Good God man.. praying for you

Now, back to Science

Edited for off-topic.
Kindly do not target other members.

soufie
Site Moderator

The only science here is the act of listening in on electromagnetic signals to see if any are artificial.

http://theconversation.com/the-search-for-et-has-been-going-on-for-years-so-what-do-we-know-so-far-44966

The Conversation

The search for ET has been going on for years: so what do we know so far?
July 22, 2015 1.10am EDT

Jonti Horner


Looking for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Flickr/Asbjorn Sorensen Poulsen, CC BY-NC-ND

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence elsewhere in the universe has leapt to prominence once again, with the announcement of the Breakthrough Listen initiative.

Announced this week and funded to the tune of US$100 million by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, it will be a high-risk, high-reward program searching for signals from intelligent aliens – definitive proof that we are not alone.

The idea that we might not be alone in the universe is not a new one. It has passed in and out of vogue for at least the last few centuries with past astronomers speculating on advanced life on our neighbouring planets.

Could Mars have been home to a dying civilisation, transporting water from polar ice caps to the warmer regions near the planet’s equator? Could a thriving biosphere have lurked beneath the clouds that cause Venus to shine so brightly in our night sky?

Astronomers eventually revealed planets that were far from the oases they might otherwise have been. Rather than a verdant tropical planet, Venus turned out to be a hellish, pressure-cooker world with a surface hot enough to melt lead. And Mars is a cold, arid, husk of a world, poorly suited to complex life.

So if we want to find life like us – someone alien to talk to – we have to cast our net more widely. And this is where the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) comes into play.

The SETI initiative

The idea is that once a species becomes sufficiently technologically advanced, it will advertise its presence to the cosmos in some way that could be detected by astronomers on other worlds.

As a species, we have already passed that point. Some argue that our modification of our environment was the threshold. That agriculture, and the controlled use of fire, would have made us detectable by advanced alien astronomers thousands of years ago.

SETI, however, is more interested in the technological broadcast of life’s existence. The radio and television broadcasts of the last century will provide definitive evidence of our existence to any alien observers, so long as they know where to look.

The first transatlantic radio broadcast, by Guglielmo Marconi, occurred in 1901. Of very low power, the radio waves emitted in that broadcast that escaped Earth will now have travelled for 114 years, out towards the stars that were above the horizon for the broadcaster.

Over the years, our broadcasts have became louder and spread across the electromagnetic spectrum. As a result, a vast and ever-expanding bubble of space centred on Earth is full of our noise. If they knew which frequencies to study, aliens at the right distance would be able to tune in to coverage of the 1936 Olympics, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II or even watch episodes of Neighbours.

If we are broadcasting to the universe, then perhaps others are too? If so, SETI aims to uncover their signals – the evidence that there is not only life, but life like us, somewhere out in space.

That search has proceeded intermittently for years with different groups of scientists using ever more advanced tools to search for a needle in a haystack. The Breakthrough Listen initiative is simply the latest.

Early searches for life out there

Just as our early thoughts on life beyond Earth were focused at our own solar system, so was our search for alien life. An astonishing example was the National Radio Silence Day, held in the US during a particularly close approach between Earth and Mars in August 1924.

For a period of 36 hours around the time of closest approach, the US government asked civilians to maintain radio silence for the first five minutes of every hour.

During the periods of silence, radio receivers listened to the heavens, searching for signs of a signal from the Martians.

None arrived.

As technology continued to improve, so did our efforts to detect the signs of extraterrestrial technology. In 1960 the first true modern SETI program began with Project Ozma.

Led by renowned radio astronomer and astrobiologist Frank Drake – who created the Drake Equation which estimates the number of potential civilisations in our galaxy – Project Ozma used a large radio telescope to listen to two single nearby sun-like stars – Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani.

The observations continued for six hours a day for a period of several months. The astronomers involved concentrated their efforts on radio waves of wavelength 21 centimetres (1,420 MHz), an astronomical hailing frequency at which radiation floods the universe from cold hydrogen gas between the stars.

The 21 centimetre wavelength is one that has often been used as a target for SETI, the thinking being that it would be an obvious frequency for alien civilisations to chose for communication with newly fledged technologies.

Again, we heard nothing.

But still the searches continue. The odds of finding something are very low, but the potential reward so great that it is definitely worth trying.


Is there a solution to Drake’s Equation?
Anyone can help in the search

Prior to the latest announcement, the SETI project that most captured the public imagination was SETI@home.

