Newly Discovered Planet: Hot, Muggy And (May Be) Livable
npr.org
npr.org
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Well, that's two different stories entirely, depending on whether those are degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Centigrade. Before I take my vacation there, I would like to know whether the ambient temperature is high enough to denature my proteins.
Even on Earth we have hyperthermophiles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile) which can tolerate temperatures of up to 122 celsius.
And before anyone says "water boils at 100C", that's only at Earth-ambient atmospheric pressure.
Are you sure about that? I know that some extremophiles can survive temperatures in excess of 100 degrees C, but they're all single-celled creatures. I don't think complicated organisms can survive temperatures at which water boils.
EDIT: The Earth was anywhere from 2 -- 8 degrees C warmer when the dinosaurs were around than it is today. But that's still very far from boiling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png
Show people a picture of another Earth and that will drive a lot of scientific research. When Columbus returned from the New World, the idea that there was another world out there had just as big (or bigger) impact for the first few decades as people actually going there.
I'm with Hawking on this. Earth is getting crowded, stale, stagnant, and in some ways unstable. We need a very clear vision that there is somewhere else to go should we put forth the effort.
Plausible technology might, in our lifetimes, be able to resolve this planet as a dot. But you'll never get more than that.
What is interesting is that it's easier to measure the composition of its atmosphere than to resolve it as a dot. Find me a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere and it starts looking very likely that we might have life there.
On your other point, though, I don't think there's much point in having a political will to send people to another star. We're still (at the very least) hundreds of years away from the point where we can even start to think sensibly about how we might want to do it. It's like Columbus wanting to go to the moon.
But, even if we magically had the ability to colonize another planet, that wouldn't solve any problems. Did colonization of North American significantly reduce the population of Europe? Not at all. The main benefit to Europe was another trading partner who had different kinds of goods. Which was beneficial to Europe, but it did not solve the kinds of problems people seem to think colonizing another planet will solve.
Let me try and rephrase that: Funding is directly related to politics, which to a large degree is emotion.
Because of the great political impact involved, we need to have plans in place to directly image these planets.
I would guesstimate that paying a top political consultant (maybe Carl Rowe himself) to sell more science funding is approximately One Thousand times cheaper and easier than imaging a plant over 30 light years away.
So the strategy I would propose is a lobby group, which would lobby politicians of both parties at all levels of government, to get more science funding.
And if we can't get enough people together to agree and fund this group, then we as a people do not deserve more discovery and exploration.
"Temperatures there may range from 85 to 120 degrees with plenty of humidity"
This method doesn't give us the density or composition of the planets, which are the other two values of primary concern in evaluating it for whether it could host life or not.
As always Bad Astronomy provides a no BS rundown of this all this news: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/12/50...
Or faster rockets.
So I call Utter Bollocks.
This is the worst type of science. It's like the old archaeologists, 'China had Bronze making, therefore everyone got it from them'. They were wrong and we had to wait till science developed carbon dating to prove them wrong.
It's pure speculation dressed up as science. A wild guess based on our own solar system. A population of 1 does not a survey make.
And the artist's impression at the top really makes me cringe. Who is giving these plonkers money to spend on artist impressions?
Unfortunately this is all a direct consequence of the way scientific funding works. But as someone who has a scientific mind it makes me die a little inside when I see this kind of thing.
As for the bits about it being "muggy", I can only assume that this is something the journalists, looking for an angle, tricked the scientists into saying. We can't say anything definitive about chemical composition of these planets at this stage, we can only infer things from their temperature and density.