Will The Cosmos Inexplicably Decide To Give Us Another Planet To Ruin?
Astronomers are predicting that the first Earth-like planet orbiting another star will be discovered sometime around next May, if recent trends in discovering extrasolar planets keep up:
Astronomers to date have found superhot gas giants and snowball-like Neptunes, with the trend toward the discovery of a planet in the habitable zone. There's no real dispute among astronomers that the discovery of an Earth-like planet is on the cards.
[Samuel ] Arbesman and [Gregory] Laughlin have taken this data and projected it forward to predict when an Earth-like planet is likely to crop up. The results have a heavy-tailed distribution in which there is a 66 per cent probability of finding the other Earth by 2013, a 75 percent probability by 2020 but a 95 percent probability by 2264.
However, they say the median date of discovery is in early May 2011, which for various reasons is the date they emphasis in their paper.
Arbesman and Laughlin caution that the Earth-like planet may not necessarily be habitable, thanks to its potential to be a little too hot. But I'm kind of hoping they're wrong, because now that the Extreme Makeover/Bridezillas hybrid Bridalplasty is going to exist, we're going to really need that chance to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del on this particular iteration of the planet. See you suckers on Virgin Galactic!
[HT: Jon Solomon]
That record makes me enjoy drawing, which I a unable to do under most circumstances, as if by magic. I cannot explain it.
Once we find it, will Antonio Sabato Jr. and Rebecca Gayheart be on the first shuttle?
We already know where Earth-2 is, we just have to make the Flash use the Cosmic Treadmill to get there.
I wanna live in a world where the Huntress is Batman and Catwoman's daughter, yes I do.
We will know the planet to truly be Earth when we find there the charred remains of Kara Thrace and her Viper.
If we have to travel around on a garbage freighter with Leoben for a bunkmate, count me out. I'd rather be stuck on Bridalplasty planet.
The timing is PERFECT. Finally, a destination for those NASA space flights!
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
I once hosted a listening party for my vinyl copy of this record.
I read that sentence over again and just now realized why only three people came.
Late to the game here. Unless this earthlike planet already has a biosphere remarkably similar to our own, there will be very little free molecular oxygen. Before photosynthesizing algae, there was very little in our atmosphere until blue green algae showed up. Even if we were able to travel there, it would take hundreds of years to terraform. This would require shipping heavy industry over a vast gulf of space and time, and that would be a huge resource suck. We could possibly find some way to upload ourselves into data cubes flanked with armies of nanobots, but then what's the point of finding an earthlike planet? If you like your flesh bodies, you're stuck here forever. If you are ok with computer brains, there's no point in leaving our solar neighborhood.
…and if there's intelligent life on this new earth, we could never effectively communicate with it. Even if you disregard the huge time lag of responses, their evolutionary history would be completely different, no common referents, no way to communicate. If they are (were?) anything like us they either would have destroyed themselves or advanced to a state that wouldn't recognize us as sentient.