That project used the downtime of computers around the world to search for signals from beyond through a screensaver people could install on their home computers. At its peak, the project involved more than a million users, all participating in the search for life elsewhere.

And again, nothing has been heard.

Which brings us to our current headline maker, Breakthrough Listen, launched by eminent and world renowned astronomers, including Frank Drake – now chairman emeritus of the SETI Institute – and the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

And Australia will play a key role through the Parkes Radio Telescope.

The new program dwarfs all previous searches. It will cover ten times the area on the sky, scan a swathe of the radio spectrum five times broader, and do all that one hundred times faster than any survey before.

The project will not only scan the million closest stars, it will also look for signals from throughout our galaxy. It will even look at the 100 closest galaxies, searching for extra-galactic signals.

The data taken by Breakthrough Listen will be open so anyone can access it. It will be tied in with SETI@home meaning that anyone with a home computer will be able to help in the search through the data.

If we find incontrovertible evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth it would probably be the single most breathtaking discovery in history. Then, the real work would start.

Are they close enough to contact back? Could they already have heard us? That all plays into the second new Breakthrough Initiative project – Breakthrough Message. But that’s a story for another day.
.

http://theconversation.com/if-we-are-to-find-life-beyond-earth-we-need-to-be-explorers-not-hunters-45001/

The Conversation

If we are to find life beyond Earth, we need to be explorers, not hunters

July 21, 2015 11.19am EDT
What secrets will space reveal?

Duncan Forgan

The news that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to receive increased funding and data through the $100m (£64m) Breakthrough Listen project is welcome news for astrobiologists like myself. Launched by Stephen Hawking, it particularly helps to allay growing concerns in the field about having too narrow a focus in our search for life in the universe.

Last week I attended the Pathways Towards Habitable Planets conference in Switzerland, where leading scientists in the search for habitable planets shared their results and ideas for the future. What was especially interesting was the relatively strong consensus on the problems with our definition of the habitable zone – the area around a star which is neither too hot nor too cold for orbiting planets to support liquid water on the surface. Even its name is misleading, as we’ll see in a moment. If we aren’t careful, obsessing about this zone could prevent us from reaching our ultimate goal of finding extraterrestrial life.

For as long as we have considered planets orbiting other stars, we have speculated over their propensity to host living organisms in the way that the Earth does. The habitable zone concept has helped astronomers to define where, in all those quintillions of acres of galactic real estate, we should search for planets that might be inhabited.

It may seem sensible to look for extraterrestrial life in regions where any Earth-like planet would have liquid water on the surface. Liquid water is an essential solvent for the chemical reactions that Earth biology relies on. If we find planets with liquid water, they satisfy a key criterion for being conducive to life as we know it.

Yet being in the zone neither automatically means that a planet will have water, nor that it could support life. It needs to have a “healthy” atmospheric composition – usually assumed to mean similar to Earth’s – and ideally a healthy magnetic field to shield it from high-energy particles belched forth by its parent star.

We might also demand that the planet’s orbit and rotation is stable and that any planetary neighbours kindly leave it alone. We don’t have enough data on the planets we have found to date to know if they meet all these criteria. Even if we did, we would most likely have to run a sophisticated computer simulation to model their climate before we could determine what conditions were really like on the surface.

These difficulties with the definition of the habitable zone can lead to astronomers and astrobiologists coming a cropper when speaking to the press. When a press release announces the detection of “a planet in the habitable zone”, the general public reads “a habitable planet”. It’s this confusion that prompted the discussion at the Pathways conference on whether we should change the zone’s name to something else – perhaps the surface liquid water zone, or the temperate zone.

Beyond this, there are other problems with the concept. Perhaps life doesn’t require surface liquid water to survive at all. Some have speculated that the liquid hydrocarbons on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, could be a solvent for a very different form of life, for example.

Other moons in our solar system, such as Europa and Enceladus, meanwhile, appear to have subsurface liquid water even though they reside outside the traditional habitable zone. The tidal heating they receive from their host planets is enough to make habitable zones beyond the habitable zone, if that’s not too confusing. The more we learn about other planets, the more the simplicity of the habitable zone’s definition begins to look dangerous.


Could Titan’s methane lakes host life? manjik

The need for focus

So why have astronomers persisted with the concept? The real reason is target selection. There are lots of stars in the Milky Way – and we now know of lots of planets surrounding them. Astronomers have limited resources, and not all astronomers want to search for biospheres.

