New super-Earth planet spurs hope for billions more
Astronomers have detected a rocky "super-Earth" planet orbiting a nearby star in a region where life could possibly exist, a finding that led one of the team from UC Santa Cruz to predict there must be billions more of them in the Milky Way.
The new-found planet is a big one, at least four and a half times as massive as Earth. It is 22 light-years from Earth,orbits its star every 28 days, and lies in the star's "habitable zone," where temperatures are just right - neither too hot nor too cold - for liquid water to support life on its surface.
Astronomers like to call that "the Goldilocks zone."
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/02/BAH01N1P41.DTL
A real life Avatar?
= new reply since forum marked as read
...that doesn't mean that he didn't have biases and should not be questioned. I think that his work is flawed by a zeal for rational thought that is almost religious in its intensity and that causes him to ignore, or underestimate, other vital components of human understanding.
I've been thinking about this for a long time--indeed, from my first viewing of "Cosmos," a magnificent production for its time, but one that is shot through with certain prejudices that have bothered me, for instance, Sagan disses the Pythagoreans (Greek/Phoenician inventors of mathematics) for their "mysticism" and "elitism" and asserts that their spiritual beliefs were a grave "flaw." The Pythagoreans FEARED MISUSE OF THEIR KNOWLEDGE. That is WHY (or part of why) they were "elitists" (tried to keep a lid on certain secrets). Their history bears this out. They were persecuted and driven from certain areas by tyrannical leaders who hated the Pythagoreans for not using their knowledge and educational authority to aid tyrannical government (war, violence, greed by the powerful).
The other main reason that they were "elitist" is that they were genuine mystics. They cultivated detachment and disinterestedness in personal wealth and advancement--and in all the worldly attachments of our ego-selves--for the very reason that their astonishing insights into the pure realm of mathematics could not occur if the mind was clouded with personal greed and with social prejudices and petty superstitions. They sought to be "apart" for the purpose of THINKING. This, of course, led to strict control over their membership ("elitism"
, to long educational apprenticeships for new members and to their refusal to be "used" by the powerful to oppress others.
Sagan failed to grasp how dangerous free thinking was in that--or, indeed, in any--era, and what free thinking might MEAN to those who first developed it and cultivated it. The Pythagoreans considered mathematical thought to be a SPIRITUAL endeavor--i.e., the HIGHEST form of religion, profoundly connected to ETHICAL behavior--and they understood very well that this form of thought presented a threat to lower forms of religion and to the petty tyrants who used religious/political propaganda and violence to control others.
We have only to look at our own era and the development of nuclear weapons to understand what the Pythagoreans feared as to MISUSE of esoteric knowledge. Give people who are not strictly schooled in ethics and non-egotistical behavior the secrets of the physical universe, and what will they do with those secrets?
Sagan descries the Pythagoreans' "mysticism" without understanding it and makes this mistake time and again--for instance, when he disses astrology, and fails to acknowledge that astrology (belief that human life is connected to "the stars" is the MOTHER OF astronomy. Without the human desire to BE connected to "the stars," human beings would never have begun to track the movements of heavenly bodies. Until very recently, astrology and astronomy were ONE endeavor. If we just lop one of them off and say "It's bunk," we are cutting out the heart--the driving force--of human activity: our desire to be connected to something larger than ourselves, and our intense longing to understand the mysteries of our own existence.
Rather than honor astrology as "the mother of astronomy," while making the nuanced point that modern astrology is a degraded version of astrology (brought about in part by PERSECUTION of ancient philosophers as "witches" and "wizards" , Sagan instead just throws out the entire origin of astronomy. And he does not recognize HIS OWN desire for MYSTICAL connection with "the stars" as manifested in his own obsession with discovering extraterrestrial life.
This is too superficial for me. Human life and thought is far more complex than Sagan was willing to acknowledge.
In fact, Sagan becomes something of an elitist himself, in his BIASED hostility to religion, one of the prime means of human effort to connect with something larger than ourselves. Believe me, neither "pure reason" nor modern science have all the answers. Where does respect for the Earth come in? Where does compassion come in? Where do democracy and equality come in? How does "mother love" fit into a "rational" world? Is our plague of homelessness the fault of religion or the fault of a cruel economic system based on mathematics? (--how many digits you have in your bank account).
We have reason to fear rightwing religious powermongers, it's true. But we also have reason to fear Monsanto ("pure science" , Exxon Mobil ("pure engineering" , and drone spy planes and bombers ("pure war" . Rationally, why shouldn't we cross a fish gene with a tomato gene? Rationally, why shouldn't the strong and the clever prevail? We're finding out what's dangerous and even lethal to all life in the application of "pure science" to the physical world for profit purposes. And I've certainly thought, more than once, that the Pythagoreans were RIGHT: we NEED an elite of non-materialistic philosophers--people profoundly committed to the good of all--to control knowledge that the rest of us (most particularly, our capitalists) cannot safely handle.
Most times, I'm a pure democrat with a small "d." I believe that democracy--when it is working right--will elevate wisdom and promote the common good. (But it ain't working right, that's for damn sure.)
