Not the Onion: NASA discovers 715 new planets
(CNN) -- Our galactic neighborhood just got a lot bigger. NASA on Wednesday announced the discovery of 715 new planets, by far the biggest batch of planets ever unveiled at once.
By way of comparison, about 1,000 planets total had been identified in our galaxy before Wednesday.
Four of those planets are in what NASA calls the "habitable zone," meaning they have the makeup to potentially support life.
The planets, which orbit 305 different stars, were discovered by the Kepler space telescope and were verified using a new technique that scientists expect to make new planetary discoveries more frequent and more detailed.
"We've been able to open the bottleneck to access the mother lode and deliver to you more than 20 times as many planets as has ever been found and announced at once," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.
Launched in March 2009, the Kepler space observatory was the first NASA mission to find planets similar to Earth that are in, or near, habitable zones -- defined as planets that are the right distance from a star for a moderate temperature that might sustain liquid water.
Tuesday's planets all were verified using data from the first two years of Kepler's voyage, meaning there may be many more to come.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/26/tech/innovation/nasa-new-planets/index.html
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for the record, the technologies I am playing with right now in fiction are two that are very much in development right now
Solar Sails
Ion Engines
And a couple that are not in development but possible. One requires a dark matter containment field and folds space time across a higher membrane. It requires both the power of the sun, and computational power that we can barely comprehend or imagine.
Trust me, will be doing a lot of reading on this site. Thanks for that.
We just aren't there yet.
and want nothing to with us 
Balderdash! I will take this up with the world's top scientist.
And how do you propose to deal with the problem of those meddling kids?
Red dwarfs, for instance, which last for a very, very, very long time.
But your scenario is possible. We just don't know yet.
But there are many, many red dwarfs which are not first generation.
As far as wiping themselves out, we don't know anything about alien sociology or psychology. It is likely to be quite divergent to human. That's always the problem with these speculations. One has to try not to anthropomorphize the aliens. Damned difficult not to do. As you aptly point out, we have one data point.
Nevertheless, I think it's fairly inevitable that there's life out there, and also likely intelligent life. The numbers are just too large for there not to be. (That's a very unscientific way of putting it, though.)
Whenever anybody mentions a Red Dwarf. It is in the neighborhood.
Perhaps they mean "newly discovered"?
he smoked teh pot, after all. 
