them for the same reasons our telescopes can't see the New Horizons spacecraft out by Pluto, just too small. And as far as observing communications. It's likely that all true interstellar communication on frequencies we could understand are sent with a targeted focus, like a laser, rather than a blast. Think of all our deep space equipment which has their uplink bits pointed toward earth.
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