Earth 2? Nasa thinks they have found one.

Nasa thinks they have found an Earth 2, if true this is amazing. Call is still ongoing.

http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html

http://kepler.nasa.gov/

Kepler-452b: Earth's Bigger, Older Cousin

http://www.nasa.gov/keplerbriefing0723

Seems its even older than Earth.

Too bad whatever intelligent life was on it blew through its natural resources and went extinct from gross overpopulation eons ago :(

Cool, always interesting to hear from those NASA guys. Especially when it is something like this.

Only 1,400 light-years away!

Lol when I heard earth-2 thought I'd finally be able to meet my evil twin.

If its older than earth it should be earth 1 right?

The real question, "What if Mass Effect Waifus are real?"

"placing it in a class of planets dubbed "super-Earths."

HELLDIVERS

Great news, hopefully they can finish filming the last few episodes of the tv show now.

We need one of these:

What if, we're Earth 2? Right?

What if we aren't even Earth 2...but Earth 14...

Happy Bearthday.

I better buy my ticket now.

i am very excited to live on kessler 452b

We need faster than light travel first. Or teleportation. Or something.

Somewhere on the surface is a fossilized cylon mask in the shadow of a nuked city...

It just keeps happening.

All right. Well time to change my name to Shepard and get this done.

D:

Really exciting news. It's pretty close too considering our galaxy is atleast 100 000 light years across.

Earth 2: Wrong Number is the brutal conclusion to the Earth saga, set against a backdrop of escalating violence and retribution over spilled blood on the original planet.

@rethla: it's a prequel, obviously. It's either that or Earth: Origins.

Just so people have some context, we've found goldilocks zone planets before but they've been closer because their stars were smaller/cooler. Kepler-452b is the first recorded exoplanet that orbits its sun's goldilocks zone and orbits a sun similar to ours.

What's really newsworthy to me about all this is how fast we're logging all these exoplanets. In just 6 months we added over 500 new exoplanet candidates to the catalog.

Eh. Sounds like a cash-in sequel. The first one wasn't even all that great. It just got dumb once all the characters started becoming obsessed with cats and Gabe Newell jokes. It would have been utterly unwatchable if not for the "Party Bill" character played by that Dan Rybread guy or whatever his name was. Give that man an award.

On a serious note, does anyone find the idea of "earth-like" planets kind of legitimately terrifying. For all the things that might be similar, what about all the differences? Are these plants edible or will they immediately murder you? Does the planet secrete any weird unknown gases? Are these insects more deadly then the ones we have on earth. Will the oceans waves suddenly reach thousand feet high tsunamis that periodically crash into the shores? Obviously it's all a fantasy for me, but the thought of a planet that is just similar enough to earth, but has a bunch of tiny differences is both fascinating and scary.

@liquidprince: Kind of. Reading about it made my stomach turn in a way I wouldn't have expected. It's not out of a fear of anything specific like you mentioned. There's just something weirdly disquieting about it. Super fascinating information though.

No? Okay then.

As I recall, Earth 2 wasn't all that good and isn't a particularly great find.

I love space and science stuff, but I'm not that great with understanding it all, does anyone know how far away that is in, like, regular earth years? As far as the speed of the shuttles we have now? Is that like, we would need to invent faster travel then we have now for it to be even remotely visitable? Or like build some sort of massive space ship that can support life for generations so like, our kids kids kids kids kids kids kids kids kids kids can see it?

Light year is a how fast light can travel in a regular earth year, so it's not a measurement of time.

http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/length/lightyear.html

Even if it took 1,400 years that's too long to survive in space. And i don't think faster than light travel will happen tbh

Not to poop on everyone's parade, but what can we really see 1400 light years away? At best, NASA is guessing this planet might be Earth-like because it's about the same distance from its star as we are from the sun and it's maybe about the same size. I mean fuck, we were wrong about Pluto's size and it's 1.7 million times closer to Earth than Kepler 452b.

@zolroyce: Someone doing the calculation on another site said it would take ~50 million years to get there based on the current speed of space travel.

it's my understanding the faster than light travel is impossible according to the laws of physics, however it is theoretically possible to design a spacecraft that can last long enough in space, and get there over many many generations, but what i'm wondering is will information ever be able to travel faster than light? like, will the news on earth 1 ever be relevant to earth 2? that planet could have been destroyed 1399 years ago and we wouldn't find out about it until next year. so in human terms it could only ever be like two completely separate universes, right? more or less completely irrelevant to eachother.

