This is pretty massive for Nasa, and for humanity as well I reckon. Using the Kepler telescope, astronomers have discovered the first "Earth-sized" planet in what is considered a habitable zone. This basically means its far enough away from a orbiting star that it could potentially hold water.

"The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind's quest to find truly Earth-like worlds."

More at the link, but hopefully they can explore the planet more and find actual water sources/Earth-like atmosphere.

got stargate?

Yes it's only a short distance away;

500,000,000,000,000,000 KM

second you mean.

First NON-earth earth-sized planet in the habitable zone.

Claimed.

Hah! Rules are rules, well played sir.

They seem to make claims like this weekly.

it's simply a Murdoch conspiracy. thought you'd be in on it, has your membership lapsed?

Yeah, 500 light years away I heard. That pretty much makes it an impossible distance away.

Claimed.

/thread, well played

i think you missed the satire and sarcasm?

If you meant to make the "Murdoch Media conspiracy" take a negative or pejorative slant you forgot to add "theory"

A conspiracy theory is normally applied to a version of events that a group of people believe to be true in direct conflict to the official version. I think you will find that its you BroolStoryCo, and people like you, who talk about the limited or lack of Murdoch Media's impact on the last election to be the Murdoch Media conspiracy theorists. That is you like to broadcast that the Murdoch Media played no or little part and that the liberals and the Murdoch Media were not directly in some sort of symbiotic business relationship.

The accepted majority view being that the media has a large impact on its consumers - hence why is media controlled and that the liberals and the Murdoch Media are in cahoots aka a conspiracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28civil%29

If you are going to go round talking about "conspiracies" you might want to learn the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conspiracy_theory

You sir a a conspiracy theory nut so its amusing to watch you ham it up

probably ;p

I like rockets and sci fi and pew pew movies or games as much as the next guy but am i missing something here as to how or why this is exciting beyond a "yeah its nice they found that because its the 1st time"?

What is there to say about a planet they discovered so far away we cant get there in our or our children's children's lifetimes? "Thats nice" i guess and it would be cool to somehow find out if it was "like earth" but what else is there to this discovery?

I know space type nerds love this s***. The "what if" and the picard "i looked up and wondered what it would be like to go" type musing but is that it or am i missing something?

http://www.americanfootballinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/IT.jpg

Abiogenesis. Basically the classic Qi card "nobody knows" but lots of theories. Also why the door is left open to faith type theories: aka Creation myth.

And yes i like knowledge and agree its a noble pursuit. Much more noble than say the pursuit of stupid stuff we dont need. That said there is a lot of resources and energy spent on researching and exploring stupid s*** we dont need. I dont even mean just by whacky materialistic corps but also usually sensible science types. The internet usually has lists of stupid stuff to get funding/ grants if you look.

Not saying this exploring for new worlds is that kind of thing. I guess I was asking people (who are into this sort of thing) to illuminate (beyond what a normal person would know about it) what the attraction is to this field of study / interest and to see if they wanted to share a little more of their interest with me (others).

On GA we had a science type guy who was absolutly nuts about this stuff - would post up launches and news and vids and images and what not. He was a lemur

EDIT: this track couldbe my relationship to knowledge

if it's habitable, wouldn't it inevitably have some sort of life on it? indubidably?

Short answer is no. Checkout:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120821-how-many-alien-worlds-exist
or Drake Equation.

Long story short, it is by chance. But because of the size of the universe, there should be heaps and heaps of ET life. So where the hell is everybody?

yes that was he: L3p3r. Where is that L3p3r? He would have a pretty solid go at answering our questions on this topic ;(

my guess greazy is its not just space (ie. how far away we need to travel to find it) but time - for example come back to earth in 10k years and perhaps there might be no life here too - if humans have their way - and the universe is million (billions,,, more?) years old. Perhaps we have looked at places where life was but just long ago before dying out.

On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone is zero.

In a large enough space the likelihood of like existing is 100%.

So space gives us life and time kills us.....

We've gone around the onion glass here, people! Watch the skies!

Nah you would be wrong to assume life is abundant in the universe. Too many factors, too many unknowns, too many variables.

Really. That sounds like an assumption. Life has been found on earth in places that nobody expected to find life. Life finds a way.
I stand by my previous post.

http://manilovefilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/life-finds-a-way.png

Lol good job.

Really. That sounds like an assumption. Life has been found on earth in places that nobody expected to find life. Life finds a way.

Abso F*****g Lutely!

I dare say life exists off our planet, at the very least at the scale of something like a Tardigrade or Paramecium.

I recall reading somewhere that Tardigrades were found on a meteorite and that they can in fact survive the vacuum of space, so it's quite possible they are hanging out in ice on meteorites!


Does intelligent life on the same scale as ours exist off earth? Maybe, we certainly have absolutely no evidence it exists though.

L3p3r, wherefore art thou not here?

Was handy to have somebody posting timely threads for launches. Super nice dude, wonder how his attention could be got. All I've got is his youtube.

I thought you said the moon landings were a hoax? you've gotta at least be consistent with your conspiracies.

don't be scared. We'll be gentle

that was strangely relaxing zaraq