I am not sure if anyone has posted about this yet but apparently they have discovered a planet similar to earth 1400 light years away.

I had a little odd thinking to myself and came up with an idea.

Apparently so I am told scientists reckon that they are about 10 years away from making immortality a reality. This however I thought I'd use as part of a plot for story of a possible way to get there.

So lets say we can create a ship that travels the speed of light and that we put 2 couples on the ship (4 people in case anyones maths is off) and send it towards this new planet. Just imagine how chaotic it would be on the ship. The two couples are to allow reproduction and hopefully prevent incest by breeding one couples offspring with the other couples. The "bus" stops in 1400 years time which is enough time to go mad. However consider that breeding does occur, it wouldn't take too long into the journey for the ship to become overcrowded. I think what would also be interesting is part way through the journey another ship stops by and ask if they want to come aboard because in 1400 years it could be possible that they invent a new ship that could reach this planet quicker than the one they already launched. Besides by the time you get their the planet may have evolved a bit more.

Also I have had this thought too. If we finally make it and reach a planet that has some degree of civilised life lets say our planet only 200 years ago. So we reach this planet, how do you approach? Do you invade and kill because your weapons and technology are far superior and conquer the planet that way. Do you negiotiate and try to coexist with the species already living their. Do you use strategy and send "UFO's" to pick up random specimens for tests until you create a disease they are weak to and spread this disease through their planet wiping them out?

Just thought I'd get other peoples minds going, hopefully outside the box. I'm not saying any of this is possible but I'm asking what if....

Being that warp 1 is 1.9 times the speed of light then warp 10 would get us there real quick

I just have this image in my head that Ship A gets overtaken by Ship B and Ship C overtakes A and B and eventually when Ship A does get there the entire planet is over populated. Sometimes better not to be the first to do something. A few other problems would be fuel to sustain light speed travel, food supply to sustain potential growing numbers on the ship for 1400 years. Do you have a facility on the ship that grows and harvests a variety of food and what foods would they be and if we arrive at the destination do we try to produce our foods on a new planet or do we see what foods the planet has to offer first? Do we eventually sort some sort of trade route out for such a place that's that far away and does it become some sort of holiday destination. It is apparently 60% Larger than earth so technically should have more habitable space for an expanding species such as our own. My question earlier was if we were to discover a planet with intelligent life on it, do you slaughter, enslave, coexist, trade with them? Because to truly know what you would do would surely make us understand better what actions a potential alien invasion of our own planet would take.

First of all, anyone on a spaceship probably used birth control so there would never be an overpopulation problem, more likely, a tightly controlled birth rate.

Food would be a big problem. They would have to grow their own and it would be a hit or miss operation with what we know about feeding yourself on a long space voyage.

If the planet had a technology, chances are that it would be far beyond ours. Ours is only a few hundred years old and most of it is less than fifty. Us being the "masters" would be quite a reach.

Lastly, the particular planet is really too far away to consider visiting at our level of tech. There are many stars much closer that probably have much better copies of Earth than this one. We only found this one because we happened to be looking there. The actual best choice stars are probably Red Dwarfs which are numerous and stable. They also lack much of the harmful radiation which make the odds better.

If we can determine how to make humans into rocket fuel our best bet would be to let the population explode and feed anyone who wants to be a politician to the engine. They would then never run out of fuel.

not to mention that it is 1400 light years away, all they really know is that it is in the Goldilocks zone...

Once we get to looking around, we will probably find some "just as likely" candidates within 25 to 50 light years. The orbital axis of the planet has to line up with the star for us to see it although the doppler method is becoming much more accurate.

"We've gotten closer and closer to finding a true twin like the Earth," Coughlin added. "We haven't found it yet, but every step is important because it shows we're getting closer and closer. And this current planet, 452b, is really the closest yet."