Because we can only observe a few targets, we choose the ones that we think have a higher chance of yielding signs of life. Depending on how you detect them, most candidates are merely silhouettes on a star’s surface or wobbles in a star’s orbit. If we’re lucky, some are both – or we have managed to discover some information about molecules in their atmospheres using transit spectroscopy, which is the study of the light the planet reflects from its parent star.

The next generation of exoplanet observations is designed to ensure we glean the maximum amount of information about as many planets as possible. This is in advance of the coming extremely large telescopes, which may be able to directly image any “Earth-like” planets nearby.

Yet this isn’t an excuse for going down the wrong path. It might be tempting to rush to the end of the search – hunting exclusively in the habitable zone – but we might be rushing to the wrong end. Consequently many scientists are saying we shouldn’t be looking for things that look like life, but merely things that look anomalous and can’t be explained by geochemical, non-biological processes.

The weird blooms of methane in Mars’ atmosphere pointed towards life, for instance. This turned out to be something of a false alarm, since they can also be explained without requiring organisms, as can many other potential signs of life on the planet. Frustrations aside, such anomalies are still worth exploring. The more we find, the more likely we are to find one caused by organisms.

I’m pleased to say that Breakthrough Listen is in the spirit of this approach. It will focus on sifting data from radio and infrared telescopes for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. It will not restrict its focus to zones, particular conditions, or even planets at all, but scan more widely to look for signals that can’t be explained by natural phenomena.


We should be exploring every kind of planet, not just hunting for ‘blue marbles’ like our own Fisherss

Every planet we find and learn about – even hellish worlds such as Venus, or gas giants such as Jupiter – is a piece of the puzzle of how planets form and evolve. They all help us learn how biospheres are born and how common or rare we really are. As we put our blue marble into ever clearer context, it’s my fond hope it will help us appreciate and cherish our singular, complex, beautiful world all the more.

http://theconversation.com/if-we-are-to-find-life-beyond-earth-we-need-to-be-explorers-not-hunters-45001/

The Conversation

Where is everybody? Doing the maths on extraterrestrial life

September 15, 2011 12.44am EDT

Jonathan Borwein (Jon) and David H. Bailey

Are we getting closer to solving one of life’s greatest mysteries?

jcoterhals

During a lunch in the summer of 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Herbert York were chatting about a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens abducting trash cans in flying saucers. Suddenly, Fermi blurted out, “Where is everybody?”

He reasoned: “Since there are likely many other technological civilisations in the Milky Way galaxy, and since in a few tens of thousands of years at most they could have explored or even colonised many distant planets, why don’t we see any evidence of even a single extraterrestrial civilisation?”

This has come to be known as Fermi’s Paradox.

Clearly the question of whether other civilisations exist is one of the most important questions of modern science. Any discovery of a distant civilisation – say by analysis of microwave data – would rank as among the most far-reaching of all scientific discoveries.

Drake equation

At a 1960 conference regarding extraterrestrial intelligence, Frank Drake (1930 —) sketched out what is now the Drake equation, estimating the number of civilisations in the Milky Way with which we could potentially communicate:


where

N = number of civilisations in our galaxy that can communicate.

R* = average rate of star formation per year in galaxy.

fp = fraction of those stars that have planets.

ne = average number of planets that can support life, per star that has planets.

fl = fraction of the above that eventually develop life.

fi = fraction of the above that eventually develop intelligent life.

fc = fraction of civilisations that develop technology that signals existence into space.

L = length of time such civilisations release detectable signals into space.

The result? Drake estimated ten such civilisations were out there somewhere in the Milky Way.

This analysis, led to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, looking for radio transmissions in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum thought best suited for interstellar communication.

But after 50 years of searching, using increasingly powerful equipment, nothing has been found.

So where is everybody?

Proposed solutions to Fermi’s paradox

Numerous scientists have examined Fermi’s paradox and proposed solutions. The following is a list of some of the proposed solutions, and common rejoinders:

Such civilisations are here, or are observing us, but are under orders not to disclose their existence.
Common rejoinder: This explanation (known as the “zookeeper’s theory”) is preferred by some scientists including, for instance, the late Carl Sagan. But it falls prey to the fact that it would take just one member of an extraterrestrial society to break the pact of silence – and this would seem inevitable.

Such civilisations have been here and planted seeds of life, or perhaps left messages in DNA.
Common rejoinder: The notion that life began on Earth from bacterial spores or the like that originated elsewhere, known as the “panspermia theory“, only pushes the origin of life problem to some other star system – scientists see no evidence in DNA sequences of anything artificial.

