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Alien planet found by NASA — Parallax Forums

Alien planet found by NASA

$WMc%$WMc% Posts: 1,884
edited 2011-12-05 19:25 in General Discussion
We all knew it....Here it is
'
http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-telescope-confirms-alien-planet-habitable-zone-162005358.html
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Well almost.....

Comments

  • SRLMSRLM Posts: 5,045
    edited 2011-12-05 17:07
    The headline is a bit deceiving. It's not that NASA has confirmed that this is a planet with aliens, but a "potentially habitable alien world". The distinction being that one has aliens, the other only might...
  • zoopydogsitzoopydogsit Posts: 174
    edited 2011-12-05 19:25
    Assume for a moment that it has life, intelligent life, and they too are hunting for intelligent life in the known universe. Our first radio transmissions of any reasonable power were about 100 years ago. First TV broadcast about 80 years ago. Yet it would be another 500+ years (they are 600 light years away from us) before they will know we exist (or did). And if they reply, it would be more than a millenia from now before we'd get the message. Sigh.....

    And if we point our radio telescopes at them, were they (600 years ago) in the technological band to transmit much power (enough to be detected beyond the noise) or have they passed that? (catastrophic dissaperence (we were in the brink of that many times, first the cold war, now overpopulation and our stewardship of planet earth).

    We weren't interesting to a radio telescope 600 years ago. We've changed a lot in the last 100 years, gone from less than 2B people on the planet to over 7B. And who know's what would happen over the next 50 years, much less in 600 years or double that.

    At least if they are hostile we have a little while before it becomes a problem!
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