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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (237193)	6/15/2005 2:33:41 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572893

"but I still find it interesting how difficult the search for an earth twin is proving to be." Keep in mind that the only ways we have of detecting extra-solar planets is slanted towards high mass planets that orbit very close to their primary. Given that, we've found a lot of planets. So far, we have no method of detecting an Earth in a solar system like we have at any distance beyond the equivalent of our Oort Cloud. So unless we start picking up the equivalent of "I Love Lucy" on a radio telescope, we are blind to them... Yeah, I know that Earth currently radiates RF so that it out shines the Sun. But with cable, satellite and point to point broadcasts, we radiate less and less every year. At some point our radiation won't be detectable any more. Chances are good that the same would be true of any technological society, there is only a century or two where high RF radiation levels are detectable...

To: tejek who wrote (237193)	6/16/2005 7:18:04 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572893

Interesting find.........the closest to an earth-like planet ever discovered; a planet which is 7 times bigger than earth and has temps at 400-700º F. What does that say about the search for an earth-like planet? That we haven't found many planets yet And that the larger the planet is the easier it is to find, and that the close to its star a planet is the more it effects its star and the easier it is to detect the relatively tiny wobble it causes in the star. What does it say about the uniqueness of earth? Almost nothing. We have discovered less than two hundred planets, in a universe that literally contains more stars than grains of sand on a beach. The earliest plants that we found were all giant planets (maybe "brown-dwarf" failed stars), that where much bigger than all of the planets, moons, and planetoids in our system combined. They were also all close to the star they orbited. I'm guessing that this isn't typical of planets in general, its just those are the easiest to find. Tim