Samuel Arbesman says yes. It's slightly larger than Earth, has a relatively stable climate (a sunny side and a non-sunny side, with the average like Moscow in winter), and it is only 21 light years away. Right now it is unknown whether the atmosphere has oxygen. Further reports are here.
I hope it’s habitable, although it’s kind of odd – a tidally locked planet in the habitable zone. If it has a thick atmosphere and a good amount of ocean coverage, then it very likely is habitable.
The real test, of course, would be to see if we can detect a significant amount of free oxygen in its atmosphere. That would be almost a sure guarantee that there’s life, and lots of it.
Even with the planet being slightly larger than Earth the habitable zone is probably small. Could it support every human currently living? There is no guarantee that the habitable zone is completely covered in land. Humans don’t do well to live on oceans, but perhaps that is because we have always had land to occupy.
Would we see more vacations toward the warmer side of the zone? It could be like going to the beach. There could be more intense destinations for people who dare to explore the poles.
USA! USA! Now that we’ve done our part in our new role, we’ll just have to wait for the Chinese to actually try to go there.
I hope we could settle the planet…!
There is no possibility of getting information on this planet’s atmosphere anytime soon.
A tidally locked planet is likely not to have any magnetic field. Not so friendly on the surface.
I think what we’ve found is the first exoplanet about the size of the earth.
@To; no, but a tidally locked planet isn’t going to have much of a ocean, or at least a liquid one at that.
LOL @ “only”
*ONLY*?! 21 light years? Do you have any idea how impossibly far away that is? Our fastest space probe (which haven’t gotten any faster in solar-system exit velocity since Voyager) would take over 400,000 years to get there!
This is not an “inevitable progress of technology so don’t worry about it, it will eventually get faster” problem – these are insurmountable problems of natural law. Remember, the rocket equation is logarithmic in speed vs propellant.
We’re not even talking about going faster than the speed of light. Getting a 1-ton probe to even 1% of the speed of light would be an absolute miracle, considering the many years of Global GDP that would be required to accomplish it. You really have to have religious faith that we can break the laws of physics to think that there is any pragmatic result to these kinds of inquiries.
@To; no, but a tidally locked planet isn’t going to have much of a ocean, or at least a liquid one at that.
Yes, on the terminator.
Unless all the water ended up frozen in the ice cap on the cold side.
take a swipe at Darwin, spend a stretch in purgatory
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wi7UsXW1As
21 lightyears is very much an “only” when it comes to astronomy.
And in practical terms? If there was a civilization there at at similar level to ours, we could trade with them. That’s how close it is.
OK, the trade would be limited to information only. But as that is the main export of the USA anyway, it isn’t a major deal.
They could send us the secret of room temperature conductivity, we send them the secret to making bone china. They send us the recipe for transparent aluminium, we send them a high resolution copy of the Marx brothers. It’s all good.
Yeah but do they have any animals to eat, or would we have to lick slime off of rocks?
Or maybe we would be supper for them a la Aliens.
EDIT: I’d also be willing to substitute the PERPETUAL MOTION for the best Gliese 581 brownie recipe.
Whoops.
This find makes it much more likely (in the Bayesian sense, of course) that Earth-like planets are a dime a dozen.
Except that all of them except Earth are as dead as a doornail. Fermi Paradox.
Send across some rapidly reproducing intergalactic bugs, wait 10 million years, and we’re in business! intergalactic buddies, yatzee!!
We found a habitable planet beyond earth but is 120 trillion miles away and will take three generations to reach it with our current technology of space travel. That will be good news for the next generation which might be looking for other place to live beside Earth who might be crowded at that time. But years from now, we might find other nearest planet to be habitable as we advance on our technology.
“Habitable” is a relative term. Very little of Earth’s landmass is habitable by humans if they have no technology.
Even if the next solar system over had the garden of Eden waiting for us, it would take us a while to get there. Whenever we find the closest extra-solar planet we can colonize, we will also need to have a lot of experience in-system to be able to figure out how to cross the void between systems. So I’d really like to start sooner rather than later on missions to colonize other parts of this system. First step would be putting humans in long-term orbit with artificial gravity so we find out how hard it will be on our bodies to colonize Mars.
For you “we could trade in information” guys, wouldn’t it take 21 years to send or receive anything unless we have find some negative mass? I thought dial-up was bad. It would be 42 years to send something and receive something back.
Er, half-century. Whatever, it’s a rounding error in the universe.
Oxygen? Only if there’s life, which is highly unlikely. By this standard, both Venus and Mars are “habitable” or close to it, so the absolute top probability you should be giving to photosynthesizing, oxygen-creating life would be about 1/3; and probably several orders of magnitude less.
India’s BPO industry has evolved and matured to present higher-end services that require judgment-based analysis and domain expertise, rather than function-specific, rules-based performance parameters alone. As service providers strive to offer end-to-end services, we see BPO falling into different segments. At one end of the spectrum is the traditional rules-based transactional outsourcing; while at the other end is judgment-based transaction processing and full-service business process outsourcing.
India has won its spurs as the world’s outsourcing destination of choice. Currently the country has a commanding share of the global outsourcing market.
India is undoubtedly the most favored IT/BPO destination of the world. This raises the question why most of the big MNCs are interested in outsourcing their operations to BPOs in India. The answer is very simple- India is home to large and skilled human resources. India has inherent strengths, which have made it a major success as an outsourcing destination. India produces the largest number of graduates in the world. The name of India has become synonymous with that of BPOs and IT industry hence the name BPO India.
Besides being technically sound, the work force is proficient in English and work at lower wages in comparison to other developed countries of the world. India also has a distinct advantage of being in a different time zone that gives it flexibility in working hours. All these factors make the Indian BPOs more efficient and cost effective. In order to meet the growing international demand for lucrative, customer-interaction centers, many organizations worldwide are looking to BPO India.
A subset of outsourcing, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) involves contracting the operations and responsibilities through a third party service provider. From the last couple of years, the BPO industry has evolved as the most substantial sector in the Indian market. India has emerged as the most favored location for all Bpo services across the globe. This has accelerated the Indian economy to the heights, progressively boosting the statistics depicting the growth in the years to come and it has been however forecasted that by 2020, more than 80% of the world of business process outsourcing services will be served by the Indian companies. Marked as the best place to attain superior quality services globally, the BPO industry is strengthening its foundation in India.
http://phykon.com/
Comments on this entry are closed.