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Hundreds of New Planet Candidates


Waspie_Dwarf

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NASA Releases Kepler Survey Catalog with Hundreds of New Planet Candidates

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NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star's habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.

This is the most comprehensive and detailed catalog release of candidate exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, from Kepler’s first four years of data. It’s also the final catalog from the spacecraft’s view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation.

arrow3.gif  Read More: NASA

 

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Very exciting!! Wishing  I could hop in my millennium falcon and jaunt over there.

Edited by BadChadB33
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I don't think it is clear from the article what kinds of stars that these planets orbit. Most often when you read about "earth-like" planets it is planets around red dwarfs where the habitable zone is very close to the star. That is a bit disappointing I think since it is debatable whether life can evolve there, or if the planets can even keep an atmosphere, due to the high radiation from the star. Would be more interesting if they found an earthlike planet in the habitable zone around a yellow star like the sun.

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Neat find! Probably will turn up nothing but you never know.

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Good, I hope we will be in time, as the Onlies will be running out of food soon.

Edited by Almighty Evan
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2 hours ago, Adampadum123 said:

The Drake equation is interesting the possibility of life is out there

Only human arrogance and some religions, would think we are alone in the Universe.

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13 minutes ago, paperdyer said:

Only human arrogance and some religions, would think we are alone in the Universe.

I'm trying to think of a religion that does not acknowledge god(s), demons, angels and other nonhuman entities in the Universe....

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3 hours ago, paperdyer said:

Only human arrogance and some religions, would think we are alone in the Universe.

Total and utter rubbish!!

There are some scientists, a huge minority admittedly, that believe the Rare Earth Hypothesis :

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In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth Hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth (and, subsequently, human intelligence) required an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances. The hypothesis argues that complex extraterrestrial life is a very improbable phenomenon and likely to be extremely rare. The term "Rare Earth" originates from Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (2000), a book by Peter Ward, a geologist and paleontologist, and Donald E. Brownlee, an astronomer and astrobiologist, both faculty members at the University of Washington.

Source: wikipedia

 

Others accept the idea of the Great Filter:

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With no evidence of intelligent life other than ourselves, it appears that the process of starting with a star and ending with "advanced explosive lasting life" must be unlikely. This implies that at least one step in this process must be improbable

Source: wikipedia

These ideas are NOT the product of human arrogance but an attempt to explain one simple observation... the fact that despite decades of looking we have not found one single piece of evidence for any other intelligent civilisations out there.

What IS the product of human arrogance is simply dismissing an idea because it is no0t the same as your own, particular when the total amount of evidence you have to support your belief is exactly zero.

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1 hour ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

What IS the product of human arrogance is simply dismissing an idea because it is not the same as your own, particular when the total amount of evidence you have to support your belief is exactly zero.

Of course, the part after your comma in the above statement generally defines religion/faith, which likely does not fit well at all with the respondee's philosophy.

Had not read of the Great Filter before, thank you. Very nice post.

Edited by Almighty Evan
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9 hours ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

Total and utter rubbish!!

There are some scientists, a huge minority admittedly, that believe the Rare Earth Hypothesis :

Source: wikipedia

 

Others accept the idea of the Great Filter:

Source: wikipedia

These ideas are NOT the product of human arrogance but an attempt to explain one simple observation... the fact that despite decades of looking we have not found one single piece of evidence for any other intelligent civilisations out there.

What IS the product of human arrogance is simply dismissing an idea because it is no0t the same as your own, particular when the total amount of evidence you have to support your belief is exactly zero.

Did you seriously just cite Wikipedia? That's funny! :D

 

"Earth-like"..."Earth size".

So what? The real human arrogance is our belief that the life we will eventually find out there will even remotely resemble life on earth or require earth-like conditions to have developed.

Life on earth evolved to adapt to the conditions here. Life on other celestial bodies will have evolved to suit said bodies conditions.

"Earth-like" need not apply. ;)

 

 

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14 hours ago, Krater said:

Did you seriously just cite Wikipedia? That's funny! :D

 

"Earth-like"..."Earth size".

