Very exciting news about the kepler project courtesy of the Bad Astronomy Blog

Cliff notes:
-Kepler has potentially tripled the number of planets that we know about.
-Of the 1200 potentials, 54 appear to be in the "habitable zone" and 5 are close to earth's size.
-If these numbers stay consistent, there could be more than a million earth-like planets in the habitable zone, just in the Milky Way!

Cool Speedo, but I'd miss the changing of the seasons though. That has to be unique to the Earth (thanks Moon).

Likely long before all of us are gone, scientists will discover that there is so much life out there that the notion there wasn't ANY, other than us, will be laughed at for a billion years.

We will look like the biggest idiots. Worse than people who thought the Earth was flat.

I agree with Razorback, and would like to add that I believe we'll eventually find out that the absence of life on planets and other bodies that can support it is the exception, rather than the rule. We may be the only intelligent life (though I doubt it) but the universe could be literally teeming with lower life forms.

I personally have no doubt about that. However, I think that what most people really care about is the existence of life that is just as intellingent as us or more intelligent. I mean really, if we discovered insects on another planet that would be exciting stuff but only to an extent. It wouldn't be anything Earth shattering (pardon the pun).

I beleive its earths tilted axis of rotation and eliptoid orbit with reference to the sun that causes season changes.


At Razor,

Haven't they already proven life exists with the finding of microbial presence that once existed on mars?

Anyway, for me personally, i truly believe life is abundant out there and quietly laugh at those who think we are alone. But that is me

The moon makes the tides, that's what is likely unique or at least rare out there.

The exception would be a habitable moon around a gas giant, of course how habitable it could be would depend on how often the gas giant eclipsed the star.



The Jedi Master

I'd offer even odds there's life on Europa, Titan or Ganymede (or all three).

We have a fair few on our own planet already.

Given how many planets in our solar system have moons of their own, why would it necessarily be unique or rare elsewhere?

The rare part is the relative size of the moon vs our planet. We're almost a double planet. Look at the moons of Mars...oh, right, they're just rocks. Venus and Mercury have no moons! Only gas giants seem to get moons in a significant number and they won't have tides. The moons themselves, if they had seas, would have tides, but they're not planets!



The Jedi Master

I figured there'd be a thread for this here...
Check out the status page, http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/?CFID=5494796&CFTOKEN=91519032
where you can browse the current catalog for appealing real estate
http://kepler.nasa.gov/files/mws/FebDataRelease_revised_020211.pdf

Also see the power point slide files, one of them (forget which) has a very nice set of
scatter charts showing the distributions of the candidates against various criteria
(size, temp, etc)

And that's just what they've got in 4 months, the catalog will be updated as the project continues.
After all, as they are watching for occultations, objects with a 1 year plus orbital period won't
be likely to have been detected til the better part of a year has passed.

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.