Give me a break! NASA discovers Earth's twin - just 60% bigger, 1400 light years away (that's travelling at the speed of light for 1400 years to get there, people); and possibly 1.6 billion years older, hint, hint, more advanced.

Every television station on earth is reporting this story as though its the biggest discovery in our lifetime. If you Goggle the story you'll even see a picture of the planet, without a mention it is actually only a representation. NASA has no idea what the planet actually looks like.

I'm sorry, but everything about this discovery is shear speculation and given that it is totally impossible to ever get close enough to know if there is life, water, or a favourable atmosphere, this whole story is nothing more than a magnificent extrapolation of data to fit someone's agenda.

I'm not being a Grinch, I would love to see friendly, earth-like intelligent life discovered; I would love seeing the proof we are not alone; I would love a more advanced world to provide us the answers to end war and improve life for all beings on Earth, but a photo of a dot billions of miles away, that is likely to have a planet orbiting it "in the Goldilocks Zone" just seems too much like a convenient scientific sound bite with an ulterior motive of generating enough research funding to keep a bunch of astronomer nerds employed for the rest of their lives.

The dumbing down continues...

Pardon my scepticism.

Pardoned and shared.

CH,

Part of the search for life outside our solar system has to find planets that could support life. The criteria being:

1 The star is similar to ours in age and luminescence,
2 The planet is in the "goldilocks" zone where the temperature makes life capable,
3 The planet is similar in size and constitution to ours (ie not a gas giant)

The point is not that we have found a second Eden with bunnies frolicking, but that we have now found a string of potentially life supporting planets in our local vicinity. That there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy and 50 billion odd galaxies, means that the chances of life on other planets is very high. That we will never be able to reach them is not the immediate issue.

Actually the is no picture of a dot, the planet is identified by the dimming of the stars own light as the planet passes between us and the star, using spectrometry we may be able to determine some of the chemical characteristics of the planet such does it have an atmosphere and its composition.

The reason the discovery is of such significance is it is the first planet discovered outside our solar system which lies at a suitable distance from its star for life as we know it to exist. The number of planets identified outside the solar system is around 1800 so far we know of only two (inc earth) which are located in the right place and in the right size range for life to be a possibility. Although the number of examples is far to low to make a calculation as to how common earth like planets are, it does tells us that of the billions of stars in our galaxy similar to our own, there must be vast numbers of planets similar to earth.

The speculation that life exists on other planets around other stars now seems much more likely, unfortunately unless some way can be found to communicate faster than the speed of light, we will not be able to communicate with any advanced civilization as in the case of the planet just discovered, just to send a question and get an answer would take 2800 years. It is also possible that from the evolutionary point of view of life that advanced civilizations are a dead end.

Of course it is exciting that scientists are
making progress into different worlds with
the help of NASA's planet-hunting Kepler
mission, a space telescope that according to
an article done by the ABC has scoured more
than 150,000 stars for planets beyond our solar
system since its launch in 2009.

And, of course it is intriguing to consider the
possibility of life existing on another planet
like ours. However the two best candidates apparently
are so far away that learning more about them presents
a big challenge.

But, as the old adage tells us - each journey of discovery
begins with small steps (or words to that effect).

And as David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for
Astrophysics tells us - the first steps have been taken:

"All we can say is that they're promising candidates."

SM, writing in Forbes about Hubble Space Telescope's 25th anniversary three months ago Ethan Seigal wrote:

"Extrapolating this over the entire sky, we find that there are 170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, and that’s just a lower limit. Given that there’s an astonishing amount of Universe out there that Hubble cannot yet see — and that it can only see the brightest of the most distant galaxies — we may yet find closer to 10^12 (or a trillion) galaxies within our visible Universe."

For his exhaustive descriptions regarding Kepler survey results see:

http://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/how-many-habitable-planets-are-in-our-galaxy-5bcf6db80c7f

"Picking a middle-of-the-road number leads us to a more reasonable, realistic estimate of around 40-to-80 billion potentially habitable worlds in the galaxy, alone. [That is the Milky Way galaxy... not the other 169,000,000,000 ones!]

That’s not bad, but as you can see, we’ve got a lot of science left to do before we know for sure. Still, at the start of 2015, that’s some amazing progress as far as learning what’s out there!"

I agree with you "That we will never be able to reach them is not the immediate issue" but the odds of a "a second Eden with bunnies frolicking" existing somewhere is arguably above zero.

However, "in the dimension of imagination" if they are Rod Serling's "twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper” it will be worth it.