[Rod_Cloutier]

Five more potentially habitable planets found:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2011 ... anets.html

[mos6507]

Someone invent warp drive so we can get off of this rock. Well, maybe that won't work out either.

[scas]

Don't you think that SETI's failures might be a hint of our peculiar situation?

Definitely. If the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life, why is it so shy? Of course, the absence of discernable communication could just mean that life doesn't necessarily become sentient, in most cases it just stays at a single cell level, or reptilian equivalent or whatever and our species is the fluke, not life itself. Or we are still so primitive and stupid that we don't have the tech to recognise alien communication. Or that it is too far away in space, on the other side of the galaxy, or in another galaxy. Or too far away in time, arisen and disappeared long ago. Probably Occam's razor applies tho, eh?

As for the information theory part of your post, I am too primitive and stupid to have anything useful to add, I'm afraid

The other option of why we don't detect other technological life is that upon becoming technological, the system becomes unstable and destroys itself through events like nuclear annihilation, ozone depletion, severe global warming, manufactured viruses, or as yet undiscovered doomsday scenarios. And in the span of time, these societies are a mere blip.

[rangerone314]

I got an idea... how about some amateurs get some powerful equipment and beam a documentary detailing humanities abuse of this planet and its lifeforms (including humanity) to all the nearby goldilocks planets, and request a biological weapon or nanites targeting Homo sapiens be sent here?

[scas]

I got an idea... how about some amateurs get some powerful equipment and beam a documentary detailing humanities abuse of this planet and its lifeforms (including humanity) to all the nearby goldilocks planets, and request a biological weapon or nanites targeting Homo sapiens be sent here?

There's a movie about this. It's called The Age of Stupid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZjsJdokC0s

Worth a download (i'm a criminal)

[Serial_Worrier]

Someone invent warp drive so we can get off of this rock. Well, maybe that won't work out either.

It's sad that you doomers can't appreciate the miracle that is the Earth. The "pale blue dot" as Carl Sagan called it. He was not a doomer.

[Pretorian]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/could-goldilocks-planet-be-just-right-for-life-2/

Temperatures can be as hot as 160 degrees or as frigid as 25 degrees below zero, but in between — in the land of constant sunrise — it would be “shirt-sleeve weather,” said co-discoverer Steven Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

It’s unknown whether water actually exists on the planet, and what kind of atmosphere it has. But because conditions are ideal for liquid water, and because there always seems to be life on Earth where there is water, Vogt believes “that chances for life on this planet are 100 percent.”

The astronomers’ findings are being published in Astrophysical Journal and were announced by the National Science Foundation on Wednesday.

The planet circles a star called Gliese 581. It’s about 120 trillion miles away, so it would take several generations for a spaceship to get there. It may seem like a long distance, but in the scheme of the vast universe, this planet is “like right in our face, right next door to us,” Vogt said in an interview.

Now humanity has a Goal bigger than ourselves, will it help us unite as one species or be ignored?

You mean, to screw one more planet before we die?

[Subjectivist]

Gliese 581c is a super-Earth planet that was discovered in 2007. It resides in the Gliese 581 system, which at 20 light-years from Earth is relatively close to our planet (in celestial terms). While early research suggested that Gliese 581c may have liquid water on its surface because it resides in its star's "habitable zone," more recent research suggests it may have a Venus-like environment.

Discovery

The existence of Gliese 581c was announced in 2007 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The paper was led by Stephane Udry, an astronomer at Geneva Observatory. Gliese 581c was one of two super-Earth planets his team found, both at the edge of the star's habitable zone.

Gliese 581c was found using the radial-velocity method, meaning that it was detected through tugs on its parent star. The instrument that made the discovery was the HARPS spectrograph on a 3.6-meter telescope managed by the European Southern Observatory in Chile. (HARPS is one of the more prolific planet-hunting instruments available to astronomers today.)


Gliese 581c: Super-Earth Exoplanet
Possible planets of the Gliese 581 system, superimposed on a picture of our own solar system to compare orbital distances.
Credit: National Science Foundation/Zina Deretsky
Gliese 581c is a super-Earth planet that was discovered in 2007. It resides in the Gliese 581 system, which at 20 light-years from Earth is relatively close to our planet (in celestial terms). While early research suggested that Gliese 581c may have liquid water on its surface because it resides in its star's "habitable zone," more recent research suggests it may have a Venus-like environment.

Discovery

The existence of Gliese 581c was announced in 2007 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The paper was led by Stephane Udry, an astronomer at Geneva Observatory. Gliese 581c was one of two super-Earth planets his team found, both at the edge of the star's habitable zone.

Gliese 581c was found using the radial-velocity method, meaning that it was detected through tugs on its parent star. The instrument that made the discovery was the HARPS spectrograph on a 3.6-meter telescope managed by the European Southern Observatory in Chile. (HARPS is one of the more prolific planet-hunting instruments available to astronomers today.)

Advertisement

At the time, the researchers said Gliese 581c is "the known exoplanet which most resembles our own Earth" because it was only five times the mass of our planet. (Subsequent searches have found many planets much closer to our Earth's mass.)

While Gliese 581c was classified as Earth-like, the researchers cautioned that actual conditions on the planet may be very different than our own. The surface temperature, for example, would depend on the composition and thickness of the atmosphere. The atmosphere also determines how much light is reflected off the planet, and the magnitude of the greenhouse effect.

The parent star of Gliese 581c, called Gliese 581, is an M-class dwarf star. It's cooler than the sun, which means its habitable zone would be closer in than our own solar system. M dwarfs are favored for planetary searches because they are dimmer, meaning that planets passing across the star would be easier to see. There also is a smaller relative size between the planet and the star, making their gravitational effects more obvious.

