Posted on 08/31/2004 8:42:10 PM PDT by Indy Pendance
Three planets have been discovered in other solar systems and are the closest ever found to Earth in size, marking an important step in the search for planets that could support life elsewhere in the universe, scientists have announced.
The planets are significantly smaller than the many dozens found so far and might even be rocky, an essential platform for life to evolve. The scientists who discovered the three planets said they were probably too hot to support life themselves, although one has a lukewarm zone that could conceivably support biological organisms.
While the existence of habitable planets elsewhere in the universe has long been hypothesized, the discoveries bring scientists much closer to finding another planet like Earth in another solar system. Given the number of stars in the universe, such planets might well be plentiful.
Many conditions would need to be met for any other planets to support life. Candidates need to be at an optimal distance from a star, and neither too hot nor too cold. They would probably need liquid water and would not trap harmful radiation, as Venus does. Once such a planet has been found, scientists could answer the final question: Was life on Earth a miraculous quirk or the inevitable result of physics, chemistry and celestial geography?
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
You should, soon it might be useful to transport you... :)
In my opinion, you are completely wrong. 99% of the stars in the milky way are unsuitable because they are too big and unstable, in binary systems (no viable planetary orbits), too small (not enough energy), or in a crowded area of the galaxy where planetary catastrophes happen regularily or in a too sparsely dusted area (no iron cores).
Next you need a very rare colision to form an earth moon system. The earth-moon system is more like a spinning dumbell which is a very stable configuration. Most other planets are more like spinning tops which leads to massive climate changes. Also a lot of the earth's crust went into the moon which made for plate techtonics on earth which is necessary for the carbon cycle (creature die and go to the sea floor, then the sea floor goes underneath and the carbon gets spit back up by volcanoes). Next you need all planets to have circular orbits, a very rare circumstance. You need a lot of water for climate stability, but not so much there is no dry land. You probably need tide pools for nutrients to accumulate and not be dispersed in the ocean and that means a very unusual moon (most moons are tiny compared to the planets they orbit). You may need some luck or divine intervention to for a human mind. Dinosaurs had about 300 million years to develope technology, and they just did not have it in them. You need a molten core and a strong magnetic field. No field means the star's solar wind full of protons slowly boils away the atmosphere. My guess is that we are very close to being unique in the milky way. There are billions of galaxies, but earth is very rare.
But what if speed is only relative to where you are physically at which would mean there is no limit to speed since you are actually standing still in your spaceship?
"And then there will be evil people who try to use it to their advantage, and somebody will have to do the dirty work of defeating them as we are doing today."
It will never end. Past, present and future. It's God's will to seperate good from evil. I'd love to be on that cutting edge though, it would be so awesome.
Yeah, Pluto.
But is there oil on them there planets? If so, we need to get Halliburton all over this one. :)
Why infest a new planet?
The Milky Way is one tiny aspect of our universe. We can not comprehend how big the entire universe is, by that, I'm including the Milky Way. There is no way, right now (current tech), what God has placed out there for us to discover. First they thought Europe was the end of the universe, then the world was flat, then the sun revolved around the earth... Have you been past the Milky Way, have you personally seen what's out there? Our backwards views will be laughed at someday.
You fail to take SamAdams main point. In the sense that the planets most close to Earth are simply to far away in terms of light years in that we don't know where they are, have never seen them, and never will.
Here's the headline: Bush Funds Exploratory Mission for Oil: Drives Up Price of Oil Again
Within the text, you'll find: Women, homeless, poor, and minorities hardest hit by this mammoth move from this illegitimate president!
If intelligent life is common to the planets close to earth, then at least some life there should have had technology for at least a few million years which is less than a second in geological time and a few million years should be more than enough time for them to find us. Granted, we have been able to reach out and find them for only a few years, but if it is common, someone should have found us. We are rare, very rare, maybe divinely rare. Further, I was an atheist, until I studied physics in college. Then I realized how unique we really are.
please read my post 35.
A smaller star where the Earth like planet is much closer to it. The star in this case would keep the planet's precession tighter. The only bad thing is small stars tend to have big eruptions every couple of million years which without a very strong magnetic field would fry any life.
or the more likely
Life could arise on a moon orbiting one of these big Jupiter+ size planets we discovered. If the Jupiter size planet is orbiting the star at at distance to give an earth like moon the climate we have it would be very favorable for life (And assuming the moon orbits far enough that it doesn't become like Io). We actually could be the few lifeforms that actually originated from a planet in it's own right.
And it's rotating and moving at speeds we can only imagine. I got in an argument about whether the sun moves or not. Non science folks of course .... Did you ever hear the theory about space being one big bubble? It's really fascinating, I can't explain it, but if you've heard the theory, you'd know what I'm trying to get at. It's like a huge orb, and if you go far enough out, billions and billions of light years, you'll end up at your starting point. It's fun to contemplate this stuff.
Planet Estrich
Planet Estrich
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