Earlier quoted context omitted.
The planet is 1,400 light-years away. They'd be seeing earth at around 600AD.
by the time our today's signal reaches that planet, we ourselves will already be there to listen to it :)
FTL Travel?
NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
261–270 of 307 posts
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#262At 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.
The engineer in me says that it's overwhelmingly likely that there's nothing alive there. The little boy in me so wants me to be wrong.
> The engineer in me says that it's overwhelmingly likely that there's nothing alive there.
Our planet has life in all kinds of niches. Why would an Earth-like planet not be overwhelmingly likely to have life on it? (I am an engineer also...)
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have sensitive telescopes. If there was life out there, we would have noticed. I'm sorry, but that's way off. Our current telescopes can't even see the majority of the exoplanets in our galaxy; we are made aware of their existence by observing the behavior of their host star (wobbling/dimming). Unless something is extremely close, unfathomably enormous, or emitting/reflecting large amounts of electromagnetic rad…
They can see stars. There wouldn't be stars in a type 2 civilization. There would be amorphous blackbody spectra which we do not see.
That assumes that civilizations derive power by encasing their host star in a Dyson sphere, which is not a foregone conclusion; that prediction was based on our current understanding if technology. Think of Huygens who imagined that Venusians sailed the seas on ships held together with hempen rope.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#264The 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…
>> Assuming random distribution (of plane of planets), Has there been any research on this? I have no actual insight, but I'd guess the plane of the galaxy would affect plane of stellar rotation and perhaps also planetary disk alignment.
The milky way galaxy is about 200,000 light years in diameter, but only about 200 light years thick.
Given this thickness, I imagine you'd need to look beyond the 200-light-year range to notice a significant influence of the plane of the galaxy on the distribution of stars (and planets).
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#265The 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…
>There are 259 stars within about 30 light years. Communication could be conceivable with such distances...
Wouldn't that mean a minimum of 60 years to get a reply to any message?
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#266The 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 we would only be able to detect those [non cross planar with earth ] planets if their orbit occluded another background star [ not their own sun ] .. wonder how rare that is.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (aga…
You just described the movie Vanilla Sky
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#268The 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…
>There are 259 stars within about 30 light years. Communication could be conceivable with such distances... Wouldn't that mean a minimum of 60 years to get a reply to any message?
Terrible latency but still possible to conceive communicating. Also 60 years would be the upper bound for those stars, unless you are suggesting crafting a reply takes a significant amount of time.
Which it may. No need to rush a reply with that time lag.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#269Earlier 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…
If they have the ability to telescope us before we do. They can probably guess that technology accelerates. In fact I feel more pessimistic of the human's future as we found more and more such older planets -- If their million or billion years older civilization cannot reach us, then we might not reach out that far as well in the next billion year, or ever.
That thought makes me sad.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google on "great oxygen catastrophe" and prepare for an eye-opening experience. (Note that neither Mars nor Venus have active plate tectonics. The surface of Venus melts every couple of hundred million years due to trapped heat, while Mars has no magnetosphere to speak of ...)
You omit a key point. The oxygen event (initial uplift from near zero at 2.3Ga) is not directly related to plate tectonics. Instead, plate tectonics appears to have helped the oxygen boost at 1Ga: increased volcanic activity released large stores of phosphorus, which is required for photosynthesis, which produces oxygen.
You're attributing a statement of causality to me that I never made; I merely said that plate tectonics would make an earth-like exoplanet more interesting -- for exactly the reason you note: it appears to be a prerequisite for an oxygenation event.