By the time the Webb Telescope is launched and deployed we would have made it to this star system, using conventional rockets mind you. How many billions of dollars spent and counting?
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Any thing we see from one of these exoplanets has to have occurred at least 10years ago, and inmost case 300 or more. And that will require any inhabitants to have discovered how to generate electromagnetic waves.
There may be life on them, but what kind? A moss, fungi, microbes, the odds are there is some sort of life as we know it, but what kind will always be a mystery unless a probe like we have sent arrives from one of them. It will be from some civilization that is much older than ours. It is fun to speculate though, the odds say they are there, not what they look like are how they got there.
It is a cosmic mystery.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the constellation which is the setting of the original Alien film(1979)? Perhaps there is indeed an "Alien" lurking there where no one can hear you scream.
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@lou andrews If I recall correctly Zeta Reticuli is where the "grey aliens" supposedly come from.
"Diana Dragomir" sounds like a good name for a Marvel heroine.
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@Alan Dean Foster. With a name like that you can be anything you want.
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The majority if not all these planets orbit their stars at a distance that is too close for comfort. Their future is doomed. It would make sense for any civilization that has risen there to look for planets with a durable fate such as Earth.
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It's incredible, even mind blowing what is continually being discovered and observed in the near cosmos.
And, just think - it's only been 500 years since Copernicus wrote his historical thesis on heliocentricism.
What will humanity have discovered in another 500 years [presupposing we still exist].
But I have some serious reservations that if we do find "life" out there somewhere, it will be on an evolutionary basis we can communicate with.
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@Texexnv
It was Aristarchus of Samos NOT Copernicus to be the first to come up with the heliocentric solar system. But, you say, Copernicus proved it. Again, no. That was Newton.
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@Texexnv. In which direction do your reservations run?
A spacecraft that journeys to an exoplanet is probably the first application where artificial intelligence (A.I.) is an absolute requirement. Stated another way, there are presently no applications for A.I. that cannot be performed by a living human being.
Without A.I., any journey from earth to a distance of greater than about 1 light year would be impossible to control. At that distance it would take 1 year to obtain data from the spacecraft and 1 year to send a command back to it. A.I. is a necessity if the spacecraft were to get into trouble.
Without A.I., it is doubtful that a spacecraft could send information to the earth, without physically returning to the solar system. Radio transmitters capable sending data 1 light year away would need to be extraordinarily powerful, and receivers would need to be extraordinarily sensitive.
Without A.I., any journey from earth to a distance of 1 light year would take at least 5 years (at the maximum speed of 58,000 Km/hr). That distance is close to the endurance of the human body travelling through the boredom of interstellar space.
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Do any of these exoplanets have liquid water? Or any sort of atmosphere? Or any other condition necessary for life?
They can barely detect their existence. Planning a move?
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Great research! Just a thought about actually getting there, if and when......
That day, we'll be able to travel 671 Billion miles in an hour. Given the speed the suns are traveling today, they'll be that much further away. I'm thinking we'll never get there.
Wait...I thought the government was shut down. What does NASA think it's doing, looking for other planets and doing science? Aren't they all furloughed? Is this some form of protest? Are astronomers considered "essential" employees...and does that mean that they have to look through their telescopes all day without getting paid? And if they do find life out there, does that mean we have to build a Space Wall?
So many questions...
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@Nadia. The answer to the last question is yes, and don't worry about the cost. The Reticulans will pay for it. They're *real* aliens, after all.
For the other questions, they may be grant-funded and working out of facilities not reliant on fed funding, or they are fanatics who have the most awesome jobs in the universe and don't mind working without pay for a while, or weren't on the clock to begin with, or something or another. My view of America will improve considerably when scientists are indeed deemed essential to the functioning of government.
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That planet "just" 10 light years away is more than 60 trillion miles. It'd take our fastest spacecraft over 187,000 years to get there. Space is vast, just saying. We might want to cherish Earth a bit better.
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How wonderfully exciting. Here is a planet, not all that far away, and not all that different from Earth. And it is one of only a handful scientists have confirmed from the continuously growing list of possible new planets.
Soon we will find the planetary porridge to be just right - not too massive or large nor too small, not too hot or cold, and not too far away from or close to its sun.
Like the truth - That planet(s) is out there.
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That planet is most likely out there and a human will never step foot on it. Anyone that thinks that interstellar trips will be possible before humans make themselves extinct has watched too many Star Trek episodes.
In any case why should humans get the chance to ruin another planet anyway? We had our chance with Earth and we blew it.
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I love that this kind of science has the potential to change the way we understand ourselves. The 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Andromeda galaxy will occur in 10 years. Prior to that discovery, the Milky Way Galaxy was thought to be the extent of entire universe. Now we know the universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies.
With the recent anniversary of Apollo 8, we were reminded of how our perspective of our place in the cosmos has shifted as a result of seeing photos of our fragile and beautiful Earth alone in vast black void. This became even more profound with the 1990 photo of Earth as a single pixel taken by the Voyager spacecraft from 6 billion miles away.
In 1992, the existence of the first exoplanet was confirmed. With TESS, we are beginning the search for alien life. If found, it will be the most profound discovery since the discovery of the big bang. It is one thing to know that it is very likely life exists elsewhere in the universe, but to confirm its existence will forever shift our understanding of ourselves, just as the other discoveries have. It is a great privilege as a taxpayer to play a small role in supporting this incredible scientific endeavor.
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@MRod. Superb comments. I'm just not so sure that discovering life elsewhere will change much on this planet. People are so far down the rabbit hole with their own problems and petty isms that I doubt they would notice. Now, if that life discovers us first, that may be different. But even then I think the main reaction would be bigger weapons budgets.
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@MRod
To be clear, Andromeda was discovered when men and women first started looking up into the night sky as it is visible to the naked eye. You're probably referring to Edwin Hubble's proof of what many astronomers had already suspected: Andromeda was a swirling collection of stars just like our own galaxy.
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