Such civilisations exist, but are too far away.
Common rejoinder: A sufficiently advanced civilisation could send probes to distant stars, which could scout out suitable planets, land and construct copies of themselves, using the latest software beamed from home.

So the entire Milky Way galaxy could be explored within, at most, a few million years.

Such civilisations exist, but have lost interest in interstellar engagement.
Common rejoinder: As with the zookeeper theory, this would require each civilisation to forever lack interest in communication and transportation – and someone would most likely break the pact of silence.

Such civilisations are calling, but we don’t recognise the signal.
Common rejoinder: This explanation doesn’t apply to signals sent with the direct purpose of communicating to nascent technological societies. Again, it is hard to see how a galactic society could enforce a global ban.

Civilisations invariably self-destruct.
Common rejoinder: This contingency is already figured into the Drake equation (the L term, above). In any event, we have survived at least 100 years of technological adolescence, and have managed (until now) not to destroy ourselves in a nuclear or biological apocalypse.

Relatively soon we will colonise the moon and Mars, and our long-term survival will no longer rely on Earth.

Earth is a unique planet in fostering long-lived ecosystems resulting in intelligent life.
Common rejoinder: Perhaps, but the latest studies, in particular the detections of extrasolar planets point in the opposite direction. Environments like ours appear quite common.

We are alone in the Milky Way galaxy. Some scientists further conclude we are alone in the entire observable universe.
Common rejoinder: This conclusion flies in the face of the “principle of mediocrity,” namely the presumption, popular since the time of Copernicus, that there’s nothing special about human society or environment.

Numerous other proposed solutions and rejoinders are given in by Stephen Webb in his 2002 book, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … Where is Everybody?.

Two of Drake’s key terms – fp (the fraction of stars that have planets) and ne (the average number of planets that can support life, per star that has planets) are subject to measurement.

Scientists once thought stable planetary systems and Earth-like planets were a rarity. But recent evidence suggests otherwise.

Thanks to Kepler and other projects, these two terms have been found to have reasonable values, although not quite as optimistic as Drake and his colleagues first estimated.

With every new research finding in the area of extrasolar planets and possible extraterrestrial living organisms, the mystery of Fermi’s paradox deepens.

“Where is everybody?” is a question that now carries even greater resonance.

An extended version of this article first appeared at Math Drudge.

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http://theconversation.com/its-not-all-about-aliens-listening-project-may-unveil-other-secrets-of-the-universe-45031/

The Conversation

It’s not all about aliens – listening project may unveil other secrets of the universe

July 22, 2015 6.01am EDT
Carole Mundell

Green Bank telescope is one of the observatories that will eavesdrop on aliens. NRAO/AUI, CC BY-SA
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project got a $100 million boost this week from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. While this may seem like a lot of money to spend on a nearly impossible task, many astronomers welcome the investment. The cash will go some way to help save some observatories from closure and allow astronomers to continue to use the facilities for astrophysics research alongside SETI.

The “Breakthrough Listen” initiative, announced on July 20 at the Royal Society in London, will pay for giant radio telescopes at Green Bank in West Virginia, USA and the Parkes Observatory in Australia to scan the skies for signs of alien communications. The Lick Observatory’s optical telescope in San Jose, California will also join the search with the goal of scanning one million stars in our Milky Way galaxy along with a hundred other nearby galaxies. In the UK, the giant Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank is also involved in SETI programmes.

The funding, to be allocated over a decade, will pay for thousands of hours per year on these facilities compared to the tens of hours usually available to SETI scientists competing with other astronomical programmes. Frank Drake, one of the pioneers of modern SETI and a member of the Breakthrough Listen team, has described previous support for SETI research as patchy. The total worldwide support in recent years has been only about $500,000 from private gifts.

Little Green Men

The telescopes will look for signals that cannot easily be explained by natural phenomena. A repeating signal could be be promising, although caution is needed; in 1967, Northern Irish astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered mysterious regular and repeating pulses of radio emission. However the source of this emission, which she nicknamed Little Green Man 1 (LGM-1), turned out to be the first discovery of a pulsar – highly magnetised dense rotating neutron stars. These are recognised today as nature’s most accurate clocks and their discovery has certainly not been a waste of time.


Searching for alien acquaintances. Lewis Francis/wikimedia, CC BY
The Breakthrough Listen project will scan stars for signals in the frequency range of 1 to 10 gigahertz (GHz), a band identified as a good choice for communication. That is because radio signals at these frequencies can travel through the universe and the Earth’s atmosphere relatively unimpeded. Light at lower frequencies is difficult to distinguish from the astrophysical background and higher frequencies are more easily absorbed by intervening gas in the cosmos and the Earth’s atmosphere.

