Earth-like planet discovered

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Scientists have discovered a planet that appears to be "similar to Earth in almost every way," some scientists believe that this planet, Gliese 581g may already have extraterrestrial life. I myself have always loved space and have been waiting since my early teen years to make first contact. Is this finally the moment we've all been waiting for? Is this the culmination of humanity's work over the past 60 or so years? Or is this just a false flag? Sadly at current speeds it would take over 200 years to reach Gliese 581g, however radio messages (both transmitting and receiving) would be almost infinitely quicker and cheaper (though they would probably still take a few years). What are your thoughts on this?


Sources:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth-like-exoplanet-possibly-habitable-100929.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/exoplanet-possibly-supports-alien-life100930.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/habitable-alien-planet-gliese-581g-facts-101001.html

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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

"Sadly at current speeds it would take over 200 years to reach Gliese 581g"

I think you may have been misinformed (or forgotten several 0's). An article in the newspaper i read stated the star that this planet orbits is about 20 light years away. after some calculations this seems to be about 1.89 x 10^17 m away. The fastest object mankind have produced (not calculating particle accelerator experiments) is currently the voyager 1 space probe travelling at roughly 17000 m/s. the division indicates that this would take 1.11 x 10^13 seconds or 352,538 years to reach. No doubt we could make a craft to travel faster than voyager 1 but getting there in under 100,000 years seems unlikely. 

The discovery is interesting but not the start of an extra solar future for mankind.

....At least not yet....

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

This is really quite fascinating. I wouldn't get my hopes up about advanced life, though. The galaxy is a big place, and if intelligent life was common enough to have a reasonable chance of appearing right next to us in cosmic terms, it seems to me that the galaxy would be so full of it that even out tiny little swath of searched frequencies could have picked something up by now. But you never know......

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Voyager 1 is just a conventional design.  It was never set up for a 200 year journey, so having the sort of fuel to do it wasn't even on the drawing board.  17000 m/s is for taking pretty pictures.

 

Spend several months accelerating and you have a whole different picture.  The only hard limit to how fast we can get there is how quickly we can safely accelerate and decelerate, basically it's Earth's gravity.  The optimum would be to use a continuous acceleration ship that did roughly earth's gravity and flipped itself around at the halfway point.  You'd solve the muscle loss issues and such, have minimal stress tolerances for the ship, etcetera.

 

It's a cost issue primarily, that and what village do you send to go make babies in space for a few generations...  The resource utilization would dwarf the entire history of space flight in just one trip.  Just getting ready for the launch might be more than we've spent to date.

Reply #4 from Demigod Forums Top

Quoting 4rearo, reply 1
"Sadly at current speeds it would take over 200 years to reach Gliese 581g"

I think you may have been misinformed (or forgotten several 0's). An article in the newspaper i read stated the star that this planet orbits is about 20 light years away. after some calculations this seems to be about 1.89 x 10^17 m away. The fastest object mankind have produced (not calculating particle accelerator experiments) is currently the voyager 1 space probe travelling at roughly 17000 m/s. the division indicates that this would take 1.11 x 10^13 seconds or 352,538 years to reach. No doubt we could make a craft to travel faster than voyager 1 but getting there in under 100,000 years seems unlikely. 

Sounds like you're agreeing that it would take over 200 years.  Unless I'm mistaken and 352,538 years isn't over 200 years ;)

 

Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

They base all their assumptions on a wobble. (By the way, how can they know that this planet is tidally locked? And that alone makes this a very un-earth like planet)

Would you spend trillions of dollars, hundreds of years, and at least hundreds of lives on an expedition to this planet? Just to see what is there?

Other things that strike me as funny:

The planet is estimated to be 3-4 times as large as Earth. (Earth like?)

The article makes it sound like life is even more possible to develop there, than here, because it is tidally locked. If that is so, and it being only 20 LY distant, then we should be able to pick up some kind of EM transmissions from them (since they have probably had more time to 'evolve' than us because of their more perfect conditions).

Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

The article makes it sound like life is even more possible to develop there, than here, because it is tidally locked. If that is so, and it being only 20 LY distant, then we should be able to pick up some kind of EM transmissions from them (since they have probably had more time to 'evolve' than us because of their more perfect conditions).
Not really. The development of intelligence would have to be a very probability-based process. The odds of a civilization developing at just the same time as we are would really be quite low. Just because the planet is capable of developing life, does not mean that everything will happen in sync with Earth's evolutionary path.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

I suppose it is possible that they would have some kind of life.

They had better get their spectroscopy right or we might end up sending a probe to a big blue gas giant.

Of course more research would have to be done before anything happens.

 

BTW, I believe something like this has happened before; they discovered an odd planet that might support life and there was a whole bunch of excitement about it, and then they found out that it was really just another ball of dust...