Planet found around Alpha Centauri

[Mike70]

an Earth sized planet has been found in the Alpha Centauri system. it is only 4 million miles away from the star, so there is no chance that liquid water exists on this particular planet. but, stars very rarely are found with just one planet around them. add to that the fact that the Sun and Alpha Centauri A & B formed from the same nebular cloud, there is a very good chance there are more planets in that system and maybe even one in the habitable zone. very interesting. http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n...alphacentauri/ on another note: of the over 2, 300 planets found by Kepler, 10 of them are Earth sized planets within their parent star's habitable zone. we are living in a great age of discovery.

[Neil]

Seems planets are common! So where are our nearest neighbours? And why haven't they dropped a cake around?

[bassman]

I guarantee one of them is Pandora and they have unobtainium....

[Legion2213]

Seems planets are common! So where are our nearest neighbours? And why haven't they dropped a cake around? I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that advanced races do one of two things. 1: Stay quiet, hide their existance and thrive/build. 2: Go out exploring/broadcast their existance and get wiped out by other races who's only concept of "first contact" is the full on destruction of said civilisation. Several sci-fi books/stories claim this is the most likely answer to Fermi's paradox and the more I think about it, the more plausible it sounds. So, no cake for us, Neil.

[krakenslayer]

So, no cake for us, Neil. And if there is one. it's probably one of those comedy Loony Tunes cakes with a stick of dynamite in it.

[Mike70]

And if there is one. it's probably one of those comedy Loony Tunes cakes with a stick of dynamite in it. we need to be very wary of anything coming from space marked ACME. - - - Updated - - - I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that advanced races do one of two things. 1: Stay quiet, hide their existance and thrive/build. 2: Go out exploring/broadcast their existance and get wiped out by other races who's only concept of "first contact" is the full on destruction of said civilisation. there is a 3rd option. that life may be very common in the galaxy but advanced, intelligent life very, very rare and so spread out that contact between civilizations is nearly impossible.

[Neil]

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that advanced races do one of two things. 1: Stay quiet, hide their existance and thrive/build. 2: Go out exploring/broadcast their existance and get wiped out by other races who's only concept of "first contact" is the full on destruction of said civilisation. Several sci-fi books/stories claim this is the most likely answer to Fermi's paradox and the more I think about it, the more plausible it sounds. So, no cake for us, Neil. It only takes ONE ancient advanced civilisation in our galaxy to be over logical and possessive about the resources available, to come to the conclusion all other civilisations do nothing more than use up the resources they could use.... so wipe them out... Maybe this is why our galaxy seems so quiet, because one by one civilisations are being shut up!

[Christopher Jon]

It only takes ONE ancient advanced civilisation in our galaxy to be over logical and possessive about the resources available, to come to the conclusion all other civilisations do nothing more than use up the resources they could use.... so wipe them out... Maybe this is why our galaxy seems so quiet, because one by one civilisations are being shut up! All the more reason why we need to increase funding for space exploration. We need to get the jump on them darn aliens before they get to us.

[Danny]

there is a 3rd option. that life may be very common in the galaxy but advanced, intelligent life very, very rare and so spread out that contact between civilizations is nearly impossible. Something i've always found odd and, in a way, kind of naive is we expect some start trek style humanoid aliens because of our very narrow idea of what "life" is. For all our variance on Earth most life follows a very singular basic template, two eyes, a nose, a heart, two lungs etc. However all the examples we have for our "sample" of what 'life' is all come from the same genetic route source and, on a galactic scale, the same enclosed environment. People worry about some predator or war of the worlds style entities so very similar to us but the odds of something existing and following all the same "butterfly effect" level forks in the road that lead to life as it is today is so incredibly slim its almost completely random. If there is life out there it could be something so truly alien and utterly mind blowing that we may not even recognise it as life at all. Hell just look at the crap we keep finding at the deepest parts of Earths seas, life can take some pretty bizaare templates indeed.

[Mike70]

If there is life out there it could be something so truly alien and utterly mind blowing that we may not even recognise it as life at all. Hell just look at the crap we keep finding at the deepest parts of Earths seas, life can take some pretty bizaare templates indeed. the first sentence is a very definite possibility. would we recognize forms of life that have undergone a totally different evolutionary process as life? that would depend on how wide open our minds and eyes are. the second part about the sea is an important point to take into account as well and i'll add another: the strange lifeforms we call "Halophiles", microorganisms that thrive in conditions so salty that we used to discount the very possibility of their existences. one example is the algae and bacteria that live in the salt flats in Death Valley and depend on the incredibly small amount of water vapor that the salt absorbs from the air for survival. talk about a rough neighborhood . I've been to Death Valley a few times and the thought that something could not only survive in all that salt but actually thrive there is mind blowing, especially considering how much stuff we highly evolved humans had to take with us just to ensure our own safety for a few days. then there are the organisms that live in Lake Mono in CA that use Arsenic instead of Phosphorus in their DNA. life can take some amazing forms. hell man, there are even bacteria that thrive near the sulfuric acid lakes that can form near volcanoes. 50168929.jpg that isn't water. it's almost pure sulfuric acid from a lake near the Erta Ale volcano in Ethiopia. so is the other body of liquid in the background. not someplace you'd want to take a dip.