Impact here far beyond aliens

The injection of cash is a lifeline for struggling observatories. The Parkes radio telescope, famous for beaming images of Armstrong’s moon walk, was threatened with closure by 2016, as the Australian government redirected funding into development of the upcoming Square Kilometer Array.

The Greenbank telescope – the world’s largest steerable radio telescope – was under similar threat, with closure projected for 2017 unless new funding partners could be found.

These telescopes will now be trained on the sky and will gather vast amounts of data that will be made available through the SETI@home downloadable screen saver. This will allow the general public to help crunch the data in order to search for tell-tale signatures of intelligent extraterrestrial communications.

In 1959, two scientists – Philip Morrison and Guiseppe Cocconi – were the first to suggest technologically advanced alien civilisations might use electromagnetic radiation to communicate. Shortly after that, Frank Drake made the first search for alien radio signals using a previous generation of giant radio telescope in Greenbank and formulated an equation that suggested there could be ten civilisations in the Milky Way that we should be able to communicate with.

The new funding will allow SETI scientists to thoroughly scan a wider range of frequencies for the next ten years, where previous efforts involved intermittent and irregular eavesdropping sessions. While scientists are hopeful that they will make a positive detection, a negative result from such a comprehensive search will be equally important. To date we have only searched a minute portion of the universe, so it is definitely worth continuing to do so. However, if we fail to find anything after the more detailed search, we may want to think about other ways of looking for alien life.

But to find a needle in a haystack, one has to look further than the first stalk of hay. The data will also be useful for astrophysicists interested in naturally occurring cosmic radio emission. Many new pulsars may be found along with enigmatic fast radio bursts – brief flashes of very intense radio emission that lasts for only a fraction of a second. Such bursts were discovered in 1997 with the Parkes telescope and their origin is still a mystery. Data from the listening project could help solve this mystery.

This is an exciting time to systematically survey a large number of stars. We know that planets are common around a range of different types of stars thanks to recent ground and space-based missions such as NASA’s Kepler satellite, which have revolutionised our ability to find other worlds. At the same time, solar system missions have found evidence of life-enabling water on planets other than Earth.

While it may seem a big jump to finding intelligent and communicative extraterrestrials, this new investment may prove to be the turning point for SETI. In turn, plans are already in place to figure out how to respond if we are not alone – Milner plans to run a competition with a prize of $1m to find the best digital message to transmit back..

http://theconversation.com/the-hunt-for-et-will-boost-australian-astronomy-44957/

The Conversation

The hunt for ET will boost Australian astronomy

July 21, 2015 4.37am EDT
Lewis Ball

The 64-metre Parkes Radio telescope will be instrumental in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. CSIRO/David McClenaghan, CC BY
It’s already an exciting time for Australia in the field of astronomy and space science. But we’ve just received an astronomical boost with the announcement of CSIRO’s role with the Breakthrough Prize Foundation’s (BPF) US$100 million dollar search for extraterrestrial intelligence, called Breakthrough Listen.

CSIRO has signed a multi-million dollar agreement to use its 64 metre Parkes radio telescope in the quest to search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Breakthrough Listen will be allocated a quarter of the science time available on the Parkes telescope from October 2016 for a period five years, on a full cost recovery basis.

The Parkes observations will be part of a larger set of initiatives to search for life in the universe. The ET hunters will also use time on the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia, operated by the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and a telescope at the University of California’s Lick Observatory.


Why Parkes?

CSIRO has the only capability for radio astronomy in the southern hemisphere that can deliver the scientific goals for the new initiative. The Parkes Radio Telescope is essential for the scientific integrity of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

It is ideally situated for a search such as this. The most interesting and richest parts of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, pass directly overhead. If we are going to detect intelligent life elsewhere, it is most likely going to be found in that part of the galaxy towards the centre of the Milky Way.


The Milky Way as seeing from the south hemisphere in the winter in a 180 degrees view. The bulge towards the center of our galaxy is directly above the head of the observer. Flickr/Luis Argerich, CC BY-NC
Click to enlarge
The Parkes Radio Telescope is also one of the world’s premier big dishes and has outstanding ability to detect weak signals that a search like this requires.

