Habitable planet found in the Libra constellation?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070424/ap_on_sc/habitable_planet

New Earth?

I bet this planet is about as habitable as Venus.

Most likely not at all habitable, but it's impressive they are finding planets so small

This is exciting. But I wonder what the weather patterns would be like if the planet doesn't rotate and it completes it's orbit every 13 days.

.....

Klingons.

Goddam Klingons.

My bet is that this rock wouldn't even be close to habitable, and the news media is all AFU yet again.

Imma build me a starcruiser and get to prospectin'!

K-PAX?

-J.

space.com was pretty optimistic... the only question is, is there water? 0-40 degrees C is fine and good... but that doesn't mean there's any water to be liquid.

And no amazonian women to take the male astronauts hostage.
Where's Shakes?

If there is water, it could mean there's life... and if that is the case, I'd think it'd be possible that it's actually more advanced than us, seeing as how it's star has been around a lot longer than ours, and will be around a lot longer.

The real significance here is that red dwarfs obviously have planets - and those kinds of stars are the most prevalent in the universe.

Yeah, but planets aren't important. Potentially HABITABLE planets are.

Yes, but if planets can form around red dwarfs, it's more likely they may have habitable ones because IIRC red dwarfs are less likely to have supergiants that would eat terrestrial worlds.

If that were the case:

1. They'd probably have at least probed earth by now, if not sent a manned mission.

2. We'd pick up all sorts of transmissions from the place. Unless they were so advanced that they had long since abandoned using radio waves for communication.. which is highly unlikely.

Anyway; I think we should start building a probe to go and check out the place. It would need nuclear pulse propulsion or something. We should be recieving the first data from that system about 190 - 200 years after launch. We wouldn't see it. Our great grandchildren would. Our grandchildren might. Hell, with advancing medical and genetic tech and predicted lifespan lengthening, our children might have an outside chance.

It's my spare testicle.

Anyway, how come everybody assumes that alien life must be more advanced than us? What if it's just a planet of alien trailer trash?

How do you know this??

Either way, we've gotta get the "Girls Gone Wild", film crew there.

Likely by the Copernican Principle for the first one, guaranteed by the known lifetimes of red dwarves for the second.

Yes, it will be around a lot longer, but you've no idea whether its a few hundred million, or 10 billion years old, and nor does anyone at this point.

Firstly, its unlikely that beings who match our intellectual capabilities could evolve much quicker than the 4.5 billion years it took evolution on our planet to produce creatures capable of such things.

Secondly - see the point I just mentioned. We can't say for certain that the star (and hence the planet) is older than our Sun (and Earth).

We're a young species in a young universe.

More like 65 million....less, actually...maybe 3 million, but if it weren't for the Big Rock, 65 million years ago, there would be intelligent dinos.

Considering the fact that we know just about nothing about the level of intelligence of most creatures on Earth, that conclusion is totally unfounded.

What's more, given the abundance of life on Earth, you might just as easily say that should conditions be suitable for life, we could at least look forward to a whole new range of animals. That's just as unfounded as Dan's guess, but a lot more fun.

If it is so close to it's star, what about radiation? How much does a Red Dwarf give off?

In Starship Troopers it talks about how radiation was a key to evolution, is this still accepted theory? How would the decrease/increase in radiation have an effect on evolution of life on the planetI

Life on Earth stagnated in the single cell phase for hundreds of millions of years before multi-cellular organisms appeared and quickly exploded across the planet.

We have no way of knowing if that is a long or short time for the jump to take place.

If the planet isn't rotating isn't that a bad thing?

Could you imagine the jet lag getting there? Then having to get used to flying half way around the planet just to go to sleep. I wonder, if there is life, are there two races amongst the one dominant species that each live on different sides of the planet, the ones in darkness becoming pale and the ones that bask in the light becoming dark. That would be pretty spiff.

I'm sure they must have done that on TNG once

Pay attention Techman. It's not widely believed that the dinos didn't die out (even if there was a Big Rock), they merely evolved into birds.

It would still probably take at least a few billion years for us to evolve (again).

Actually, it's both.

One particular dinosaur eventually ended up evolving into all the birds we see today, however most members of the dinosaur family tree died out.