And So, Earth #2 is Discovered
 

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In an interesting development, a planet quite similar to Earth has been discovered. Being 20 light years away, it is relatively close considering how massive the universe is.

The planet is 12,000km in diameter, compared to Earth at 8,000km. The temperature estimated to range between 32 & 104 degrees Fahrenheit, yet years only take 14 days! Sneeze and you'll miss a season, pract near =p Finally, something passes the Goldilocks Test.

The atmosphere could be similar, but gravity is twice that of Earth's, supposedly.
I think this quote does a nice job of summing up the volume of this discovery. Living there is a distant hope, but the main victory is the fact that we've found something very similar to Earth. This is a huge find.

Fuckin' awesome.

So when Earth dies, all can just migrate to that place. Victory for science~

I want images of this planet or I refuse to believe it.

Yeah, seeing how we are still only capable of sending something through space at no faster than a few thousand kilometers per hour and Gilese is 1.89210568 × 1014 kilometers away, and that fact that they're not even 100% certain that Gilese can sustain life at all...it's not worth me getting excited for in my lifetime.

Maybe in my great-great-great-great-great grandchildrens' lifetimes, but not mine.

Think about this: on that planet, you would weigh twice as much as you do now. I'm not sure If I could handle weighing 300lbs. You could develop heart troubles from the increased gravitational pull as your heart struggles to pump blood around your body.

That star is older, so when Earth dies, I don't think it'd be the best place to move. This is really cool though. I hope it pans out. I want people migrating off this planet soon.

Given the rate at which the planet makes a revolution around its "sun", and the intensified gravity, I'd still be skeptical of life on this new planet. It's atmospheric conditions may be similar to our own, but this doesn't mean the geophysical properties can nurture life. The accelerated orbit would likely mean that this planet doesn't experience "seasons" in the way we're accustomed.

If there is life, however, it is perhaps primitive, protozoa and bacteria that can endure themselves in hypergravity. That discovery would still be monumental, though. The only downside is that it could potentially destroy the concept of theology as it currently stands.

If gravity is twice that of Earth's, it would be quite uncomfortable living there.

Then 30% of America is fucked XD

Seriously though, I'm not very suprised something like this was eventually found, but at least it boosts the odds of Earth2 becoming a reality. Now we just need pics so that we can rag on how fat the planet is.

Years only take 14 days? Damm...

Maybe they have zombies living in that planet!! ZOMBIE WORLD!!

Irregardless of what sorts of life forms we'll find (if any) on there, they've had billions of years to evolve. Might find something interesting~

The gravity & seasonal variation shouldn't have a bearing on life. The main deciding factor is the atmospheric make-up. Given the proper container, anything can happen. It's not like we have a sweet-spot on gravity, or our 365 day years are ideal (heck, they used to be much shorter), but rather we've been existing in it for a loooong time.

amazing, this only boost my belief that there is another type of life other than ourselves. The chances that there isn't is just becoming lower.

See, its not a matter of belief, but rather a matter of odds of Intelligent life being on other planets. It's entirely way too unlikely for there to be an entire ecosystem full of life, and not have that sort of occurance occur ANYWHERE else in the entire universe.

Try this on for odds: "The Statistics", taken from http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/Extrat...ial%20life.htm,


I completely acknowledge this is both very simple and very faltered as far as scientific standards of testing and probability goes, but that itself goes to show that even with a simple example of how much or few the odds of life developing on other planets are, with those results showing multi billion possibilities, that the chances are higher then we might realize.

So, is there Intelligent Life out there? That's what we need to discover :)

If the planet is 25% larger than Earth and there are only 14 days to a year, doesn't it mean that planet is spinning waaaay to fucking fast?

(they spinnin' nigga! they spinnin'!)

SPINNAZ~

THEY DON'T STOP

Not sure about the articles Gech linked, but the one I read on Yahoo mentioned how they're not sure if the planet even rotates about its axis. I imagine the days they're talking about are Earth days.

Wow. Looks very interesting. I honestly have the belief that there are other planets similar to our own. I mean, with the so many possibilities out there in the universe, it just seems easy to assume that there may be something, even remotely close. Guess it will take a few hundred more years, and avoiding total destruction of our own planet, to find out.

I'm sure we could train ourselves to survive at 2x gravity. I mean, Goku trained at like 100x gravity.

If we were to train at 1.6 times normal gravity, our power levels would be over NINE THOUSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND

:scouter br8ks:

14-day years and therefore 7-day transitions from freezing to 104 degrees and back again? It sure won't be sustaining any Earthly lifeforms, to be certain.

Perhaps microbes and bacteria, at a stretch.

Space stuff is really cool... but it's just frustrating that we aren't technologically advanced enough to be able to study this stuff up-close and in person. It's like the carrot on a string that tempts the horse forever and ever.

It could be like Mercury where it's rotation is longer than it's revolution.


This is indeed exciting. Finally the shortlived TV series Earth 2 will be realized!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...x-IC01Last.png

Wanted for Questioning.

I was hoping the planet in question would be orbiting Alpha Centauri. It would have been closer, though the mind worms could have been a problem.

Still, this is actually fairly interesting. Both the fact that they've found such a planet and the fact that they can find such a planet. It's not like you can use a telescope and look around for planets. I remember one of my professor last term making a comment on how little info you have to work with when trying to find extrasolar planets and the convoluted, unintuitive and indirect methods that have to be used. I don't remember much of it though, astrophysics is not my favorite part of physics.

The severity of the seasonal change would depend how fast the planet itself is spinning, the angle it's spinning at and how eliptical its solar orbit is. If it were spinning at right angles to it's orbit and in a perfect circle, it would have no seasons at all.

