Astronomers have found a planet like Earth orbiting a star like the sun
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Can we detect if it has life without going there? Even just an yes/no answer would be immensely important.
We can detect water, and oxygen in the atmosphere using this method.
Plus we can estimate it's temperature based on it's orbit and star's energy.
If it is in the habitable zone we can only suspect that it potentially can support life, but we cannot detect if life exists there.
Well, even if we could do that we would get data from N years from the past, depending on the distance.
But we've detected life in volcanic vents, in arctic ice, in the upper atmosphere, in pretty much every niche on our own planet. Apparently life is pretty adaptable. So we have some clues already.
If we detect life on Mars or Europa it would likely be related to our own, so that's not an independent data point.
But if we detect that there's definitely life on a planet 3000 light years away, or if we exclude that possibility - that's a massive change in our model of universe, understanding of Fermi paradox and our origins.
Yes, I'd like to learn of life elsewhere. But life here is amazing too.
To put some thing in perspective. If we get an instant teleport technology to go there tomorrow, it will be a planet that had passed 5 times more time then we know since our humanity almost went extinct 60k years ago.
If we get technology to go at speed of light we'll get there in 300k years, again 5 more times then our modern humanity as we know it.
Yeah, space is vast.
Light takes 3000 years to travel 3000 light-years, not 300k years
His previous sentence also makes no sense
> To put some thing in perspective. If we get an instant teleport technology to go there tomorrow, it will be a planet that had passed 5 times more time then we know since our humanity almost went extinct 60k years ago.
The light we see from the planet is 3000 years old not 5 times 60k. Space is big, but not as big as OP seems to think. The diameter of the Milky Way is only 150,000–180,000 light-years light years. All the exoplanets we have detected are within the Milky Way.