Kepler Delivers Confirmation of Extrasolar Earth-Sized Planets

[del35]

Hilarity would ensue if in a few years we get radio transmissions from a race thousands of light years away, we listen in to their signals for about a hundred years then it all goes silent a few years after they invent nuclear weapons

Ummm, that could possibly send a shot across the bow and get us to straighten our act. As we are headed now, I see little chance that we will make it.

By the way, in my estimate radio wave communication is a rather primitive technology that no doubt has been superseded by all but the least advanced of extraterrestrial civilizations, probably billions of light years away from us. Radio wave communication may seem as advance to some exosolar civilizations as smoke signal communication seems to us now.

Given that communication can be boiled down to just transmitting a series of zeros and ones or binary states, it is likely that myriads of sophisticated methods of sending signals across the universe, and possibly into parallel universes unknown to us, have been developed in the universe at large. We will probably never reach the level of technological sophistication to achieve decryption of those messages, or even sense them with our limited technologies.

 

[cybnetic]

there are shadows out there....

 

[nottheking]

I have to ding Tom's a point for taking forever to report this... Though I will give credit for giving what appears to be the most ACCURATE version of the same article.
[citation][nom]back_by_demand[/nom]Great news, all we need now is FTL drive spaceships, wormholes or a working Stargate and we can stripmine it, err, colonise it.[/citation]
As gm0n3y mentioned, due to the effects of time-dilation, simply getting close enough to the speed of light would suffice in ensuring the original generation of colonists are there when they arrive; peg your speedometer close enough to c, and even a >10,000-light-year trip across the galaxy will only pass by as a mere few days for those on-board. (and, thankfully, the ship itself, so you needn't worry about it deteriorating)

Such technology isn't so fantastically out of reach as one might think: nuclear pulse propulsion is something that was developed even back in the 1950s, and even using older atomic bombs of the era, it could reach up to 10% c; more modern designs using inertial confinement fusion (plausible for this century) or even antimatter, (plausible for coming centuries) could achieve vastly higher speeds.

[citation][nom]velocityg4[/nom]Great then all we have to do is send a craft and wait a few hundred thousand or million years to confirm that a potential planet was found.[/citation]
So I take it that humanity didn't know that the planet Jupiter existed until Pioneer 10 was able to beam us some up-close photographs of it?

You might do to brush up on the methods used for detecting planets: Kepler, in question, simply detects them as they eclipse (or more accurately, "transit," as they don't block the star entirely) their parent star. Once you watch it happen enough times with enough regularity, you know something's orbiting there. By measuring the amount it dims the star, you know what percentage of the star's surface it's obscuring, and hence the size of the planet.

And no, for Kepler, that's not considered enough to "confirm." (Kepler's actually found >2,000 "planetary candidates" so far, BTW) The alternate method used in conjunction is the older "Doppler Method." (Radial Velocity) If they can confirm that the parent star is being "tugged" as by a force coming from right where the planet should be, (i.e, it lines up with the orbit seen in the transits) then it's pretty safe to say there's a planet there, just as if it'd been directly imaged.