I sincerely hope we find definite proof within my lifetime.

Let's say you run across an alien during a walk in the woods. How could you ever tell whether the alien was friendly or not? Aliens might act friendly, right up until the time they put you in the big alien stew pot. Likewise, friendly aliens might use deadly force and extreme caution to make sure you pose no threat. Would you want to be sending "Howdy There! We're new in the block! Drop by for some free pizza!" messages to a civilization 20 light years away?

I must have stopped reading it fairly early, because looking at the cover I don't remember any of it. I remember the first book, however -- that super guy they brought back for Ender's training and the planet and all. It's been a few years, though. Good thing I kept all the books.

Apologies for the poor memory.

The problem is that cats and dogs have opposing body language; when a dog acts excited and happy, the cat interprets that language as aggression. For example, a cat with its ears down and tail wagging is a cat that's about to fight. A dog doing the same thing is being submissive.

Of course, this all assumes that any intelligent extra-terrestrial life even has any sort of body language or capability to communicate that we can even recognize.

Wake up and smell the history! :)

This makes the total size of the Library perhaps about 3 petabytes (3,000 terabytes).

-Lesk.com

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=205001869&Sear...

...and store my own personal LoC for $600k. That's cheaper than a lot of houses here in Boston. And that's just the stupidly inefficient way to store a personal LoC.

(With peer-to-peer, of course, the problem of giving me instant access to the LoC from my portable phone is essentially solved. The movies are still a bit slow.)

Where did we come from? Why are we here?

I'm not sure that finding life on another planet would change the science much. Maybe there would be some connection, maybe not - they could be parallel processes, or maybe some kind of seeding function took place.

Either way, it would still be immensely satisfying discovery, one of the greatest ever.

If there is life in another planet (even a non-intelligent one) means life is a normal part of the universe, and it is another blow to their idiotic books that claim god created everything.

If you took a picture of the night sky with a 1 zettapixel camera (mega giga tera peta exa zetta) this planet would be about 1 pixel.

Another possibility is that everyone, or better everything that has ever been, can be ressurected providing Heisenberg was not completely right. It seems reasonable that sometime along our civilization we will find a way to trace back and reconstruct every part of history.

Most importantly, when we do eventually meet an alien, always remember to count in radians.

P.S This guy must have seen some really amazing stuff not to be amazed by aliens.

"Young Ellie: Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?

Ted Arroway: I don't know, Sparks. But I guess I'd say if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space."

The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching for.

http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/contact.shtml

I thought the technology wasn't ready for all of the claims the article makes. An atmosphere? Rocky world? If they're able to do this now, imagine what it'll be like with the James Webb scope NASA is putting up in a few years.

And if we ever do discover intelligent ET in our lifetime, perhaps a good way to get to know each civilization is to hook up our internets. Or then again, maybe that's an awful idea.

The planet was found by repeatedly observing the same star over and over, and measuring how fast the star is moving away or towards us. This wiggle is produced by the motion of planets. It's really small. Currently the best team (full disclosure: one of my advisors is on it) can measure velocities of 30 centimeter per second. Pause and reflect. It's an amazingly difficult and important detection.

Although the discovery is amazing, there's a bit of over-selling in the article. It's a detection based on a wiggle that means the model says there's a world where the model says it would be mostly rocky where the model says....

I guess I can stop painting those "Welcome E.T." signs now.

The atmosphere, color, etc.. of the planet is still in the speculation stage.

It'll be great when we can start making direct observations instead of doing a lot of inference.

I mean, if a quantum object represents a bit, and gets flipped here; and its counterpart is on... Mars; the counterpart should get flipped instantly, no?

Under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there is in fact some kind of spooky "instantaneous" communication going on between the particles -- one of them needs to tell the other "oh no, my wavefunction has just collapsed in such-and-such a basis and your value now has to be |X>".

Complicating this even further is the fact that relativity tells us there's no such thing as "simultaneity" when we're talking about things happening at different points in space, and so while it looks to one observer like the faster-than-light signal must have gone from Ted's box to Bob's box, to an observer moving relative to the first observer it might look like the faster-than-light signal actually went from Bob's to Ted's.

Some other interpetations of quantum mechanics (in particular, no-collapse aka "many worlds" interpretations) this faster-than-light signalling doesn't occur... though these interpretations have other counter-intuitive features instead.

Even if there _is_ faster-than-light signalling between particles, though, you still can't use this to send a message, because the information you get is always just a random string of bits -- there's no way to actually send useful information.

However, reading a little more about the quantum teleportation process leads me to believe I'm wrong on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation

Thanks for the great explanation, btw.

Or maybe I'm confused about where to draw the line with chauvinism. (shrug)

That would also influence the "animals" (i.e. non-photosynthetic life) there and its behaviors.

That's all assuming they get energy from the sun. Maybe they can produce energy in other ways.

Great book, with interesting insights about unusual planetary configurations with life. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes hard science fiction.

A Fire Upon the Deep, set in the same universe, is excellent too.

Or most? I know the cyanobacteria do and I'm pretty sure the purple bacteria do. The bacteriorhodopsin-users might not. If you call that photosynthesis.

To be fair, there's a huge PR machine behind these kinds of discoveries. In other words, there's fuzz associated with a planet being an "earth analog." There will be more and more "earth like" planets discovered in the future.

I mean, we've only discovered 212 extra-solar planets so there's plenty more to find :)

Seriously, depending on how much you give, your name might go on one of the most important telescopes in the world.... maybe you could even name the first true earth analog :)

Pretty good deal.

What will those Satan-worshipping scientists think up next?