UP, UP AND AWAY: The Kepler satellite, scheduled to take flight March 6, is lifted for attachment to its launch rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Kepler will look for Earth-like planets that may be hospitable to life.
Image: NASA
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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
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Next week brings a milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life with the scheduled launch Friday of NASA's Kepler satellite. The mission, named for 16th- and 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, will study a group of stars for three-plus years in search of subtle, periodic dips in stellar brightness—the telltale signs of planetary orbits. Although more than 300 planets outside the solar system have already been found using this method, among other techniques, Kepler's strength will lie in its instruments' sensitivity to smaller, cooler planets more hospitable to life and more like our own.
In a new book, planetary scientist Alan Boss, who studies stellar and planetary formation at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and is a member of the Kepler scientific team, argues that the mission should throw open the door to finding life outside the solar system. With any luck, Boss says, Kepler should indicate that billions of habitable planets exist in our galaxy alone, with an almost unfathomable tally of sextillions across the entire universe. (Where are Jules Verne and H. G. Wells when you need them?) We spoke to Boss about the thesis of his book.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Your new book is called The Crowded Universe. What does the title mean?
The point of the book is to show why one can claim that the universe is likely to be teeming with life. I make the argument throughout the book that we already know that Earths are likely to be incredibly common—every solar-type star probably has a few Earth-like planets, or something very close to it. To my mind, at least, if one has so many habitable worlds sitting around for five billion or 10 billion years, it's almost inevitable that something's going to start growing on the majority of them.
If they've got water on them, and they've got some comets coming in dumping in some amino acids and other interesting prebiotic chemicals, how are you going to keep those things from growing some sort of life?
Life is so tenacious and willing to seek out a toehold anywhere it can, my feeling is that it is going to originate anywhere it has a chance. It may not necessarily be little creatures like in a Steven Spielberg movie, but there will be some kind of archaealike or bacterialike microbes crawling around or bubbling along. Those are going to be creating output like oxygen and methane, and those are things we can see in the atmosphere. We may not be able to tell if a planet has intelligent life or dinosaurs, but we can at least tell if it has slime mold. So we're going for the slime mold.
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Add CommentDid it ever occur to anyone that sending this stuff out into the heavens might be the equivalent of sending inter-galactic spam? As much as I would love the make contact, I think the chances of encountering another civilization at the same technological level and the same attitudes as ours is too far remote to spend on this effort. The assumption that an intelligent civilization must have technology like ours is very narrow minded. 2/3 of our planet is covered in water, if intelligent life arose in an ocean or in the clouds of a gas giant like Jupiter, of what use would the wheel or fire have been to them. They would develop an intelligence far different from anything we can begin to imagine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, looking at my post above and I see it really has nothing to do with the article. For some reason I was thinking of the SETI project when I wrote the comment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGLM2001, I must disagree with you. Look at the numbers, what if only 1 civilisation is similar in it's tool-making and problem solving skills and has had access to common elements like iron, silicon etc.. like we have. Imagine our civilisation's technology in 100 years: Genetic medicine, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence will have combined to make US biologically immortal at least. Imagine an alien species only 10,000 years more advanced than us. Imagine the possible technologies, imagine their mastery of matter and energy (yes, also imagine their cold, ruthless, alien minds and their alien goals and behaviour if you want). But open your mind and fully appreciate the possibilities. By the way, we're not sending any 'stuff' out there, we're watching and we're listening. All it takes is 1 signal with information (a la "Contact" by Carl Sagan) to change our civilisation for ever. Look at the numbers again - even if we do find nothing that's significant in itself - learning that this 'reality' we perceive is really unique. All the scientific evidence suggests that 14 billion years ago there was a 'big bang' event. The universe has expanded and evolved to a point now where it is aware of itself through us and our minds. By perceiving and thinking, our minds (as small parts of the universe) can become aware of the whole - like I said, the universe is self aware through us. When a human gazes out at Andromeda in the night sky there's a link, a connection made between 2 entities millions of light years apart. That we can even think these things is amazing enough but I think it also gives us good reason not to take things for granted and imagine we know it all. As humans, we're inquisitive and optimistic and brave and cunning. Millions of us travel every year to sit on beaches and stare at the oceans or gaze at the stars or head off into unexplored wildernesses. We keep exploring and enquiring because that's what drives us. I think there's room for a bit more optimism my friend.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is just my opinion. But we probably need to work on governing ourselves better and not destroying this planet we have been given before we venture out into the Universe. It is important that before we announce ourselves to the Galaxies that we have at least a minimal ability to DEFEND ourselves and this planet. I agree with the other poster, folks, wake up, there could be many countless planets with life and "aliens" with technology that far transcends our abilities to even understand or comprehend. Take time travel and suspended animation and terra forming and throw in Tesla's Death Ray. "It ain't all roses and chocolates out there". Most people would already be digging holes in the Earth to hide in if they even had a clue of what could be out there.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInstead of Mankind standing together as one we fight each other and have petty differences and wars and hate each other because we all have differing beliefs in Supreme Beings or not. We are ruining this planet yet have hopes of finding another. As a species, we cannot even crawl, yet want to peer outside our crib and dream of the possibilities. We are all naieve.
