New Planet Discovered, Could Hold Life

(Special thanks to Kalyna for bringing this up)

New Planet discovered recently, could hold life

For those of you that don't want to live on this planet anymore, there is some good news! Scientists discovered a planet that could hold life, in the right distance of their sun, and hold water.

You probably should start walking now, since the distance is only a mere 500 light years away.

If life is sustainable (and already there), what would that mean to you? To society in general? Opinions?

Slowpoke

I am laughing harder than I should at that... XD

Great! Closer than Gliese 581.

I guess my next question would be Xenomorphs or Facehuggers? The world is your oyster!

If life exists on other planets, such as this newly discovered one, we're likely doomed as a species! ヽ(*・ω・)ﾉ

On the other hand, maybe we're not! (＠益＠.;)ﾉｼ

If we were to find life on another planet. It likely be this



or some type of sulfur oxidizing bacteria or methanogens.


It's not going to look like cat or human.

i hope we find a planet full of zoidbergs

What about a cat-humans?

Ones that are biologically adaptable for human mating rituals....

/dreams

The Mithra home planet.

While I like to be optimistic about this stuff, it should be noted that venus and mars are in the sun's habitable zones. So there are a heck of a lot more factors here but it's a really good candidate, the best we have.



But if there is life there, the gravity is stronger so maybe we'll find a dwarf civilization!

Don't you know, if Earth was 100feet closer (32Meters), the oceans would boil off. Lern2jesus thx. btw wut is elliptical orbit?

That isn't even the most ridiculous thing I've heard about it today...



Also, with all the tossing around of thought experiments, it should be noted that the most probable reason for the lack of evidence of interstellar civilizations is that, even within our galactic neighborhood, there is a very large portion of things that are not actively observed. There is a ton of emptiness, lots of visibility issues, and even the closest stuff is hundreds of light years away, parts of our galaxy being hundreds of thousands of light years away. So, it's not inconceivable that there could be an advanced civilization in our galaxy that is either so distant that the evidence isn't here yet, or obscured by the galactic center as a good portion of our galaxy is.

Not if we all hop onboard Reid Malenfant's train and bootstrap our way to the stars. Learning to survive outside of Earth's protective bubble would ensure effective immortality for the species barring the entire galaxy exploding (although it's speculated that the Milky Way is doing exactly that).

That said, there is the Carter Catastrophe, which dovetails with what the article you linked is vaguely saying.

On the other other hand, the universe is only, what, about 3 times older than Earth? In cosmic terms, it took human life quite a long time to develop. There's really nothing to say that we aren't one of the first intelligent species in our neck of the woods. And intelligence certainly doesn't imply being able to casually break the laws of physics and travel as tachyons. Our science fiction would be considerably more dull if we accepted reality and noted that even reaching Proxima Centauri is a huge undertaking that would likely exceed the lifetime of the engineers who launch the exploration vessel.

Well obviously the actual reason is that they abide by the Prime Directive ^^;

If virtually every relevant episode of Star Trek is any indication, they NEVER follow the prime directive.

Distances like those wouldn't really be a factor though. If some space-faring alien civilization did exist, we'd theoretically be bumping into them or tripping all over their junk. It's less likely that two civilizations, us and some other, are both in similar stages of technological advance since the time it would take to traverse to or even occupy the distance reaches of the galaxy are much smaller compared to the timeline of the galaxy itself. Faster than light travel wouldn't even be necessary. (Argument shamelessly taken from the wiki)

And even though our species took its sweet time evolving into existence, there were some very notable setbacks (5 major ones to be more precise). Perhaps in a safer corner of the universe or more stable plant in the galaxy, if such places exist, intelligent life wouldn't require quite the expansive timesink as ours did.

Good to see that people's priorities are in check.

Kirk would be proud.