The search for Earth's Twin heats up

I am an avid reader of this site, science daily and I was reading about the discovery of "Super Earths" outside of our solar system. The more discoveries like this that are made the less credence I place in the "lone-Earth" theory proposed by those who believe we are the only ones out there, that it is highly unlikely no-one has visited us and that Alien life is highly improbable if not impossible. Science just keeps whittling away at those outdated 19th and 20th century ideas that we're somehow not special or unique if we ain't the center of the universe. It is an exciting time to be alive and an Earthling! [cheer]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071213101403.htm

The state of Nasa's "faster than light" travel research...

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warpstat.html

FASTER THAN LIGHT TRAVEL: Infinite Possibilities

http://www.usd.edu/phys/courses/phys300/gallery2/dave/dave.htm

Gravity waves can make travel faster than light possible

http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/14087.asp

Science is a truly fascinating field of study; too bad none of my science teachers ever got me truly interested in science.

And faster-than-light travel is always an intriguing subject. My friends and I even came up with some crackpot theories...

According to my vague notion of star formation....a star either is binary (two stars orbiting each other) or has a system of planets. The accretion disc must coaless into something.

It appears about 2/3 of stars are binary hence 1/3 of the stars you observe have planets. This places the probability of earthlike planets very high. After that it is simply a game of chance if life actually developes into something intelligent. Much like the ocean the universe is a dangerous place----eg the dinosaurs likely got whacked by a collision with an incoming object. The odds are against such survival but with the vast number of candidates it is a safe assumption that a great many have survived and many are considerably older than our life-forms---hence probably much more advanced.

Life is in all likeyhood very common out there and is as varied in developement as the stars themselves. Remember with the naked eye we can see only a small portion of what is out there.

I can go on for hours philosophizing about subject like this.

It is so immense huge out there, why wouldn't there be life? Why would we be arrogant enough to think we are the only ones? It is only so far away, we still can't prove anything.

I don't think we are "the" centre of "the"universe. But we are the centre of OUR universe! How large is the universe, anyway? Is it expanding, and how do we know? And where to? And what was there before? ;-)

So many questions :lol:

Brenda,

Interesting side-note. Assuming that there was something "here" before the universe exploded out of nothing is false logic, yet it logically follows that the universe "had" to expand into something.

Don't you think that the Doppler is to measure things closer by? Sound takes time to come back, and if you want to find out where the universe ends, we need time.

But where does it expand to? And why was there nothing before? And what is nothing? How far away is "the end"? Why? What changes things?

Every answer triggers more questions, and so does every question