African Americans were enslaved and brought to America. We should focus on the survival of Humankind and be prepared to defend ourselves and we should start today. Being enslaved by "Aliens" or killed by their biological weapons is not something I want my Grandkids to experience.
Personally, I am all for exploring the Galaxies and the stars and finding all of the habitable "M" class planets. But let's take our Phazers guys, just to cover all the bases. All the "I Love Lucy" reruns are already on their way announcing our existence. Time is elusive and the clock is ticking. The difference between the past, present, and future, is only an illusion, however persistent. Albert Einstein 1955.
Have a nice day...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI seriously doubt we'll ever have any visitors or go visiting ourselves.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe distances are just too vast. The only way any kind of interstellar travel would be feasible is if we were to invent some sort of receiver-less form of teleportation.
As for defending ourselves if we were to be visited by hostile aliens - forget it. We live at the bottom of a deep gravity well on a surface that follows a very well defined path. They could simply send in a decent sized asteroid at .9 c and we could never stop it. The best we could hope for is to have a wide spread space presence throughout the solar system so that a single large scale event (Short of our sun going nova) couldn't wipe out the human race.
While I would love to see us finally start a real space program with manned colonies first we need to get the world in order.
We need to unify the planet.
We moved beyond family groups, then beyond tribes, past city states and grew out of single states to nations, it's time to move beyond nations and become one people looking out for each other, supporting a global revolution to give everyone plenty to eat, safety, good health and a high standard of living.
When we have completed this, when we have gotten our own house in order, THEN we should look outward and launch ourselves from this world as a people united and working together.
Hoo-hum and away we go! If you believe in a creator like God or intelligent
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislife. Then you need not second quess the probability of other advanced intelligence. What would be the purpose in creating dead planets; a whole universe for that matter? What proof do we have that this world isn't being
monitored by higher advanced intelligence? Maybe we aren't ready at the right frenquency. I believe we will discover intelligence else where and that humans do exist in and on other worlds. Once this awakening happens, we will be glade to call Earth our home. The key for opening this new door will be abandoment of selfish and bias double thinking, fears and ignorence. Learning more how to articulate his understanding the universal life principles and energies that govern this universe will be the biggest giant step for mans inlightenment of other worlds and understanding that there are higher intelligent beings waiting to let us know we are not alone.
I believe it is possible to travel between the stars and galaxies. The solution is to use the hyper-space. Through the normal space is not possible. I think that through a very strong electromagnetic field it is possible to distort the space, or you speed up the spaceship for high frequency.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout aliens, they are already around us, from the most ancient civilizations in that Galaxy. They may exist in higher frequency dimensions, like the spirits. I believe that the older religions speak to us about them. This is what the Science must follow.
Think about it!
