New Earth?????

[nindanjoe]

I first heard of this yesterday, this is some very good news. I always thought I'd be dead by the time scientists found anything like this. There's this episode of The Eyes of Nye (with Bill Nye) named Astrobiology that talks about the search for life in the Universe. I have an OK quality version of that episode if anyone wants to see it; I just need to re-encode since it's about 1GB. There's mention of life existing near deep sea volcanoes in that episode. Awesome and very strange.

[Victoria]

I don't think any human being, no matter how biased or deranged could possibly think we are the sole existance in this universe.

http://www.godhatesfags.com

[Elsiar]

@xizer: Is that one of those godhates parodies?

http://www.godhatesgoths.com
http://www.godhatesfurries.com (seriously who doesn't? )XD

[kelly]

@ Elsiar
as I understand it, that's the original, the others are parodies of it.

[Elsiar]

@kelly: taking a look at the site, It's a parody
It has links to
Priestsrapeboys.com
Godhatessweden.com (I lol'd )
And
Godhatescanada.com

[Fredrick2003]

Yeah I was reading about this earlier.

Its a big deal in a way, because nothing has been found like this before. But I don't think we will ever have the technology to actually do anything about it...

[moomoo]

Oh, I'm reasonably sure we'll someday be able to travel at the speed of light, and probably faster too. Don't ask me how or when, I'm not a scientist, heh.

[moomoo]

Yeah, from what I udnerstand travel at lightspeed should only be possible with no mass or something(acording to whatever), but I have enough confidence in human ignorance that we have no idea of what will be possible in the future.

[Vespasian]

We have enough to worry about on this own planet of ours, 'Nuff said.

[moomoo]

Isn't that one of the main reasons people want to find a new planet, so we can just abandon this one and move on rather than trying to find a proper solution? Or at least just colonize it and not worry about overpopulation and natural resources?

[Ultra Magnus]

Prof. Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engine I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.

Cubert: That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.

Prof. Farnsworth: Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.

[nindanjoe]

It's been exactly one month since the last post! Anywho, I just found out something interesting about our intuition. A rather large quote since I can't quite summarize it properly:

The second problem with this item is more subtle. This is with your reasoning that we are definitely not alone because of the "almost-infinite" number of possibilities in the universe. Unfortunately, "almost-infinite" is not a term with any mathematical or scientific meaning. It is a statement about intuition. Unfortunately, as Richard Dawkins points out, it is precisely the human mind's poor intuition about very large and very small numbers that often leads the undisciplined astray. It is the use of intuition rather than strict mathematical reasoning about large numbers that leads creationists to think evolution is not plausible.

While the number of planets capable of supporting life in the universe is vast by standards of human intuition, the chance of us finding life is the product of the number of planets times the probability of life starting given such a planet. We have no way to know what the probability is, and it could be so low that even multiplied by the number of worlds it is very low. Intuitively, we aren't used to thinking of such low probabilities, so most people assume that with such a vast number of worlds, the probability of finding life on one must be high. But that is an intuitive response, not a scientific one. In fact, our complete lack of knowledge of the probability of life arising given the right planet must compel us to admit a complete lack of knowledge of the probability of any life on any other planet in the universe.

This will not always be so – as we gather data from other planets with Earth-like conditions, we will have data on which to narrow the probability, but until then, any opinion about how likely life is elsewhere in the universe is an unscientific opinion about a scientific subject.

Source: http://www.randi.org/jr/2007-05/050307.html#i9