It has always been at the forefront of discovery, from receiving video footage of the first Moon walk on 20 July 1969 (which was dramatised in the movie The Dish), to tracking NASA’s Curiosity rover during its descent onto Mars in 2012, to now once again searching for intelligent life.

It has also played a leading role in the detection and study of pulsars, small dense stars that can spin hundreds of times a second, the recent discovery of enigmatic (but boringly named) fast radio bursts, or FRBs, and in the search for gravitational waves.

Parkes also played a leading role in previous SETI searches. In 1995 the California-based SETI Institute used the telescope for six months for its Project Phoenix search. The Parkes telescope provided the critical capability to search the southern sky that could not be accessed using telescopes in the northern hemisphere.

The latest initiative is being led by a number of the world’s most eminent astrophysicists and astronomers. Professor Matthew Bailes, ARC Laureate Fellow at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, will be the Australian lead of the SETI observing team using the Parkes telescope.

Knock-on benefits

The program will nicely complement the existing scientific uses of the Parkes telescope. Although it will take up a quarter of Parkes time, it will benefit the research undertaken during the other three-quarters of the time the telescope is in operation.

It will enable even greater scientific capability to be provided to a wide range of astronomy research through both the financial support and through the provision of new data processing and analysis systems and techniques.

Incredible advances in computing technology make it possible for this new search to scan much greater swaths of the radio spectrum than has ever before been explored. Rather than trying to guess where on the radio dial astronomers might receive a signal, they can now search an entire region of the radio spectrum in a single observation.

The dramatic increase in data processing capability has also meant that astronomers can analyse telescope data in new ways, searching for many different types of artificial signals.

CSIRO is thrilled to be part of this global initiative which takes advantage of the significant advances that have been made in computation and signal processing since the search for extraterrestrial life began.

The probability of detecting intelligent life is small but it is much greater today than ever before. To be the first to discover intelligent life would be a phenomenal achievement not only for the scientific community but for all humankind.

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Hi Sassy,
That's an extensive ground now I've to copy in word & frankly
this will take another week (for me) to digest.

By the way, Drake equation has already been covered by MM, MW and others
a few weeks ago. Excellent read, i'm surprised you missed it.

Just wondering why we don't have a thread on Mars considering that
many of us are into it. and wondering whether it's reasonable
to request you to be our lady carrying the torch here?
I feel it's the real thing, we may see in our lifetime.

Thread Title: "The Empire is Back"

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/07/23/nasas-kepler-mission-discovers-earths-older-bigger-cousin/?cmpid=NL_SciTechFoxNews.com/

ASTRONOMY

NASA’s Kepler mission discovers Earth’s older, bigger brother

By James Rogers

Published July 23, 2015

FoxNews.com

NOW PLAYING

NASA discovers Earth-like planet in 'habitable zone'

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered Kepler-452b, the first near-Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” around a sun-like star, the agency announced Thursday.

Kepler-452b is the smallest planet discovered orbiting in the habitable zone, according to NASA. The habitable zone refers to the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet.

In a statement, NASA said that the confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030.

"We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth’s evolving environment," said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who led the discovery team. "It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth. That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”

The planet, which is about 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth, is located in the constellation Cygnus, about 1,400 light years away. Scientists have yet to determine its mass and composition, although previous research of similar-sized planets indicates that it could be rocky.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft was launched in 2009. The mission's objective is to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems.

Ground-based observations at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory, the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, and the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii were used to confirm the Kepler space observatory's research into the Kepler-452 system.

Chris Carberry, executive director of Explore Mars, a non-profit organization that aims to advance the goal of sending humans to Mars, told FoxNews.com that Kepler-452b is an important stepping stone in a series of discoveries.

"The Kepler announcement was inevitable and we should expect many more similar discoveries over the upcoming years," he explained, in an email. "As our capabilities improve, it's entirely possible that we could discover a habitable planet that can (or does) sustain life - I can't even imagine the discoveries that will be made in the next decade."

Thursday's news caps an exciting few weeks for NASA. The agency's New Horizons spacecraft made a historic flyby of dwarf planet Pluto last week.

When i titled 'Empire' it was with Great Britain in mind.
The Brit DNA, & the legacy & impact world over for 1000 years
greater than that of Rome over Europe in middle times
beyond Alexander, Genghis Khan and wotnot?

With that kind of legacy, the Brit's have a cautious approach,
listen to the enemy, get close to the enemy, and so this
"Breakthrough Listening project"

Now I do realize there's a clown within us
but to turn this thread turn to a comic book??

Hey, you started the comedy when you proclaimed "The Empire is Back".