NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Smallest Earthlike Planet Outside Solar System

[wathsalive]

The smallest planet yet spied outside our solar system has been found orbiting a sunlike star about 560 light-years away, astronomers announced today. Known as Kepler-10b, the planet is just 1.4 times Earth's size and 4.6 times its mass.

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The planet, found using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, is the first of the more than 500 known exoplanets that's

Comments

[akashasheiress]

MTE.

[supermouse]

Unlikely. Space is very, very big and we travel very slowly.

[supermouse]

I don't think so. I think the sheer vastness of space will stop humans from engaging in a galactic scale what Europeans did to the Americas and to Africa. I think that was the point being made?

[supermouse]

And I am saying that, thanks to the incredible vastness of space, this will never happen. Even once.

[supermouse]

It's got nothing to do with the morals of humanity and everything to do with the fact that space is just too *big* for us to go and colonise inhabited planets. I'm saying it's flat out impossible, not that we're too noble.

[supermouse]

We'll never have the ability to do what the European explorers did, because space is too big to allow us to. We may eventually be able to send small numbers of people to set up home, possibly on a generational basis, but we won't be sending armed mobs to strip any new worlds of their stuff and send it back to earth, because space is too big to allow us to do that. The sheer size of it means the same as sea travel would have done if ships could only sail about two millimetres per year.

[supermouse]

Not at all! I think we're more than capable of destroying anything we get our hands on- but only if we can reach it in a single lifetime. If there's life on Europa, then very probably it's going to be subject to the full horrors that humanity can wreak on it

Changing the subject slightly

[supermouse]

If you think about it, we're already on a generational spaceship of sorts. Which means that my hopes for humanity on any human-manufactured generational spaceship lasting out without destroying a) the ship or b) each other is slim.

[wathsalive]

That's not relevant. The point is that the analogy the person made in the video was inappropriate and insensitive. The fact that current technology makes people incapable of exploring or exploiting space to a scale comparable to what European explorers did to the lands they discovered does not make the analogy okay to make. tl;dr it was a shitty and insensitive analogy.