NASA Announces a Single Star Is Home to At Least 7 Earthlike Planets

[Mormolyce]

Bear in mind that we can only observe objects as small as planets (funny isn't it?) when they transit the star. Which means their orbits have to be roughly in a plane such that the planets move in between their star and the earth so we can see it happen. There are very likely far more planets than we're able to observe via this method, orbiting stars much closer to us.

The galaxy is getting very crowded.

I really hate reading pop science articles.

How many light years away and how long would it take for us to get there using current tech?

I think the short answer is "we can't".

I'm not up to date on the theory, but if we take Project Daedalus from the 70s, and assume we could actually build such a rocket (which I think is speculative), it was supposed to be able to get up to about 12% of light speed after about a 4 year boost period. So with a bit of napkin maths that's 325 years minimum to reach a star at 39 light years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

Note: this is just idle estimation to illustrate that with current tech it's probably not realistic. These estimates are for entertainment purposes only :P

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I would also add, per other proposals, to make the NASA Administrator a 10 year, non-political position (similar to the director of the FBI, well, nominally)

Oh I see what you did there.

Though to be honest I can't tell what side he's on. He seems to be a partisan of BOTH sides somehow. Maybe he's just an agent of chaos...

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Still took you 36 hours to reply, even with using the internet :thinking:

I think this one deserves a round.

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Its not silly at all. The only silly thing is dismissing them and acting like they are not a real thing.

It doesn't matter how fundamentally similar we are. There is only 1 sentient life form on this planet. This planet was unable to produce 2. We may need to agree to disagree at this point. I just do not forsee Nasa finding anything going off of data collected from humans when this planet couldn't even produce a second race similar to us.

This is a fundamentally flawed comparison though. Let's assume humans are indeed the only sentient form of life on earth and ignore any of the grey area around the term "sentient" and what exactly it means.

First of all, how many billions of years did it take to develop one sentient life form? Homo sapiens have only been around for a few hundred thousand years, and we've had written history for a few thousand. Not sure exactly when you'd place the "sentient life begins" marker in all that, depends what you consider sentient I suppose. Now you're going to have to wait a length of time on the geological scale to see if it develops another one.

And that's assuming that the birth of one sentient species doesn't inhibit the development of another. Apart from them actively exterminating competition, the evolutionary niche is already filled. This is also a question we'd have to wait billions of years to find out.

In short, this doesn't really prove anything about the relative rarity of sentient life in the universe. That's an unknown.

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I wouldn't believe much of anything NASA claims.

I also distinctly remember this same story coming out in the 80s. They're like pro-wrestling... they recycle their storylines every few of decades.

NASA is fake news?

Gamma Cephei Ab was discovered in 1988. First extrasolar planet "discovered" although its existence wasn't confirmed until 2002. So sure maybe you saw that back in the 80s. They're still finding them you know. You realise there's 100 billion stars in our galaxy, any of which could have planets orbiting them, yes? And exoplanet discovery is a relatively recent, rapidly evolving field of study?