There has to be life on other planets. For centuries mankind has put itself at the center of the universe and created our own gods to worship to make us feel so important. The odds of any form of life to be at the current human level I would guess to be very slim. Just a few thousands years of evolution would be make a big difference, let alone millions of years. But just as there are millions different life forms on Earth there has to be millions of life forms on many planets within the "Goldilocks" zone that contains water. We just have to find them to prove it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs far as never being able to reach them I believe is a wrong conclusion. Merely 500 years ago if you told people that someday you could pick up a small metal device and pushed about dozen buttons you could instantly converse with someone in China, Italy, or almost anywhere in the world they would think that you were crazy. What if 200 years ago you told them that men will soon someday walk on the moon and return safely to earth.
Supposedly nothing can travel faster then the speed of light but someday there may be away to get around that somehow possibly by shrinking the space in which one has to travel just as space was possibly expanded after the Big Bang.
The biggest impediment we have to really understanding the possibility of any intelligent life is that we only have one datapoint for any type of life at all. Most people (scientists fall in that category as well) tend to think all too earthcentrically in this regard. Of course, we are lacking a great deal of information to realistically break out of that particularly centric mode of thought. To cast about for every possibility isn't reasonable either, so we go with what we know.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a very interesting discussion going on over at the JREF Forums about this very topic.
Some other things to consider:
- Our "I Love Lucy" episodes may be 60 light years out there, but due to the inverse square law, they would be barely detectable by even our own Ariceibo Observatory if it were located only 4 light years away.
- The volume of our won galaxy that we have actually looked for planets in is less than 0.05%.
- The bias for finding large gas giants close to their respective sun is due to the detection methodology we have available to us right now. If you are only able to see one type of thing, then that's generally what you'll see. ;)
- Keep in mind that Kepler will be looking for transiting planets. If the orientation of a solar system is not lined up to our plane of view, we won't find anything there with this instrument.
Sometimes the three most powerful words in the English language are, "I don't know." Not knowing is what drives us to find out!
This is the way I see it . The Cosmic Mayfly From deep under the oceans, far from any sunlight, to high up in spewing volcanoes, life-forms have been found on our planet. Even deep in the arctic ice, life-forms have been found to exist. For life is tenacious, if it can exist it will exist, this is the way of nature. Soon, yes very soon, I’m sure we will find life-forms on other planets in our solar system. Indeed I’d be very surprised if the whole universe, were not teaming with some form of primeval life or another. But will we find intelligent, alien life in the cosmos? This is a very different thing. Yes I’m sure intelligent life has existed in the universe at one time or another, but does it exist right now, at this very moment, in our time? Cosmetologists’ and Mathematicians calculating the endless galaxies’ in the universe, with their countless suns, and infinite solar systems with literally, trillions and trillions of planets, will know-doubt say. By the laws of probability there must be many planets, orbiting far-off Suns not unlike our Earth, where intelligent alien life, could well have evolved. It’s even possible some of these solar systems could have two planets, with intelligent life-forms living on them, though not necessarily during the same time period, nothing is entirely impossible. So why haven’t we heard from any of these, alien intelligences? Is it perhaps, simply down to the vastness of space!, the unimaginable distances between the galaxies. Some star systems are Hundreds, even hundreds of thousands of light years from our own galaxy the Milky Way. In this infinite universe, any forms of signals or transmissions may, barely have left their back yards, or indeed in our case, our own back yard! Life forms, bacteria and Algae, first appeared on our Earth approximately 2 Billion year ago. It’s only in the last 100, two 200,000 years that intelligent man has so very, quickly evolved. With mans rapidly developed technology, and nuclear weapons. I fear we are like monkeys playing with grenades, unable to comprehend the science we have so quickly mastered, and here I think could well lie the clue. Perhaps all intelligent life has a built-in obsolescence. Many alien planets could have had highly developed technologies, only to destroy themselves, when they developed nuclear or biological weapons. If MANKIND could only have watched, some KIND of TIME-LAPSE MONITORING DEVICE, from the very beginnings of the universe. The very moment of creation, just what would we have seen? Yes, Millions of galaxies forming over endless trillion of light years. Expanding, dividing, and colliding, at