Today we celebrate Earth Day. And Yesterday only I read the news that a new Planetary System with potential Earth like conditions has been found. Needless to say it generated all the speculations about whether these planets have aliens, whether it can sustain life or whether it is habitable for humans, etc. Hollywood would like us to believe that within next 100 years we will be living on some other planet. There are endless science fiction that imagines we will go to a far away planet and live there comfortably. :cheers Such news used to excite me when I was just a kid. But now I'm finding such research useless and wastage of money and time. I refuse to believe we can ever have any other place as wonderful as our Earth. That this is our only home and we have no where else to go. But that's just unimaginative me Do you really think we humans can survive long enough and be powerful enough to find another planet? Or do you feel we will simply perish like Dinosaurs when our time will come? :coffee
It is a very good question. We have to travel for many light years to find the place like Earth. I guess there will be a Earth as like ours and some replicas. But it takes more time to find them and have to spend more energy too. Instead of going for hard way, we could preserve our own for our future generations.
Thanks for the reply Mrskannan I always feel that the huge money that is invested in each space travel or explorer mission, if that was invested in cleaning up the environment, trying to invent Eco-friendly materials, etc, it will be more beneficial for us.
Shreya Stimulating fact!!!!!!But before getting into arguments,just read what Geoff Marcy (professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Principal Investigator with NASA's Space Interferometry Mission (SIM)...co-leads a team that has discovered more than 70 planets outside the solar system. Along with Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institute in Washington. SAYS................ Since 1995,more than 100 extrasolar planets have been discovered. Why is all this happening now? Marcy: The discovery of planets around other stars is extraordinarily difficult. The problem, in a nutshell, is that a planet is about 1 billion times fainter than its host star, so the planets get lost in the glare of the host star. The reason we're finding planets now, by this doppler technique, is that now we have big telescopes, fast computers and most importantly, exquisite optics. So far, all of the planets discovered are gas giants. How long will we have to wait for the discovery of Earth-size planets? Marcy: NASA is launching two missions within a decade, both explicitly to detect Earth-like planets. The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) and Kepler will determine whether there are Earths out there and how often Earth-like planets occur. What fraction of the twinkling stars you see out there are going to have Earths? We're going to have the answer in 10 years or less. With SIM, we're going to survey about 200 nearby stars. The interesting problem we face is that we don't know how many planets it's going to find. It might turn out that every star has an Earth or a Venus or a Mercury or a Mars -- a smallish planet heretofore undetectable. That's the great part about SIM -- we don't know the answer ahead of time. We don't know if we'll find three planets or hundreds. We have to do the experiment to find out. Why are Earth-sized planets considered the "holy grail" in planet-finding? Marcy: What we're trying to do with SIM is to find planets that have a rocky, wet surface. It is that liquid water that provides the solvent for biochemistry -- the chemistry of life -- to flourish. So we're looking desperately for planets with a surface that can hold those pools of biochemistry that we think would eventually lead to complex life.......... Why should the general public care about this quest? Marcy: The discovery of planets around other stars will never change the price of any stock on the U.S. stock exchange. NASDAQ isn't going to budge when we find a new planet. But I think there is great value in finding out if there are other planets out there, and I think the main reason is simply because we want to know if we're alone in the Milky Way galaxy with its 200 billion stars. When you look up at the night sky at those twinkling lights, you wonder: Are any of those suns like our own Sun? Is our solar system unique? And we're getting answers. There are other planetary systems, and the chances for life on some of those planets, if conditions are right, are very high right now..... Courtesy:NASA - Home So...................have to wait n watch till another terra firma with lively components is scientifically observed. Till then lets enjoy this GOLDEN EARTH by conserving its core
Wow, thanks a lot for sharing this interview. Yes, it is very exciting thinking about other planets and some of them being like our earth. Maybe someday we will have another home, however far-fetched it might look like today. But till then, Go Green for Blue Earth
