Why is NASA seeking another habitable planet?

NASA has to justify spending 550MN tax dollars on the Kepler space telescope...

Look here...this planet is just like Earth!

Basically a load of hooey. They use one criteria, the distance a round piece of rock is from it's host star aka Sun.

They have no evidence there is liquid water...or an atmosphere..nothing...strictly orbital distance, which they call the "habitable zone."

Just like "Earth" as I say is nothing but sensationalism to keep Congress funding their projects.

This is not to say there are no habitable planets there could very well be, but the Kepler space telescope uses a very narrow set of criteria...the rest is basically yellow journalism to keep taxpayers interested and Congress writing the checks.

 

To send RW idiots. LW idiots. Let real people be who they are.

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To many RW hacks on this planet. Yes, LW too.

Oh, LW or liberals does, or did fund them.

 

They use more than one criteria - admittedly they are not looking for intelligent life but then the evidence for that judging by the posts on this board are slim for finding it here on Earth first

 

That's more a Russian roulette issue, which may or may not be amenable to technology to overcome someday, and I'm not so sure it would be much more of an issue for manned versus unmanned. Masses tend to cluster around bigger masses, and once you're out of the solar system, you could still get killed by some freak rogue asteroid, but the odds would be slim. There's just a lot of space out there. That said - yeah there are many other challenges.

I think the largest benefit has been in the development of technologies that space exploration necessitated but we enjoy today. The most obvious areas are medicine, aviation, and software. Here's a very incomplete list: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html

War does the same thing. The silver lining of the Iraq war was the advances we made in regenerative medicine because of it. Like war, space exploration is expensive, but there's a much lower cost in blood.

Alternatively, one could develop a self-contained biosphere and get raw materials either from what is left of Earth or the other planets/moons in the solar system. And where do you get the idea that antimatter engines would be limited to 1/10 the speed of light, or that antimatter engines are the best possible way to travel (yes, I know the energy release is the most complete, but who knows what is possible given quantum physics)?

 

They focus the telescope on a star...when a planet transits the star..it "winks"...from this data they determine the geometric probability of this planet transiting the star in the habitable zone...the right size, not too hot, not too cold.

Basically that's the criteria. From this very limited data you get..."Earth like" planet found.

It's bull (*)(*)(*)(*) basically to make that sort of conclusion with so little evidence aside from planetary transit.

What it is, is evidence of Earth size planetary transits...not "Earth like." It's a rock, about the size of Earth, and about the same orbital distance from it's host Sun..that's about all the data from this telescope can conclude. What we see in the media is conjecture and speculation that feeds the Sheep.

 

Would people like to see another piece of rock in the habitable zone?



It's called our "Moon." Yes, our Moon, some theories suggest, was once a part of Earth...yet in the billions of years the Moon has existed in the "habitable zone," nothing has ever inhabited there..

Granted the Moon is much smaller than Earth.

As I say, I have no doubt that somewhere and sometime...life existed elsewhere in our galaxy and certainly in our Universe. I have no doubt about that..
however the Kepler telescope is not looking for life...it is looking for round rocks orbiting stars, about Earth size and about Earth orbital distance from it's Sun. None of which guarantees life exists, existed or will exist. So from limited data we get "artist conceptions" of a planet with an atmosphere and oceans...none of which Kepler has found or can find. That is not it's mission, it's mission is detecting Earth size pieces of rock orbiting a star making it not too hot or cold to POTENTIALLY host life. ..or this piece of rock could be as dead as our Moon. Folks like leaping to conclusions apparently. I'll wait for actual evidence before I will do so.

 

Anyone remember the story out of NASA about discovering life in arsenic?
Basically around 2010, NASA funded scientists claimed bacterial life had been discovered that could thrive on arsenic.

Two years later...it was refuted.

Scientists say NASA's 'new arsenic form of life' was untrue.

Source: http://phys.org/news/2012-07-scientists-nasa-arsenic-life-untrue.html

You see, I know a lot of young people inhabit this board and it's easy to see an article about the discovery of an "Earth like" planet in some distant solar system. Visions of alien life, the equivalent of sugar plum fairies start dancing in heads...pack your bags we're moving to Earth v.2!

Well..I'm old enough to remember the Apollo missions...right after Apollo 11, the public lost interest in the Moon. The excitement was gone..ho hum, another walk on the moon, this time in a dune buggy. People stopped caring, the funding dried up; we've never been back since.

I know I'm coming across like Oscar the grouch..but this is about NASA getting the public excited and pumped up about astro-physics...a topic that puts all but a few..asleep. The public is more concerned about celebrity and scandal...not what is many light years away. So, NASA pumps up the volume and gets the juices flowing..the dreamer's dreaming. A new Earth! Lots of people just like us live there...yippie!

