Is anyone interested in science?
This is great. The future is in us finding other places to move to.WHAT does Goldilocks want? At least four times in the last few years, astronomers have announced they have found planets orbiting other stars in the sweet spot known as the habitable zone - not too hot, not too cold - where water and thus perhaps life are possible. In short, a planet fit to be inhabited by the biochemical likes of us, a so-called Goldilocks planet.
None are known to be habitable - let alone inhabited - yet, but astronomers who are making the discoveries with NASA's Kepler spacecraft are meeting next week in California to review the first two years of their quest, which seems tantalisingly close to hitting pay dirt.
''Sooner or later, Kepler will find a lukewarm planet with a size making it probably Earth-like,'' Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, said.
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''We're no more than a year away'' from such a discovery, he said.
Sara Seager, a planetary astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it this way: ''We are on the verge of being those people who will be remembered.''
All this has brought to the fore a question long debated by geologists, chemists, paleontologists and cosmologists-turned-astrobiologists, namely: What does life really need to get going, flourish and evolve on an alien rock.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci ... z1fePiC2ck
I can't wait to find life that evolved independently from our own.
"It's life Jim, just not as we know it"
