I'm quoting a person who works on that project:
"They discovered a huge number of Earth-like planets. The new count is vastly outnumbers previous estimations even over the gas giants due to imperfect technology."
The remaining conclusions are up to you, even if they are not going to be voiced at the conference....
The reason I found it interesting was that the news about 'hundreds' of Earth-like planets (using a very ballpark description of 'Earth-like,' of course) filtered out back in June in the usual fairly low-key fashion.
This announcement refers to a 'new discovery about an intriguing planetary system' - in other ones, just one solar system out of the hundreds of possible candidates. Maybe it's nothing more than extreme cleverness being used to confirm one of them has 3 or more planets (which would be significant in itself), but I sense a mystery - either something we'd never seriously considered before (like planets with overlapping orbits?) or else something that looks unexpectedly familiar.
Most exciting of all would be confirmation by some other observation platform of something interesting at a particular location - the plan is to work with other observatories to take a more detailed look at interesting candidates (see http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/keplerm-201005...). Small hope of that right now, though.
Overlapping orbits would be interesting. They would have to be equal size planets and directly opposite (my mind isnt alert enough to consider 3D right now) the star so as not to collide nor alter the other planet's orbit right?
Well, if you have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet, turning it into a habitable world should be trivial, so Mars is Earth-like enough for colonization purposes at least.
That doesn't seem to hold up empirically. We have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet (namely, Mars), yet we don't have the ability to trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization.
I thought it was clear from my post when I said "Mars-like" that excluded Mars. (Since the subject of debate is extrasolar planets.)
And I was speaking in reference to traveling to that planet, which is virtually impossible with current technology.
And to expand a little more, I would say a generation ship of some sort would be required to get even to Alpha Centauri, so creating a self-sustaining ecosystem from whole cloth is a prerequisite for traveling to extrasolar planets.
Now, you could make an argument that some magic FTL technology will appear, but I still think that terraforming is a trivial problem by comparison.
Houses aren't terraformed colonies, and they're definitely not closed cycle. Anything we would set up on Mars (or a Mars-like planet) would necessarily have to be, because the planet lacks a human friendly biosphere and volatiles with which we could support them. We can't terraform the Sahara into something 200 people could live in for any extended period of time.
Teraforming an entire planet would, in many respects, be simpler than safely teraforming just the Sahara and nothing else at the same time.
We don't even need to make Mars better than the Sahara. The primary objective would be to raise the pressure to that at which a pressure suit wouldn't be needed, and the temperature such that that too would meet what we currently can handle on earth. Once we've got that, the rest would be fairly straightforward (I'd argue that atmospheric manipulation is harder than getting life to colonise the regolith).
Looks quite likely. They started collecting data in June 2009 and expected that a year of observations will be necessary to confirm a big number of planets.
What are your conclusions? We are not alone? There are places for humankind to expand to?
As far as I have been able to tell when looking a couple of weeks back the data they are mainly using for ground based confirmations is the stuff from the first few months. There seems to be quiet a big lag time between recording the data and actually getting it out for confirmations which themselves would be taking quiet some time.
These are Earth-mass planets, not Earth-orbit (1 year period) planets. They need 3 transits for confirmation, which requires at least 2 years and more likely 3 years of observations.
These are "hot Earths" to the previous "hot Jupiters" we had been discovering.
