Kepler continues exoplanet bonanza Data from the Kepler space telescope has yielded yet more Earth-like planets, with a University of Washington researcher identifying a second “habitable zone” super-Earth orbiting the star dubbed Kepler-62. The rocky Kepler 62f is estimated at 1.4 times the size of Earth, and receives a solar flux about half as much as Earth, …
I suppose we could detect them but it would take them a while to reach us. It is a big problem with any kind of interstellar communications as we know them: Even if we did detect them there's a real possibility 'they' wouldn't be there anymore by the time we detected them & got a signal back to them.
No, it's a whole other level of difficulty.
Military radar would be most detectable, I reckon. But even the power output of that kind of artifact is puny. AFAIK you would need a few thousand of square kilometers of collecting area to get any signal whatsover. This also means you would need to point it very precisely at the Sun.
And for example, like lets say if they were earth, we would have to being seeing them within a very narrow temporal window, (earth, for example, is roughly 4 billion years old, and has been potentially radio detectable for .. at the outside, just over a hundred years? And a hundred goes into 4 billion?,.. Ohhh ... Quite a bit. )
And then that brief period of time would spread out into the Cosmos at just below the speed of light in a ripple, an as yet unknown but likely narrow band of who knows how many light years thickness, .... To then pass over an likely equally brief area when and where some one might just be listening, ... It's a lonely quite place out there.
Even worse, its likely that the earth's radio signature is actually decreasing due to the use of new technologies, internet tv to replace broadcast tv, satelites to replace over the horizon radar and communications, and who kows what else in the future. That hundred years or so might be the only hundred years or so in 8 billion years of habitatable time that you have chance to pick up radio waves. So if those radio waves crossed 1200 light years and started hitting earth 200 years ago, we have already missed our opportunity to detect them.
Also the electromagnetic emissions from that system's sun would probably be far more powerful than any emissions from a potentially inhabited planet, and over this kind of distance, would totally swamp the signal. Imagine putting your mobile phone right in front of the speaker stack at a rock concert, backing off a hundred metres, and then trying to hear someone's voice on the phone...
"Yeah, we found this blue-green rocky world orbiting a yellow star about 1200 light years away. Nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, liquid water, stable orbit well within the habitable zone. Too bad they are scheduled for demolition to make way for an insterstellar offramp."
Some recent research suggests that life on Earth may have taken a lot longer to evolve than first thought, even longer than the age of the Earth and thus we might well be the only intelligent (?) life in the Universe.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/04/16/1740254/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life
It's a couple of decades since I got my degree in genetics, and a bit less since I got my PhD in Biochemistry. Interestingly, I was still able to tell that this was utter bollocks within a couple of minutes simply by reading the abstract. I suggest you tweak your bullshit detector.
You seem to be clever enough to get some decent qualifications but not to learn some basic manners.
Instead of just being rude could you perhaps set out what you see as being incorrect with the paper? I believe that is how scientific progress is supposed to happen, but then I don't have a PhD in Biochemistry and so could be wrong on that.
One issue is that a proper scientific paper should not say 'Moore's "Law"': It is a shameful misuse of the term 'law' to apply it to a market forecast. 'Moore's Rule' or 'Moore's Best Guess' or 'Gordon Hopes & Dreams' would be an appropriate name for the observation and a scientific paper would have some title like "Correlation of Silicate Density In Compute Processors to Observable Probabilities of Recognizable Extra Terrestrial Life", or something.
Don't let pseudo science or marketeers fool you with their misuse of terms. It is a nasty practice and it is the responsibility of the reader to see through their bullshit and know the correct meaning of the words.
From the slashdot post:
When plotting genetic complexity against time, the researchers found that genetic complexity increases exponentially, just as with Moore's law, but with a doubling rate of about once every 376 million years. Extrapolating backwards, the researchers estimate that life began about 4 billion years after the universe formed and evolved the first bacteria just before the Earth was formed.
Setting aside the Moore's law reference, the most obvious flaw is exemplified by the phrase "extrapolating backwards." It asserts the assumption that underlies the entire original piece: that the rate of genetic change is constant and has remained constant. This is not consistent with observations on how environmental changes can affect (and even effect) evolution.
Instead of just being rude could you perhaps set out what you see as being incorrect with the paper?
The major failing is their cherrypicking of data to give them a nice regression line. Their underlying idea remains interesting, but the "evidence" they've presented in support of it is nothing of the sort, sadly.
You could have a read of this, perhaps: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/18/graaarh-physicists-biologists/.
Apologies - I intended to be rude about the paper, which is worthless, rather than to yourself.
Firstly. I think it needs to be made clear that Arxiv.org does not have any automatic status. Things that appear here may be e-prints of articles that have appeared in reputable refereed journals, or they may be nothing more than blog posts. And some of those are distinctively cranky - you can easily find proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis or the Goldbach conjecture here.
Secondly, the paper takes an observation (that some trend is near-enough exponential) and applies it to another field as if it were a 'law' - Moore's Law is a misnomer in this regard. Of course, very many natural and artificial processes are logarithmic in nature. But there is no evidence of a mechanism that genetic complexity would increase in a strictly exponential manner. So the evidence is quite weak.
Thirdly the claim is a very strong one. It is one thing to do a little thought experiment and come up with an interesting conclusion (wow, if genetic complexity progression were strictly exponential, there isn't enough time for life to evolve). But the sensible conclusion is that genetic complexity is very unlikely to have progressed in this way - not that life must have come from outer space. They might as well have said that this gives them evidence that the earth is a lot older than they we thought!
Perhaps I was overly irritated because I miss being a scientist (unfortunately other life circumstances ejected me from a world I loved and always wanted to be a part of) and I now spend my time looking at very poor code developed by offshore coders and being told by my managers that it is now too late to do things properly. I can only offer this as an explanation rather than an excuse, but my rudeness was meant to be directed mainly towards the paper, somewhat towards the authors, and not at all towards you.
Using the current means of detecting exoplanets, I suspect that there's no reasonable way to detect the presence of a moon with a decent degree of certainty. The nature of these small rocky worlds that are rather larger than the Earth isn't 100% certain yet, let alone anything smaller.
The detection of exomoons is beyond our current technology. However, the detection of exoplants was beyond the then-current technology of the early '80s. Thus we might be able to detect them in 30 or so years time. IIRC, every credible astronomer says that exomoons almost certainly exist.
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