what do you think about the new "earth" that has been found ?

Question

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6589157.stm

do u think talking apes are living on it? lol a bit extreme but you never know,could we fly up there and have a closer look or is it to far?

Answer 1

i'll assume you know nothing about science and space flight. put it this way, you are never going to visit that planet or any other planet. no one living on the planet right now will never get there other than in dreams. if you have any offspring, none of them are going to have a chance of seeing it either. perhaps 200 years from now, man may be able to journey to the closet neighboring star system, but that's a long shot, and a lot closer than all the extra-solar planets being discovered through the neghboring galaxy in the past few years.

sorry to break your bubble up, but based on your question, you seem like a day-dreamer who has no grasp on practical and legit space travel and what is truly possible with man's known grasp of science.

it's nice that you think about this, but you need to read up on real science in terms of the limitations of man in space, solar radiation, how weak and impotent current rockets are in terms of navigating through our own solar system, not to mention going out of it. Star Trek, Star Wars, and just about 98 percent of all sci-fi movies and novels are nothing more than fantasty with a few dashes of real science thrown in to make it seem legit and engrossing.

We've only sent men to the Moon since the beginning of space exploration in the 1950s. Going to the moon is the equvalent of going down to the corner block of your neighborhood on foot while going to another solar system is like walking from your home town in the USA to another continent, such as Asia or Africa, on foot only.

I suggest you go to a legit site called Bad Astronomy and read every article you can by Phil Plait if you are truly interested in astronomy and space travel. www.badastronomy.com

the upcoming missions to the Moon and the planet Mars are highly questionable in themselves and they are the closet celestial objects to us. Some people think a mission to Mars will lead to disaster because the taxing effects of such a long journey. The human body could be severely damaged or killed while simply travelling to it through solar radiation or a form of space cabin fever.

Answer 2

Fascinating!

No, it won't have talking apes on it, like our own planet. The reason is even if they started out with the same unicellular life (very, very, very unlikely) then billions of years of evolution on their planet would yield very different results. If they have animals that swim in the sea we might see some shaped like dolphins or sharks because the same environment will shape creatures living in it by the same rules of hydrodynamics. In biological terms its called convergent evolution.

We could fly up there and have a look but it won't be a manned mission and it won't be any time soon. Even a probe by today's technology would take hundreds of years to get there.

This really is pretty exciting. An extrasolar planet with liquid water. Of all the places in the Universe we've seen, this has the best chance of harbouring alien life.

Answer 3

If they step foot on the planet, they'd probably be dragged off by aliens and never heard from again. If there is life, the greedy people of Earth would try and invade the planet and it's inhabitants and their resources. Just like there is prejudice on Earth, there will be hatred for those people who are different than them. Predjudice leads to wars.
Until humans get over thier hatred for their OWN fellow humans and start taking care of their own planet turf, they will never be ready. If some people fear other people becasue of skin color, or race, just you wait till they come in counter with someone that doesn't even LOOK like a human. They'd probably think as humans, they have the right to enslave the natives and display them in zoos. The leader of the natives would get pissed and blow up Earth if they had the technology. We would be the evil aliens, not them.

Besides, if we do move to Mars, or this other planet, we'd just destroy it like we're destroying Earth and when the aliens tell us to leave on account of this... THATS when the war will break.
Anyways... did you see the size of that planet? Anyone should know that the bigger the planet... the greater the gravity. Our bodies would have to get used to the new, intense pressure, and once that happens, those people could never move back to the Blue planet again. It's not the moon, where there's no gravity... this is a real planet.
It's a little sci-fi, but it COULD happen.

Then there would be a war and the other people would kick our asses and that when Earth shall be invaded. Who knows, they are probably living in the year 7008 while WE are considered the primative cavemen.

Answer 4

There is no reason to believe there is any life on this planet. Venus could be considered in the "Goldilocks zone" too, and it is about as inhospitable to life as anyone could ever imagine.
There is also no reason to believe that life can't exist on this planet. If there was intelligence and technology equivalent to ours, we would have picked up their radio emissions long before now. But still, sure, some kind of life could exist there.
Some will say we might go there one day. All of that, assuming there are great new forms of travel and propulsion we haven't discovered yet. But we can't even think of building an interstellar spacecraft in the forseeable future, and even if we could build one and achieve the very unlikely speed of 1/10 light speed, it would take us 200 years to get there.
IOW, it's all speculation and it will be a very long time before we know any more about this planet than its mass, orbital period, and probable temperature.

Answer 5

A planet that massive is bound to have a very dense atmosphere. For all we know the bulk of its mass (5 times earth) is hydrogen and helium like Neptune and Uranus. Or CO2 at 98 times earths atmospheric pressure like Venus. Or it could be covered with a huge global ocean full of life. We can´t really tell just yet but we will know for sure within a decade when Darwin and Terrestrial Planet Finder are both online. Can´t wait...

Answer 6

the problems of course is scope of distance. Trying to discern information about that planet would be like trying to gather data about a moth that is flying around a spot light in Moscow - from New York City.

Another problem presents itself; it is 20 light years away. That's frikken far! To put it in perspective, Voyager 1 is the fastest man-made space craft leaving the solar system. In 30 years (from launch in 1977 to now in 2007), it has travelled 103 AUs. A single light year is 62,000 AUs. That means it will take Voyager 1 18,060 years to travel one light year. If it were pointed at Gliese 581 c, it would reach the star in about 361,000 years.

In other words, unless we figure out some way around that pesky nothing-can-go-faster-than-light problem, we probably won't be getting a closer look anytime soon. Heck, Pluto is a paltry 40 AUs away (that's .00003% of the distance), and we still know very little about it.

It's exciting and all, but don't expect to be recieving Gliese 581 c Pizza shops to be delivering to Earth anytime soon.

Answer 7

It needs to be said that half of you are talking about the Star system Gliese, which was found to have a giant rocky planet orbiting it, and the other half are talking about the star system Cancri, which was just the other day was found to have a jupiter-like planet in it's habitable zone.


Anyway, I would say that until we invent some technology that lets us move 1000s of times faster than light, any trip to any star is going to involve people spending their entire lives traveling, perhaps living in a spaceship for several generations. For this reason, I suggest that our first serious attempt to travel to another star will probably be traveling to a cluster of stars that are all near each other. That would allow us to (in time) colonize several stars in one shot.

Answer 8

It sounds good! A planet with possible liquid water, rocky or ocean terrain, about the size of Earth, closer to its star, but not too far, star smaller and dimmer, gas giants in it's galaxy, and at least two other orbiting planets similar to itself. Sure sounds a lot like our Milky Way. What's not to love? Well, astronauts are not likely to be landing on it any time soon, due to its vast distance from us. On the other hand, we will be able to use our telescopes and send probes to study and keep our eye on it. I gotta tell you, I'm excited about this enormous discovery!

Answer 9

Interesting. Still though, our technology is too primitive to allow us to get there quickly. Even in deep space, our best propulsion unit can only produce a speed of 24000mph. I'd be about 300 by the time a probe traveled the 20.5 light years to get there.

Answer 10

nah, this one is the wrong composition and a wrong size. It is too large. Even though the distance from its sun lies within habitable zone for carbon-based life, the size and the composition are not conducive to life. It appears to be a Jupiter-class planet (4 times the mass of Earth).
Thus life (as we know it) is unlikely to exist as it does not have a true *surface*. It also appears that clays were instrumental in forming first photosynthetic mats which made our atmosphere habitable to life. Gaseous planets would not have any clays in their makeup.