It's 1075 light years away. If there's life there and they looked at us, they'd see vikings colonizing northern France and they'd see the Maya civilization collapse.
As of now, the content linked says nothing more than the PR announcement from yesterday -- so either the title is misleading, or the OP comes from the future.<p>(I'm aware he might have other sources for the title, but it's still misleading)
I'm disappointed by the negativity expressed in some of the top comments in this thread. This is an exciting discovery, and the most popular comments here are basically "humanity is destroying its own planet, if this place was anything like earth, the inhabitants there would have already destroyed their planet."
Whenever my imagination starts to run wild with the possibility of a huge announcement of this variety, I always like to remember what Terence McKenna said about this: "if aliens were to land on the front lawn of the white house tomorrow, it would not change the fact that the weirdest thing in the universe is DMT."
ELI5: until we flew next to Pluto this month all we had is blurry 16-pixel images. How can we get such precise data on something millions of times further?
This similarity index only measures radius, density, escape velocity and surface temperature, so it doesn't mean nearly as much as one would think upon reading the headline
Here are some other planets we've found with comparable similarity. Note that earth-like similarity does not imply that it is habitable.<p><a href="http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/data" rel="nofollow">http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/dat...</a>
Is there any way at all for us to be able to see oceans/clouds/continents on such planets if we have a hundred billion dollars and built equipment specifically just to look at that one planet?<p>Or would the star near it just haze everything too much?<p>Is it <i>impossible</i> to observe a planet in more detail like that without travelling next to it?
Searching google news for "earth similarity index" gives me no indication that NASA will make this specific announcement.<p>Is there a source? If not, it makes sense to change this title to "NASA to make announcement that 'astronomers are on the cusp' of finding 'another earth.'"
It's interesting to note that the highest ESI so far has been Kepler-62e with a score of 0.83 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index</a>). So a score of 0.98 would seem significant.
If there is life on that planet, I wonder if it would be similar enough to host infectious diseases. I know the Apollo team was quarantined when they got back from the moon. As someone living on a continent that has undergone one apocalypse, I hope we have a similar procedure to prevent the spread of spacepox.
In case you have questions about exoplanets, there is an ongoing AMA by exoplanet researchers on /r/science: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3ebavu/science_ama_series_were_the_planet_hunters_team/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3ebavu/science_ama...</a><p>(They mention the upcoming announcement, but they don’t know know what it is about either.)
Apparently there's already a Kepler discovered planet with an ESI of 0.98:<p><a href="http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/data" rel="nofollow">http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/dat...</a><p>EDIT: Unless that list was literally just updated with ESI 0.98 planet this thread is referring to...
It's crazy to think that there may be life everywhere in space and incredible things we haven't seen yet, that our mind can't even conceive.
Accessing this with HTTPS Everywhere and Firefox leads to <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/embed/9407922" rel="nofollow">http://www.ustream.tv/embed/9407922</a> being blocked, so you don't see anything other than the text.<p>However, The stream has reached "maximum capacity" at this time.
For reference, a 195lb human being (who is assumed here to be spherical in shape) has an Earth Similarity Index of approximately 0.001:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5351f6185e8473a3c002" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5351f6185e8473a3c002</a>
Is it this one?<p><a href="http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOverview/nph-DisplayOverview?objname=K04878.01&type=KEPLER%5fCANDIDATE" rel="nofollow">http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOver...</a>
It HAD an ESI of 0.98 1075 years ago. By now, the inhabitants have burned through all their fossil fuels and then annihilated each other with nuclear weapons leaving the planet in both a long-term nuclear winter and with a runaway greenhouse effect. Its ESI must be at least 1.0 by now.
I can leak some more info:<p>its 1400 light years away
in habitable zone
and the sun is 8% different than ours (don't quote me on the 8% but its very close in size)
Likely off-topic, but Nasa's site feels very weird to me. Like it think I'm on a tablet. Everything is huge. And I'm on a 1920x1080 laptop using Chrome.<p>Okay, to make this slightly on-topic now, I am excited to hear about the discovery in about an hour and a half. Even if it was a 1.00 on the similarity scale, I'm more interested in finding out how habitable it would be for earth-like life.