NASA's Kepler mission discovers bigger, older cousin to Earth | CTV News

very cool. A good possibility there may be life of some form on this world as well. We likely will never know but it's pretty exciting to see it fits within the life zone of it's star. That alone is a huge step at beating the odds of forming life.

Really cool news. Learning more about this planet will teach us more about our own planet. Very cool

This is cool news! I will be going to Daytona beach in Aug. for vacation. I plan on taking a visit to the Kennedy space center while there. I went there as a kid in 1975. I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever seen! The Apollo-Soyuz thing was going on then. The space shuttle didn't exist yet. If you are ever vacationing in Florida, you should seriously consider a side trip to Cape Canaveral. It is a day well spent.

Liquid water is the ultimate chemical solvent but it only occurs in a narrow temperature. If there is life out there, it is hard to imagine it getting started without a water based soup of complex carbon compounds. Maybe, there is the possibility of life being based on other chemical families but there is nothing remotely like he range and complexity that is possible with water as a solvent for carbon rings and strings.

One of the many cool properties of water that allows for life is the fact that it is less dense in our atmosphere as a solid than it is as a 4 degree Celsius liquid. This is a result of trapped gases as a solid which may be more conducive to our environment. It ensures that water doesn't freeze bottom up. It may not be so precise in other atmospheres.

Good thing it's pretty much out of our reach if it is habitable. We'd just fuck it up if we went there.

Told you I was right about these sorts of things. It ain't pessimism, dawg, it's realism about the human condition.

they have 1.5 billion years over us, they might be the ones doing the fucking if their evolutionary arc is anything like ours. As people have pointed out, when a technologically superior civilization meets one less advanced, it doesn't go well for the latter. Of course with 1.5 billion years extra time, if we ever made it there chances are we'd just find a smoking ruin sucked dry of resources.

Told you I was right about these sorts of things. It ain't pessimism, dawg, it's realism about the human condition.

I'm not pessimistic, I'm positive we'd fuck it up.

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This! I've always laughed at those who say advanced civilizations would be more peaceful than us. we'd be lucky if we just ended up as slaves.

Morals advance in the same way biology does. As shitty as things can be today it's considerably less worse than it was in the past, even the recent past, because enough humans eventually decide that "we're not going to behave that way anymore". That's why one of the few things I accept as a basic truism is that if the aliens are vastly more technologically advanced they'll also be more biologically advanced, in that their brains will be far enough ahead that basic savagery, *theotropism, and greed will no longer exist in them either as individuals or as part of whatever kind of society they live in.

Give me this one, boys. It's one of the few things I still want to believe in.

*theotropism: an unfortunate hard-wired need in the human brain to believe in gods

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This! I've always laughed at those who say advanced civilizations would be more peaceful than us. we'd be lucky if we just ended up as slaves.

Let's just say they were us a billion years ago and still exist.

Why would they need slaves. Their apple software, would be awesome. Can you imagine an iPhone 300,000,000,000.02 . The apps would be better than us.. the iPhone alone would make us obsolete LOL!

They might use us to make them though, can you imagine living the rest of our lives as a planetary Foxconn factory.

I never heard of theotropism and googled and got this.
http://yrif.org/2009/06/09/theotropism- ... nese-jews/

With the study of Quantum Physics and String Theory and biology and cultural geography etc etc etc....



I get a feeling that evolution can jump geographically. It's as if the wisdom of evolutionary change is just there in all of existence. Airy Fairy Pseudo Science is my forte.

Life on other planets is as much affected by it's own evolution as ours effects theirs?

Just a thought.

Well, if we've have just discovered them and if they are, in fact, that far ahead of us then chances are they already know that we exist.

(Assuming of course that life similar to ours exists there at all)