So when the hell are they going to discover one of those Mass Relays I’ve been hearing so much about?
You may have heard of the Kepler Space Telescope, a $600 million dollar piece of equipment designed, as most telescopes are, to see things that are very far away. Through that telescope NASA has disovered 715 new exoplanets, essentially doubling the number of known planets. This is a big deal.
Why is it a big deal? Well, because many of these planets exist in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ — they area from a star most conducive to facilitating life. There are now hundreds of known planets within this Goldilocks Zone. The odds of us finding life on other planets, and essentially becoming part of a massive Galactic Federation, and living the life of an elite space soldier just chilling on the Citadel, just skyrocketed.
And, when you think about it, that really is the goal here, isn’t it.
NASA Kepler telescope doubles number of known planets outside solar system [Washington Post]
Via Gizmodo
Comments
34 responses to “NASA Just Discovered 715 New Planets. We Are One Step Closer To The Citadel.”
I call dibs on the human spectre roll!
I call dibs on the commander of the intergalactic grammar nazi corps.
(role not roll, unless you mean actually rolling, or some form of space bakery treat named the human spectre O_o)
Yum!
I meant that I would be a spectre, doing barrel rolls. GOOD ONE FOX.
But really, it’s Friday afternoon. It was a typo. Nexi, plz stahp. 🙁
Good save milord, good save
And, and, and one apparently has H2O!
Surely, by all laws of probability, there has to be some other life out there
There’s is an equation for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
But the odds of us ever making contact with one of these civilizations are significantly low.
Unfortunately, I am forced to agree with you, in our lifetime anyway
In addition to that, if there were contact made with another species it would be folly to assume we could even communicate with them – think of the massive jump in intellect between man and monkey, now consider the implications of the same intelligence difference between man and ‘E.T’.
Neil deGrasse Tyson touches on this in one of his talks, and puts it far more eloquently than I ever could. Worth a watch.
True that. Someone said: It’s like talking a walk in the Himalayas on a lonesome path – You might come across someone, but what are the odds they will be the same age as you?
If we found a planet that has life. Intelectual life. But they were at the level we are currently at now and we were more advanced. What would we do?
Eat them.
LMAO
I call them, popplers.
What about testsicles?
The answer resides somewhere in the Wikipedia entry for human history. I think it involves a war and some pillaging.
Yeah but considering we were able to progress on to interstellar travel, I would like to believe we evolved somewhat and have learned that it won’t be something like our past. Perhaps would be more peaceful.
Nuke them from orbit.
Its the only way to be sure.
Would like to believe there would something other than nukes. Nuclear weapons would be too old, and there would more efficient ways of dismantling obsticles. Should there ever need to be one.
Matter / Anti-Matter warheads! Don’t get much better than that.
It’s a movie reference…. *flies away*
How come there is a massive spike on discovered planets this year?
Did someone just learn how to focus the lens or something?
They have a yearly quota like how parking instructors have quotas on fines. They must have realized they were behind the yearly-planet-finding-quota and started to make some up.
It’s not like we can check if they’re correct anyway. 😛
It’s probably due to how Kepler works it takes numerous exposures and they detect a planet by its movement across the stars. When something does move across the star in what is called a transit, it causes a reduction in apparent magnitude. I would imagine then that they have to review and verify the data before confirming its a planet. So while they’ve confirmed over 790 planets in total they have well over 2000 unconfirmed ones
I have mixed feelings about these kinds of discoveries. On one part it helps me appreciate how big space is, another part makes me feel really small, and the final part is sadness knowing I may never see humanity colonize the stars.
I like to imagine they were all found at the same time hiding behind something.
The telescope was facing the earth, and they managed to turn it around 😀
Is it just me or weren’t the mass relays built? I haven’t played ME in a while but I remember there being essentially a structure that did… something.. with … something (presumably a black hole)..
If you find one already built, you’ll probably find Shephard right there with you.
Dude…what? “did the mass relays built?”
,… did/weren’t – aka, were they not built, rather than ‘discovered’
Ah now it makes sense lol.
IIRC, they were built by the Reapers a bergillion years ago to funnel their pray into their killzones so it’d be easy to feed every 50k years. So yes they were built, but they were still ‘discovered’ by us in the sense that we just tripped over one at some point.Would someone mind looking at proxima centauri for a year. I want to know everything About the next star system.
Kerbal Space Telescope.