this very birth of the universe. Taking snapshots every million o-so light-year, perhaps the device would have detected Radio or TV signals, or a nuclear explosion, in some far of constellation, indicating intelligent alien life, had reached an advanced stage of technology. Some snapshots would I’m sure, have revealed many planets with intelligent, evolving life-forms. A snapshot a few million light years later, with very few signs of intelligent evolving life. And this may well be the case right now, at this very moment in our own, small corner of the cosmos. We could really truly be, on our own. 200,000 years of mans existence on our small Planet Earth, is a mere day in the history of the universe. Like the Mayfly that soars in the sky, for its one brilliant day in the warm spring Sunshine. Man could well be the cosmic Mayfly, soaring into space for one brilliant day in the cosmos, only finally to fall back to Earth to die. This may well be mans destiny. The chances of other intelligent life-forms nearby, existing right now at this very moment, in our one-day in the universe, must be reasonably remote. I’m sure in later snapshots of the universe, when man has long become extinct. Intelligent life-forms will be detected in outer space, in some far, or not so far of galaxies. Only to eventually go the same way as man, after their one, or perhaps two, brilliant days in the cosmos.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow! This guy has some faith. We don't even know if life evolved here and he is saying it probably happened all over the universe as if it is as easy as 1 2 3. A planet does not = life. Ours is a privileged planet and the odds of finding another where the conditions for life are just right have got to be low. Then even if there are a bunch of these planets, the odds of life evolving are astronomical as any Origin of Life researcher knows.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is absolutely no evidence for what he is claiming. All we have are 300+ planets discovered so far and of all of them, only 1 is rocky. And it is a virtual furnace, totally uninhabitable. The evidence seems to point in the opposite direction from his amazing faith. As of now, it must be said that he has blind faith. He is banking on chance. This is not science. I think it is something that deserves further research, but these kind of exaggerated claims do nothing to serve the purpose of science except make sensible people skeptical.
Wow Kopak! Interesting post.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHoo-hum and away we go! If you believe in a creator like God or intelligent
life. Then you need not second quess the probability of other advanced intelligence. What would be the purpose in creating dead planets; a whole universe for that matter?
Let me answer your question here.
Psalm 19:1-4
" 1 The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
2 Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
3 There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
4 Their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. "
The short answer to your question would be "for His glory".
You said: "What proof do we have that this world isn't being
monitored by higher advanced intelligence? "
None whatsoever. It is also just as likely that there is a Creator like the Bible says. It seems though like you would rather believe in aliens than a Creator.
"Maybe we aren't ready at the right frenquency. I believe we will discover intelligence else where and that humans do exist in and on other worlds."
Great so you have faith too just like me.
"Once this awakening happens, we will be glade to call Earth our home. The key for opening this new door will be abandoment of selfish and bias double thinking, fears and ignorence."
Why is the abandoment(sic) of selfish and bias double thinking, fears and ignorence(sic) a bad thing? Perhaps those are good things in the alien world? If so, maybe the key to our survival will be just the opposite. Being selfish might be important if we want to survive. Evolution is the survival of the fittest - kind of a selfish system if you ask me. So why in the world would you think that getting rid of selfishness is a good thing? Just curious.
" Learning more how to articulate his understanding the universal life principles and energies that govern this universe will be the biggest giant step for mans inlightenment of other worlds and understanding that there are higher intelligent beings waiting to let us know we are not alone."
OK, that's your opinion. I do agree that there is a higher intelligent being that exists. He has already let us know that we are not alone. He has already revealed His existence to us through His great creation. He has already shown His love to us by sending His Son to this earth. Remembering that the cause must always be greater than the effect, yes, the heavens certainly do proclaim the glory of God!
jbm
Humanity is passing through the adolescent phase of it's social development.We are coming together as a global community populated with but one race, human. When we have come into this unity, stop squandering our resources on killing each other and use our resources to the development of each person's abilities, then we will be ready for the alien anthropologists to introduce humanity to galactic federation of planets.
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