NASA announced this week that it will share news on Thursday from the Kepler Space Telescope project hinting that NASA may have found an earth-like planet.
“The first exoplanet orbiting another star like our sun was discovered in 1995. Exoplanets, especially small Earth-size worlds, belonged within the realm of science fiction just 21 years ago. Today, and thousands of discoveries later, astronomers are on the cusp of finding something people have dreamed about for thousands of years — another Earth,” a NASA press release about the Thursday news conference reads.
It’s unusual for NASA to call a news conference for the Kepler project, according to Wired Magazine.
Kepler has found numerous exoplanets in the orbiting zone that could be conducive to supporting life. They discovered eight new planets earlier this year, and Kepler astronomer Fergal Mullally said at the time that they were “now closer than we’ve ever been for finding a twin for Earth,” according to Wired.
If I were the conspiracy-minded type, I would say they have already discovered life elsewhere and are releasing information in drips and drabs so as not to cause the “widespread panic”. If you look back the last couple of years there are tantalizing hints.
Is that a Koch brothers flag on the surface? If so, it is a doomed planet.
What are those “hints?”
It’s highly unlikely that Kepler discovering an earth-like planet has anything to do with discovering life itself. The technology that Kepler uses to identify planets that are thousands of light-years from our Earth is simply not capable of discerning anything about what’s occurring on that planet’s surface. If our government has evidence that life exists elsewhere, it has acquired it by other means.
Heck, since climate change took hold, even Earth itself is only “earth-like”.
Wonderful. The Kepler project has been an awesome experiment with thousands of candidate planets detected and this announcement is indeed unusual. Wonder what they found, and will continue to find, just in our Milky Way neighborhood? As far as life elsewhere, I’m damn certain of it. The numbers favor the probability. But it’s highly unlikely that Kepler will find it first. More likely we’ll find it much closer to home, like on Mars or Europa.