So, what we're seeing right now is light from 1400 years ago?

@zomgfruitbunnies: yes

Faster than light travel through conventional means in normal space time (as in, accelerating via propulsion to reach and exceed the speed of light) is physically impossible. However, even though we're nowhere near having the capabilities of actually trying anything, there are theories that travelling faster than the speed of light could be possible by means other than conventional thrust and propulsion. The Alcubierre Drive being the most notable proposal.

For communications faster than light there is some optimism regarding quantum entanglement. I won't pretend to know how quantum mechanics work but basically according to current laws of physics it should be possible to entangle two particles, and if you affect the state of one it in turn affects the state of the other in the same instant - regardless of distance. If we make something like that work, in the probably distant future, it would enable zero-lag communication regardless of distance.

I think the theories about this have been around for a while now. Long enough to appear often in science fiction. I believe they explicitly say they use this method in the Mass Effect universe for example.

Guys, guys what if our ancestor actually came from Kepler-452b and fucked up the planet so badly so they had to migrate to this Earth?

@sinusoidal: The detection is based on how light of the star changes when the orbiting planet passes it. In another words, they are not seeing the actual planet, just it's effect.

@honkalot: @ll_exile_ll: most interesting, thankyou

@honkalot: hold up hold up hold up, forget all this space jumbo that we probably won't live long enough to be relevent... are you telling me that zero ping connections for online video games is a possibility?!

No we can't really see Kepler-452b.

The only way we knew it was there is because our telescopes detected a slight dimming of the star Kepler 452 as the planet passed by.

We are still years and years away from doing a chemical spectral analysis to know the composition of the planet's atmosphere (something we really need to know for the life hypothesis). We don't know even know basic facts like if this planet is rocky or made with some other weird material.

@honkalot: I dont think current laws of physics have any working model for quantum mechanics.

It's not a matter of not having a working model for quantum mechanics, it's a matter of misunderstanding quantum entanglement. We can tell that quantum entanglement occurs, but it's impossible to use it to transfer any meaningful information. I don't understand it exactly because the math is disgusting, but the theory is easy enough to understand (if not rationalize.) The moment we measure the state of an entangled particle, it's no longer entangled. So, we can tell that information is being transferred instantaneously, but as soon as we know what the information is, there's no way to control its content. It's impossible to send a message via quantum entanglement because it's impossible to know what the message is without disentangling.

When you talk on the phone, it monitors the line for a signal and you hear the results. If you were to try talking on a quantum entangled phone, the instant it connects, you lose the connection.

@sinusoidal said:

I am probably misunderstanding, but couldn't the loss of entanglement then be interpreted as a bit for communication purposes?

Or do you mean like: Observer 1 measures - entanglement is thus lost. Observer 2 measures - entanglement is lost but Observer 2 does not know if it was because of his observation or if Observer 1 had previously observed.

@honkalot: Well it all sound very fishy to me. A perfect example of when we dont know what is going on.

Also for whoever proclaims this method to communicate in distances greater than what is possible to travel, even if they are able to instantly communicate with each other you still have to bring one over to Earth 2 before you can give them a call.

@rethla said:

Well that is how all facets of science work, everything is a work in progress until we find something better.

But yeah, that method were it to work like in optimal science fiction circumstances you would need to bring one part of the system with you when you leave Earth.

Yeah, the moment either observer observes the state of an entangled particle, the entangled particles decohere. It would be impossible for either observer to know if the state of the observed particle was due to its entanglement, or just the natural state of the particle. One of the fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics is that observations are not independent of the observer. It's like Shroedinger's cat. We don't know if it's dead or alive until we observe it: thus determining its dead or alivedness. There's a great Greg Egan novel about the concept I can't remember the name of. Basically, there are a bunch of scientists who are working on a grand unifying theory of how the forces in the universe works, but there's a great deal of competition because the idea is that whoever describes a sufficiently accurate theorem first will henceforth actually determine how the universe works.

its really fascinating. but as far as I understand the planet might not be there at all, since we see it and its position as it looked 1.400 years ago. Still its interesting to know that earth like planets might be more common than we previously thought.

This.

Also, why are there never pics from the telescope when news like this hits? The public is not good enough to see what they can see? It would be nice if they gave us a picture of what they observed and explained what they were able to read from it and what other tools they used to gather info on the planet. Am I just not aware of a resource that includes all of this or do they just never do it?