Free Republic

Astronomers are preparing to announce the discovery of a potentially habitable second Earth orbiting a nearby star, it has been claimed. Last month, sources leaked news that the European Southern Observatory (ESO) had spotted an alien world orbiting Proxima Centauri, our closest stellar neighbour. An anonymous source from the ESO told German publication Der Spiegel the discovery is the closest habitable planet to Earth, which means we could reach it within our lifetime. But the astonishing finding was not officially announced, sparking furious speculation that the second Earth has deliberately been kept a secret. Now the ESO is set to...

“A prior indigenous technological species might have arisen on ancient Earth or another body, such as a pre-greenhouse Venus or a wet Mars,” he wrote. ... Earth’s plate tectonics would effectively have “erased” the traces of a civilization that lived billions of years ago. Venus is in the grip of a severe greenhouse effect and also undergoes similar “resurfacing” that would scour it clean of artifacts. This leaves just a handful of places where archaeologists might find traces of a lost extraterrestrial civilization. “Remaining indigenous technosignatures might be expected to be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be...