FSTDT Forums
Community => Science and Technology => Topic started by: dpareja on April 17, 2014, 10:50:53 pm
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/earth-sized-planet-found-in-star-s-habitable-zone-1.2613794
Just maybe.
For the first time, an Earth-sized planet has been found in the habitable zone of a star — the right distance away to host liquid water and possibly life.
Kepler-186f has a radius just 10 per cent larger than that of the Earth, researchers reported in a paper published online in the journal Science on Thursday. That means that it is likely to have a solid, rocky surface, like Earth.
The bad news for people wanting to go there?
The new planet, discovered by the Kepler space telescope, is about 500 light years (about 4,700 trillion kilometres) away from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. It is the outermost of five planets orbiting a small, cool red dwarf star, and it completes its orbit every 130 days, reported researchers led by planetary scientist Elisa Quintana at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.
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To be honest habitable earth like planets are a dime a dozen nowadays.
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To be honest habitable earth like planets are a dime a dozen nowadays.
Actually no. Right size and right zone is rare, I think this one is the first.
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Okay Hawking, get that warp drive finished ASAP.
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Planet Goldilocks and the Red Dwarf. Sounds better than Kepler186f. This so wonderful they finally found one like Earth. At the rate of improvement in finding these tiny, low albedo objects, maybe they will prove to be a "dime a dozen", relatively speaking.
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Fine, how bout "20 bucks a dozen"
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We should keep in mind that life on other planets might be unimaginably different from anything we could imagine.
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If only because it would be both disappointing and boring were it otherwise :P
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I'm still hoping for first contact in my lifetime. Yes, I know the odds and science. Doesn't mean I stop hoping.
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I'm still hoping for first contact in my lifetime. Yes, I know the odds and science. Doesn't mean I stop hoping.
I'm just hoping that the first contact will not end with the first interplanetary war for humanity.
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I'm still hoping for first contact in my lifetime. Yes, I know the odds and science. Doesn't mean I stop hoping.
I'm just hoping that the first contact will not end with the first interplanetary war for humanity.
Nah. We're fucking DUMB, but I don't think we're that stupid.
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I'm still hoping for first contact in my lifetime. Yes, I know the odds and science. Doesn't mean I stop hoping.
I'm just hoping that the first contact will not end with the first interplanetary war for humanity.
Nah. We're fucking DUMB, but I don't think we're that stupid.
a) Sometimes we are incredibly stupid.
b) It is not necessarily us that start the war. We might just meet a species that is doing colonialism on an intergalactic scale or eradicates other species due to religious or philosophical reasons or something.
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I'm just curious about the timespan between "first contact" and "first interspecies frick frack".
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I don't care about first contact (Okay I do mostly to prove my bible thumping classmate with the same name as my ex wrong) all I want is for space colonization to be a thing (Cause this will lead to my biggest dream ever to join a space navy, yes I'm still obsessed with that.) Also what is the percentile for life-bearing planets (I know it's based on the whole Goldie locks zone thing) do we have some kind of equation or something for it?
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The Drake Equation.
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Also what is the percentile for life-bearing planets (I know it's based on the whole Goldie locks zone thing) do we have some kind of equation or something for it?
The Drake Equation.
The Drake equation takes the probability of a planet bearing life as given, it doesn't calculate it. The number Drake originally used is that between one half and one fifth of all stars will have planets, and that each star with planets will have between one and five planets capable of bearing life (Drake further assumes that 100% of planets capable of bearing life will do so). This adds up to between 0.2 and 2.5 planets with life per star (you can divide that by the average number of planets per star to get the per planet probability, but Drake did not supply that number).
Of course, Drake's educated guesses are just that, guesses, and are not really made more legitimate by the fact he managed to get an equation named after him.
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To Drake's credit, it's slightly better than pulling numbers out of one's backside.