So what? The real human arrogance is our belief that the life we will eventually find out there will even remotely resemble life on earth or require earth-like conditions to have developed.

Life on earth evolved to adapt to the conditions here. Life on other celestial bodies will have evolved to suit said bodies conditions.

"Earth-like" need not apply. ;)

 

 

Correct. "Life-like" planets would be a lesser arrogance.

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"Earth-like" confers with the Rare Earth Hypothesis.  If it's so unfathomably rare, then the astronomically improbability of a planet capable of cultivating an advanced species like ours is probably "Earth-like" as a consequence.

Not having discovered another advanced civilization isn't evidence that we're alone in the universe, it's evidence that our technological capability of even finding another advanced civilization in the universe is virtually nil. 

Even the conditions for determining an intelligent species is somewhat arrogant.   Our embedded tendency to think we're smarter than others would have to ask:  "Yeah but can they make spaceships?"   A species can be far more intelligent than we are, and yet never build a single machine.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I don't think we have a solid grasp on what it means to be alive or conscious. We only have a vague idea of what that seems to look like here on Earth.

 

We would probably not even recognize an alien conscious being if it was staring us in the face. The human race is stupidly arrogant.

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  • 3 weeks later...

how did such a nice topic about exoplanet turn into religious debate? So much could be learned if people stick to topics. 

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Its worth a read of the article to know how these planets were detected and how long it took to collect the data.  This is a tiny slice of the sky searching for planets with an orbit in the right plane to obscure light from the star.    This method finds only a fraction of the planetary bodies out there.  You know this is a big technical advance.  A few years back, we could only find planets by the Doppler effect; the periodic lengthening or compression of the wave length of light a star  emits as it moves around the center of mass of the star and a large planet.   That method found a lot of gas giant planets, as massive as Jupiter more or less. Observations and calculation power increase and new methods become available.  Sometimes we know what to do and are waiting for technology to be able to produce the required detection instrument.  Now we are finding smaller planets, some of them rocky.

We know what elements are common in the universe and a lot about how they behave.   We know a lot about stellar and planetary formation.   We know where to look for rocky planets. We know the temperature range congenial to carbon compounds, we know the usefulness of water.  It may not be all down to arrogance it may be a matter looking for what is most likely based on what we know. That is how knowledge is gathered.

When you talk about unrecognizable or undetectable life forms, you leave the discussion and enter one of faith.  When you toss off silicon based life forms as an alternative because you heard it or read it, you give it too much credence.  People have spent a lot of hours and maybe significant portions of  careers working out the chemistry and environment of how that might happen.  It is not an easy alternative, and there is less silicon in the universe than carbon.  Not impossible, but difficult.

As for the Drake equation, the big question is where are they?  They may be out there, the discovery waiting for our detection methods to improve.  You have been schooled in the talk of all of the radio signal noise we have been broadcasting into space, and that any aliens within 100 light years would be picking up our signals.  Much of our detection efforts have been based on that premise.  Revise your thinking. The attenuation to noise is not so far as our earlier predictions based on signal strength, so folks out there might not have picked up much unless it was a direct beam that just happened to intersect their detectors.

Worse yet, for our ability to detect advanced civilizations by radio signatures, our own era of blanket transmissions is closing.  The most powerful signals in the past were the DEW line radars and presumably the Russian equivalent.  TV and Radio transmissions were less powerful. Think about it, radiating a lot of power all over the place is less efficient than directing it from the source to the user.  Cable TV, internet, and cell phones have greatly reduced planetary emissions.  The era of blanket transmission at its peak lasted for less than 50 years.  Thus any advanced civilization that developed along a parallel course to ours would be undetectable if its technology were only 50-100 years ahead of our own.  We can't find somebody exactly like us if they have a 100 year head start, much less races and civilizations that developed differently.

You can speculate or you can help.  You can speed activities up by supporting the efforts, letters to respective governments signalling your support for these sorts of projects can help them move faster.

 

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