Characteristics and habitability

Researchers examining Gliese 581 have had different opinions over the years about how many planets were there; one example was the discovery of Gliese 581g in 2010. Signatures of the planet did not show up in independent searches, and today most astronomers in that field consider that the planet does not exist.

Not knowing the number of planets exactly makes it difficult to determine the radius of Gliese 581c. The planet has not been seen directly passing across the face of its star, so astronomers can only learn about its characteristics from Gliese 581c's influence on other planets and the star. The radius would in turn determine such matters as whether the planet is closer to an Earth-like planet (with a smaller atmosphere) or closer to a Neptune-like planet (with a much thicker atmosphere).

Gliese 581c takes about 13 days to orbit its parent star. (By contrast, Mercury's orbit around our much larger sun takes about 88 days.) Because Gliese 581c is so close to its star, a common belief is that the planet is tidally locked. This means that as it orbits, the planet always keeps the same side toward the sun. This phenomenon is common among moons of Jupiter and Saturn in our own solar system. Earth's moon is also tidally locked to our own planet.

If a planet is tidally locked, this means that one side (the star-facing side) is always warmer than the other side (which always faces away from the star.) Any considerations of habitability would have to take this into account. The only firm example of a habitable planet that we know of – our own Earth – has a regular day-night cycle in most areas of the planet, except the poles. Over billions of years, lifeforms have adapted to this cycle. It's unclear how life would survive in an area of perpetual day or perpetual night, but studies are ongoing.

A 2007 follow-up paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics, led by Werner von Bloh at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, suggested that Gliese 581c is too hot to support life because it is so close to its parent star. This means that the planet may have more of a Venus-like environment, with an extremely hot surface and a runaway greenhouse effect under a thick atmosphere. This was confirmed in a 2011 study in Astronomy and Astrophysics led by Y. Hu, who is with Peking University's laboratory for climate and ocean-atmosphere studies.

While Gliese 581c has not been discussed much in scientific literature in recent years, astronomers are working more generally to improve their models of planets that are close in to their parent stars. An example is a 2013 article published in the journal Nature, in which a team led by Jeremy Leconte examines the conditions under which runaway greenhouse effects happen on Earth-like planets. This line of research is receiving increased attention again after the discovery of Proxima Centuari b, a potentially habitable planet just four light-years from Earth, in 2016.

https://www.space.com/36196-gliese-581c.html

[KaiserJeep]

Most people are way out of date on this one. As of December 2017 something over 3000 exoplanets have been discovered around nearby stars. The closest "Goldilocks Planet" is Proxima Centauri b which was discovered in 2016 around the closest star to Earth, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri.

Since Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf and a flare star, it is a debateable point whether life could evolve there on the Proxima Centauri b planet. All we know for sure is that it is in the "habitable zone" where water is a liquid.

[ROCKMAN]

KJ - What I always find interesting about the excitement over such reports is the lack of context with regards to times frames. IOW the hope of finding intelligent life requires more then a Goldilocks position. It requires there being someone there to here the door knock. Consider some distant intelligence sending a signal to our little Goldilocks neighborhood...in 1750. No one then would hear the doorbell to that intelligence would move on to the next likely candidate. Given how long the earth has been in a Goldilocks position and the extremely tiny portion of that time would could have picked up a signal what are the odds? Same true for us looking at a distant world.

And imagine if some distant intelligence knocks on our door in the next 1,000 years: would there be anyone left here to pick up that signal?

[KaiserJeep]

RM, you make a good point. All of the NASA types who were searching the Heavens for signs of life are now unemployed. The private efforts in this regard are still in business, but NGO funding is relatively small for this purpose.

So we pretty much are not even listening very much at all, today.

[Outcast_Searcher]

KJ - What I always find interesting about the excitement over such reports is the lack of context with regards to times frames. IOW the hope of finding intelligent life requires more then a Goldilocks position. It requires there being someone there to here the door knock. Consider some distant intelligence sending a signal to our little Goldilocks neighborhood...in 1750. No one then would hear the doorbell to that intelligence would move on to the next likely candidate. Given how long the earth has been in a Goldilocks position and the extremely tiny portion of that time would could have picked up a signal what are the odds? Same true for us looking at a distant world.

And imagine if some distant intelligence knocks on our door in the next 1,000 years: would there be anyone left here to pick up that signal?

And that's assuming we'd hear the knock. Or recognize the knock. We assume we'd recognize an intelligent alien civilization. Maybe if such a civilization survived long after our state of development they'd have technology and habits that would make them completely invisible to our technology and our assumptions.

Almost everything we thought would be true about the nature and composition of our own sun's outer planets and/or moons was basically wrong enough once our NASA probes got to take a close look, that it was all just guesswork. But we "know" what to look for to find E.T.?

We know to look in the mirror to find arrogance. Beyond that, I posit it's mostly guesswork.

[Rod_Cloutier]

This is going to sound 'Out there', however during my experiences with Ayahausca a few years ago, I was telepathically in contact with extraterrestrials. They are well aware of our presence, however they are waiting for us to mature as a species and cross the cultural Rubicon of social development before they will make contact with us.

I specifically recall that there were at least a dozen nearby intelligent species, the most dominant form look like the ogres from shrek, 9 ft tall and green, but the most happy and friendly extraterrestrials look like giant red tree frogs, and there are others.

The main cultural barrier we must pass as a species is a general understanding shared by everyone that "We are all part of the one thing that is- life", and a total renunciation of violence to solve problems. Once our distant descendants solve those issues, then we will be permitted access to the community of mature sentient beings in the cosmos.

I was also telepathically told that "They will decide when we are ready". I don't see our civilization moving in either of those directions right now, so contact won't formally occur in my lifetime. If you want to experience them directly, you'll need to take consciousness expanding substances yourself.