Scientists have discovered other small, potentially habitable exoplanets, but those previous finds orbited red dwarfs, stars much smaller and cooler than the sun.
Meet Kepler-452b, Earth's closest twin
An Artist's concept of the surface of the newfound exoplanet Kepler-452b, a planet about 60 percent wider than Earth that lies 1,400 light-years away. Kepler-452b is likely rocky, and it orbits its sunlike star at the same distance Earth orbits the sun.
[Pin It] An Artist's concept of the surface of the newfound exoplanet Kepler-452b, a planet about 60 percent wider than Earth that lies 1,400 light-years away. Kepler-452b is likely rocky, and it orbits its sunlike star at the same distance Earth orbits the sun.
Credit: SETI Institute/Danielle Futselaar
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The mission of the Kepler Space Telescope is to identify and characterize Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars.
The mission of the Kepler Space Telescope is to identify and characterize Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. [See how NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft works in this Space.com infographic]
Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com contributor
View full size image

Kepler-452b lies 1,400 light-years away, and is the only planet known in its solar system. It's about 60 percent wider than Earth, which gives it a "better than even" chance of being rocky, researchers said. The planet is probably about five times more massive than our own, making it a so-called "super Earth." It likely possesses a thick atmosphere, lots of water and active volcanoes.

The exoplanet completes one orbit every 385 days, so its year is only slightly longer than Earth's. And Kepler-452b circles a sunlike star that's just 10 percent bigger and 20 percent brighter than the one that hangs in Earth's sky.

"It would feel a lot like home, from the standpoint of the sunshine that you would experience," said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. (Jenkins led the team that discovered Kepler-452b.)

But Kepler-452b's star appears to be considerably older than the sun — 6 billion years, compared to 4.5 billion years.

"It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth," Jenkins said in a statement, referring to that just-right range of distances that could support the existence of liquid water on a world's surface. "That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet."

Kepler-452b's existence was announced with the release of the latest Kepler catalog, which includes 521 new planet "candidates" dug out of the data the spacecraft gathered during its first four years of operation. (Kepler, which launched in March 2009, stopped observing under its original planet-hunting mission in May 2013, after the second of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed.)

Eleven of the 521 newfound candidates are, like Kepler-452b, less than twice as wide as Earth and reside in their host stars' habitable zone, researchers said.

Kepler's total haul of potential exoplanets is now nearly 4,700. Just 1,030 of these finds have been confirmed to date, but mission scientists expect that the vast majority — 90 percent or so — will end up being the real deal, just like Kepler-452b.

During its original mission, Kepler stared at more than 150,000 stars simultaneously, looking for tiny brightness dips caused by planets crossing these stars' faces. Kepler's dataset is therefore huge, and it has taken researchers a while to analyze it and address the main goal of the $600 million mission — determining how common Earth-like planets are across the Milky Way galaxy.

Analyses of Kepler observations to date suggest that about 20 percent of the Milky Way's stars harbor at least one rocky planet in the habitable zone, but this number will be revised or refined with additional study, researchers said.

"Continued investigation of the other candidates in this catalog and one final run of the Kepler science pipeline will help us find the smallest and coolest planets," the SETI Institute's Joseph Twicken, lead scientific programmer for the Kepler mission, said in a different statement. "Doing so will allow us to better gauge the prevalence of habitable worlds."

Indeed, the team plans to release the eighth Kepler catalog next year. Continued software improvements and the knowledge gained during previous analyses of the dataset should lead to more exciting finds by the mission science team — and by researchers who study the publicly archived data in the future, Coughlin said.

"I really expect that discoveries will be coming from Kepler for the next several decades," he said.
The exoplanet Kepler-452b circles its parent star in an orbit very much like that of the Earth around the sun, as seen in this NASA diagram. Kepler-452b takes 385 to orbit its star, and is in the habitable zone where liquid water could exist, making it a

http://www.space.com/30026-earth-twin-kepler-452b-exoplanet-discovery.html

What good is the find if we can't reach the planet?

We need a stargate....

It might as well be a virtual world. It's meaningless in terms of practical terms.

You find an apple tree and the apples are ten feet high! What do you do?

I couldn't help but think, what about toilet paper, where would it all be stored, or would it be fitted with a posh Bidet

Where there's a will there's a way

This is more than 10 feet high. It's astronomically out of reach with an infinitesimal shot of developing a means to get there.

nobody knows what future tech will be, but none the less, you have to see the apples in order to build a ladder to reach them... thats all thay are doing now, for future studies/missions... they have to be ready for when we can get to them...

They get more information probing farther and farther out in space that we can't even imagine.

lots of educated guessing with that info tho... but when we can get closer, we will get the real info on them...

Like a puzzle; you have to look long and hard for the right piece that fits.