... developer / gamer

We finally have started finding Earth-like planets outside our solar system. This is huge! Huge on so many fronts that I'll break it down for each one.

About a decade ago scientists started to find planets outside our own solar system. The news was incredible, but it was always dampened by the fact that we were only able to detect gaseous giants similar to and even much larger than Jupiter and Saturn. Scientists spent the following years improving their detection techniques and now claim to have found a planet, only slightly larger than Earth, and it may be rocky like Earth as well.

The kicker is that this planet is at the exact distance from it's red dwarf star to allow for water to be in liquid form. "closer to its star and the heat would vaporize any water; farther away and water would freeze". What's the big deal? Well, even in our own solar system, there is only one planet that meets these criteria, and your standing on it. Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold, there's only the small sweet spot where life is likely to thrive.

Now for another bombshell, this planet orbits a star Gliese 581, which is approximately 20.5 light-years away... WHAT?! 20.5 light-years may sound like a lot, but considering our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter, this is just a short run down to the corner store. Not only that, but this is only one discovery of many more possible discoveries to come, we may be looking at quite a large number of Earth twins relatively nearby.

The search for life on other planets has just gotten a boost in my opinion. SETI is currently reliant mostly on listening for deep space signals, essentially searching the proverbial needle in the haystack among background noise. If and when we start finding more of these Earth-like planets, SETI will be able to narrow it's search to these neighbors nearby. Also keep in mind that 20.5 years is just enough time to send a message back and forth between planets within one person's lifetime, equaling 41 years for the round trip. Yes, yes, highly unlikely I know, but it's still cool to think about considering the technological revolution an exchange like that would bring about.

In my lifetime, we've gone from just speculating that planets existed outside our own solar system, to finding large gaseous uninhabitable planets, to now finding that Earth like ones may not be uncommon. Who knows what we'll see in the next few years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581