Well as I've said, life could very well exist on these exoplanets, or it might not...given NASAs track record, frankly, I'll wait for peer review to anything they release.

Publish or Perish.

NASA needs to get people excited to keep the tax dollars flowing in. Right now, all they've found is a rock, light years away, going around in an elliptical orbit around another star. It might be habitable or it might not...to infer it is based upon limited criteria and actual data...is really more sensationalism than science..but welcome to NASA public relations.

that is all...

 

Right, I understand all that theory and it will probably come to pass down the line sometime, but I am simply saying that if we need to get off here any time soon, and we are dependent on our own technological developments to do it, I think ion drives, solar sails, AI computer systems and automated human growing processes could probably be the best we could do in the next 20 years or so.

 

I just love this much ignorance - They use three separate methods to review the planets

http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/the-search-for-earth-20/story-fnjwlcze-1227454264097

So what is the issue here - are we contending this is just another conspiracy theory?

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Meep! We could always teleport - mind you we may not end up the same size or shape at the other end

 

Unfortunately the average public is more excited about celebrity and scandal, because it is in their face all the time. Lets bring up something more interesting and useful, science and the search for knowledge. I likeed the quote from the movie 'Contact' "If there is no other life out there, what a terrible waste of space" Funding research is so much better than funding wars. Don't you think?

 

Curiosity.

On the other hand, if any travel is announced to planet Mars, we must demand first from NASA to send "again" astronauts to the Moon and make them to come back.

Only if NASA proves that it has enough technology to "repeat" the former trips to the Moon, then an attempt of traveling to planet Mars might be possible.

Otherwise, the whole thing about traveling to Mars is a hoax.

 

We can't grow humans without humans.

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YOu shouldn't have watched Interstellar five times.....

 

Theyre looking at worlds like ours to find other people like us in the universe.

Your poll is a joke.

 

This one took way too long to get the point across. How about we let you have another crack at it? Try to make it a one-liner.

 

Yes, my comments probably sound as though I am anti-NASA and anti-space exploration in general. I am not. It is imperative that we explore space and possibly find another habitable planet. It all starts with locating these exoplanets that resemble Earth in size and are the proper distance from their host Sun to possibly allow life to survive.

I am for spending tax dollars on this. The only issue is to put these discoveries in perspective. There is no conspiracy about preparing us regular folks for the fact the government has knowledge about alien Worlds already.

This is worth saying and repeating..at the moment, there is no evidence of life outside of our planet. The closest we have are small microbes residing in our troposphere. That's it. Life has yet to be found elsewhere.

That does not mean there is no life, we just haven't found it yet. We have found exoplanets that might allow life to survive..if there was life in the first place. There is no evidence of that yet. We need to continue exploring, I am in total agreement with this. I just don't get all hyped up just yet. Ok, we found an exoplanet, let's improve our technology and search for evidence of actual life.

 

E.) Curious and quest for the unknown.
Who would have known there is a world of democraps out there?

 

The problem with this whole subject is that it is devoid of all titillation. We can't have it right now, and once we get it, it will require huge amounts of effort to keep it viable. Yecch!

 

I suspect that's why they refuse to communicate with us.

 

You correctly point out if we find a habitable planet we have no way of getting there.

This indicates we had better not make this on uninhabitable, or we are just another species gone extinct.

Maybe you want that or don't care.

So I suggest we agree to do something to stop doing what we are doing that we do not want to do. Then I provide a brief analysis of the illogical acts we've committed to get where we are.

What brought religion into your mind? Why is your statement I replied to you forgotten?

 

first they have to discover a wormhole....so far they have not found any....

 

There is one in the Bajoran system.

 

Two reasons...

#1. And Earthlike Planet would most likely support life.

#2. Humanity will one day grow in numbers to great for the Earth to support alone.

AboveAlpha

 

I didn't even mention a wormhole.. I was going off of if we actually had to put a space ship out there and sail it the whole way to another solar system.. granted, by the time it got there, humanity on earth would likely be gone for a long time at that point, which is why I say AI will have to be the ones raising new humans which the AI creates from human sperm and eggs.

As far as worm holes go, I do believe science has discovered them, but they are on a quantum level, and they disappear almost as instantaneously as they are formed.. science has no way of amplifying that worm hole and knows no way to keep one open for longer than what would be on a nano-second scale (that we know of).

 

its only on theory ..the one someone mentioned is from a movie doest really exist ..

 

Right.. most people also don't work around science every day.. I install and service electron microscopes as an engineer, so I like to live in the world of real science.