Alan Boyle writes: Astronomers say they've found the first planet beyond our solar system that could have the right size and setting to sustain life as we know it, only 20 light-years from Earth. "My own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent," Steven Vogt, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told reporters today. "I have almost no doubt about it." The discovery, published online in The Astrophysical Journal, is the result of 11 years of observations at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Astronomers participating in the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey detected the planet by tracking the faint gravitational wobbles it produced in its parent star. Now they say there may well be many more planets out there like this one. "The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common," Vogt said in a news release.
"Many more planets like this one"? If we believe that the Universe is infinite then there's an infinite number of planets like that one, like Earth. And if there's an infinite supply of Earth-like planets then of course there will be life on some of them. And due to the nature of infinite, if there's life of some of them then there will be an infinite number of planets like Earth where life has evolved.
We should not discount the infinate number of individual occurrances that had to happen over the billions of years for earth to be become what it is. Earth. Often imitated, yet to be duplicated.
Even if there was an Earth like planet with life in only one in a thousand galaxies since there's an infinite number of galaxies it still means there's an infinite number of planets with life.
Probable yet...where are all these people? Almost anything can be beat down with large enough numbers. Just going by what we actually know... There have been a couple thousand extrasolar planets discovered, like the one initiating this thread. A number of those have been held up similar to how this one is here...none has withstood full scrutiny...sounds like they got the size right this time.
Oh shit...I apologize i had not even read the article. Although it has todays date, this is Gliese 581g. This info is 8 years old. It already has been discounted. Actually except for the excitable astrophysicist saying he is 100% sure there is life on that planet...even that article calls the probablity in question. Don't worry...there will be more
It took the light 20 years to get here from there so on the day the discovery was made it was already 20 years old.
Only 20 lightyears away... It might as well be on the other side of the universe. Astronomer speculate there are a trillion other livable planets in the universe. There are not an infinite amount of planets in this universe. We're much better off escaping into a virtual world where time can be easily distorted; giving us a perceived near immortality, it's the only way we'll ever truly reach the limits of our will. 1 second in this reality could be 100 years in a virtual world that works exactly the same. I doubt we'll ever get a living person outside of this solar system due to constraining technology. Our ecologically volatile planet will see to that, its only a matter of time between cataclysmic events and at this moment, light speed travel is still just a figment of our imagination after we've been here over 200,000 years. Think of Gas giants and other planets in our solar system, the weather does not change for hundreds or even thousands of years at a time, ours varies day to day. All it takes is one wrong factor and boom, life as complex as us can't inhabit the planet. One asteroid, one serious solar flare, a gamma ray burst could flash fry us, the temperatures could rise too much for technology to be of concern, or they could fall too much. That's not to mention that we could be our own deaths through weapons of war. We have all kinds of means to make land uninhabitable, masses of water undrinkable, and for hundreds of years potentially thousands if it were desired. We haven't observed signs of other intelligent life in the universe at all, for all we know, we are the most intelligent life in the universe. Perhaps we've lived longer and grown more complex than any other intelligent life, as the universe has too many factors to snuff out complex intelligent life before they can get to the stars, making us a doomed statistical anomaly. Or perhaps life has long past evolved us and has died out, an ancient race of hyper-intelligent aliens, extinct as the dodo, their entire empire returned to the dust leaving no trace. Either way, we haven't observed extraterrestrial intelligent life, in the case that they are super intelligent we surmise they've long been dead, or in the case that we are the most intelligent life ever; we are likely to die to what killed all other intelligent life before it could reach the stars.
Those "gas giant" planets actually have and do protect earth from an onslaught of colliders. Over and above that, our solar system is almost perfectly positioned in the galactic plane where radiation during this time of humans is at its lowest level. There are enumerable things that make earth unique and life-sustaining. Add to that our positioning in the Milky way actually gives us the ability to observe the sky and make these "discoveries" as most places could not sustain life and/or the brightness of objects would extremely curtail such observations. Earth and our time here is pretty special.
I was high thinking about this the other day and I’ve come to the conclusion that the universe is not infinite it has to stop somewhere even if it’s to far for us to realize it. It can’t really go on FOREVER.... can it? Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
We havnt and are not able to even explore our deepest parts of oceans on earth.. We're thousands of years away from understanding our own solar system.. And the dangers are too great to explore dimensional travel.
The theory behind black holes, if accurate proves other dimensions exist.. If the power of a sun imploding on itself can rip a hole in space and create a vacuum strong enough that light nor pure energy or matter can escape is proof enough for me we're far from understanding what's beyond us as a society
Cliff note version... Other planets in our solar system are positioned(in a position) to protect us. Our solar system is positioned (in a position) to protect us. We are in a position to recognize that we are being protected.