Venus isn't inhabitable at all though, really. Its surface temperature hangs around 450 degrees Celsius on average, and about 97% of its atmosphere is CO2. There is literally no oxygen, to boot.

The size isn't a huge deal, but moreso the average temperature and atmospherical make-up.

I propose we name it Z'ha'dum.

Oh, wait, would that be a bad thing. "Earth 2" wound up being the Vorlon homeworld anyway.

It sounds like this planet wouldn't really be a viable option for relocation, but it does give me hope that we'll find somewhere to go once we've leeched this planet's resources to the point that it's "leave or die." 20 light years is still a damn long way away. So, who's up for getting that pesky FTL flight up and running?

I guess this is what they would classify as a type "M" planet on Star Trek. I wonder if Picard ever visited Gliese.

Yea in about... 7 billion years if I remember correctly.

(You know the whole Sun gets big and swallows up Earth, Venus, Mercury, Mars before laughing at everyone else and becoming a White Dwarf thing).

No no, much better: Sephiroth.

*run away*

I have to say that made me laugh. :D

Fun Fact #2: The Russians landed a probe on Venus quite some time ago, only a few pictures were transmitted back to Earth before the probe melted/died a few hours later.

Also, our orbital eccentricity doesn't cause the seasons on Earth, only our axis tilt.

Lol.

And yeah Goku trained at 100x gravity, we will pwn this planet.

We'll all pretty much die of heart failure, on that planet. The physical stress placed on our hearts alone would do the deed. Then again, any enduring souls would embark upon our next and very rapid evolutionary transition. Nice find.

Well that was an interesting read, tis a shame that we woun't actually learn of anything useful about such planets in our life time :(

Why is it that FTL is just imaginary numbers btw? I can't be arsed to google it :p

I imagine during any sort of journey to an extrasolar planet there would be ample opportunity for people to train for the harsher conditions (assuming we have a gravity chamber so our muscles could become over nine thooooooooousand times stronger).

Who said life on other planets must follow the same laws of physics and whatnot that we follow? Maybe they don't even need water to have life? Who knows? Don't you think our scope of science as of today (although we call it advance and modern) COULD in fact be primitive and limited? There are so many things we can't explain, or we just don't know, and the scientists are all jumping at the "if there's water, there's possibly life!!" idea.

Maybe there can be neon-based life forms, or potassium-permanganate based life-forms, or ethereal life forms made of mass that doesn't even exist in our world that we can't comprehend out there. We all think we are so smart that everything in the universe must fit our definition of what is what.
We don't know enough as humans to scientifically calculate these things out; we can only leave that up to our imaginations and ponder the possiblities... hmmm.....

Please don't confuse laws of physics, with astrobiology. The laws of physics are understood to be universal (at least what we understand of them).

What it Earth 2's opinion of Halo?

This is an interesting bit of news.
It's strange though, that the first thing most people were thinking is "is it the new earth? Can it sustain life? Can we live there", which I find both humorous and kind of frightening at the same time.

With an educated guess, it will probably be at the earliest possible day about another hundred years before we can find a planet that's even remotely close to earth's habitat, rotation, revolution, and the distance from surface to the star it orbits.

And even then, we have no idea what the geological implications could be. Perhaps it's a hollow planet or something else from some science-fiction B-movie.

The chances of finding a planet just like ours are extremely low, if not impossible. Though, granted with scientific research going as fast as it has in the past forty to sixty years (which is pretty fast in my opinion, due to the growth ratio in all of recorded history), we may one day be able to terraform our own planets, and create our own solar-systems, galaxies, and possibly a universe where everyone has a mustache.

Civilian transport would be ridiculous, seeing as the so-called "space needle" being developed would take three months just to take civilians with little-to-no training just outside the atmosphere.

We don't have to worry about losing our planet for a few billion years at best. By then we may not even exist, or even then, we may evolve to something completely different than we really are.

The whole situation really raises more questions than anything.

Benjamin,

If there's a chance for something to happen, in an infinnate universe such as ours, it will.

I remember hearing that someone did some calculations on the percentage of chance that evolution took the route that it did on this planet. Yes the chance is so small you'd think it would've never happened. Yet here we are, talking on an internet message board about it ;)

Infinite Universe != Infinite mass. The universe is expanding, not creating infinite number of stars/planets. In a hundred billion years from now, the universe will probably dim out of existence. I think a lot of you would be interested in seeing the Drake Equation:

THe laws of physics are understood to be universal, like you said, at least what we understand of them. Maybe it isn't. Everything we know is NOT absolute when it comes to the universe. Theories and hypothesises are all we have based on the limited science we've developed.

Some people just think whatever scientists throw at them is absolute and that's that. No it isnt! Perhaps some concrete science like meterology or human biology has weight to it, BUT NOT astrobiology (I didn't know there was such a thing; how silly). THink for yourself, imagine what happens when scientists are wrong even in those concrete sciences (which happened quite a few times in the past century alone).

They're understood to be universal, yes, or else we wouldn't understand even 1/10th of astrophysics that we understand today. Are we calling them universal? No. Is there a reason to believe that physics behaves wildly at any given place in the universe? Not at all. We know what we know because we're able to make such a leap of faith.

And yes, there have been instances in which physicists have been proven wrong, Newton was proven wrong by Einstein, for instance, but that just means we can figure out when we are wrong. It's pretty self-defeating if we just go around saying we don't know much of anything, and the universe is one giant wildcard because we only know physics that affects us here on Earth; thus somehow can't apply anywhere else in the universe.

Since we're both on the same page, don't you think astrobiology is sort of a silly science, as it is based purely on non-concrete evidence and theories and "what-ifs"? Some stuff in other sciences are sort of theoretical as well; but should everyone begin to make assumptions solely based on those?

Theoretical science, as it's title suggests, shouldn't be taken for truth. Unfortunately, many do.