I love Sagan and his works. Don't get me wrong. All I'm saying is, don't worship him. And beware of this notion that "pure reason" or "pure science" are "the answer."
Sagan dismisses and ridicules "the mob." That is a form of elitism in itself. Be wary of his paintbrush in "Contact." He is loading the argument with broad swipes at religious believers and most definitely sees himself as a "crusader" against them. And the conclusion of "Contact" is most certainly "mystical" (a word that he uses as an epithet against the Pythagoreans). The powerful aliens, who reward our heroine with a mystical experience, are going to keep their existence a SECRET from the rest of humanity! The rest of humanity is NOT READY for the knowledge that they have! How Pythagorean is THAT?
Sagan, brilliant though he is, is full of contradictions. He is flawed. He is human. As are we all. That is one good reason to come down on the side of democracy with a small "d," for all its perils. History is full of the misrule of elites--religious and otherwise. And the Pythagoreans failed to protect even themselves from oppression. Their elitism was not a successful strategy for achieving the common good (which they sincerely sought, from what I can tell).
I think that Sagan's flawed and biased view of history and his direct attacks upon religion and "superstition" were a bad strategy for educating people. And he forgets that every great scientist in the history of the world was born in religion, educated in religion, imbued with religion and religiously inspired to pursue science--including the great Sir Isaac Newton and all the Arabs and Persians (and Chinese), not to mention all the great tribal medicine men and women who preceded them. ALL considered science a "heavenly pursuit"--even the "rationalists." The biggest "rationalist" of all, Newton, was experimenting in his basement with the deep, dark, ancient art of ALCHEMY! Why? Because he wasn't sure that the material world was all that rational!
Today we're almost back there, at Alchemy--the ability to turn one form of matter into another. That was not such a strange notion after all. Sagan blinds himself to the spiritual and poetic insights of the human mind that DON'T COME FROM rational thought. On his crusade for rational thought, he fundamentally misunderstands and mis-characterizes the human mind, with all its devious and creative pathways to knowledge and truth. He was on a noble journey, for sure--one that demands respect and admiration. He was most certainly one of the guiding geniuses of the "space age." He understood that human endeavor profoundly. It is our search for other beings like us--the discovery that will trump all others. The discovery of discoveries. And it is quite sad that he could not enjoy (or is he?) this latest evidence that we are not alone--a habitable planet so near by. He was right about this! This is our destiny. I revere him for understanding this--that all of human history points us outward, to "the stars."
But he was wrong about why we aren't there yet. It is NOT religion that is holding us back. It is corporate greedbags, war profiteers, warmongers and their political lackeys--the very same forces that we must learn how to disempower, in order to have a democracy (a society in which everyone has a voice and everyone has a chance). These forces are irreligious in the extreme. They believe in nothing but their own greed. Religion, on the other hand, can equalize people, and has often done so. It is not all bad, by any means. It is sometimes the communal expression of the equality and preciousness of every human being. That is the core value that attracts billions of poor people to Catholic churches in Latin America, despite the bad history of the Church and fascist elites in that region. They believe in that core value--that all souls are equal. That may also be what inspires billions of poor Muslims to their mosques--the religion is the equalizer. It represents a communal belief in equality and the communal strength necessary to care for all. The notion that science is good and religion is bad is myopic, even stupid. I don't admire Sagan for this. I think he made a big mistake--had a big, self-deluded hole in his thinking.
Sagan generalized "the mob" as deluded, anti-science and superstitious, and considered himself an elite of one, the defender of the rational. He does make a few stabs at trying to be fair, in "Contact," but he largely doesn't succeed because he fails to realize that his protagonist IS religious, in her own way. She stands for him, and she is as obsessively devoted as any god-freak religious believer to her own notion of religious ecstasy: contact with extraterrestrials. That meeting is mystical and that meeting excludes the rest of the human race. The extraterrestrial whom she encounters (who takes the form of her dead father) tells her that the rest of humanity is still too child-like to meet them. (You gotta wonder why they sent plans for the big gyroscope, in that case!). Humbug, I say! The author didn't know how to end it, because he had come right smack up against his own irrational, contradictory, elitist viewpoint, which he had criticized the Pythagoreans for, in "Cosmos."
What I admire him for is TRYING. "Cosmos" to "Contact" is a noble journey--one of the noblest. He tries very, very hard, to understand his own obsession and even his own failures (for instance, his failure to inspire the U.S. to vigorously pursue the highest NASA goal: other life, and his own disgust with religion, which I think got him targeted by some nutballs). He wasn't able to make his obsession universal, the way, say, Shakespeare might have done. In "Contact," his enemies become cartoons; his heroine is too virtuous. It's a whopping good tale--but flawed. Do you have to hate religion in order to admire and promote space exploration? Come on. Religion is not the obstacle. Our society being hijacked by profiteers and do-badders is the biggest obstacle to "the stars," to the other human-like critters who are surely out there and to our maturity as a species.
Somebody has to be the bad guy 
But they might be religious and worship some other character. Or is that a joke and it went over my head? I'm thinking there's a clue in that avatar photo but I'm not getting it. 
..then Christians are not people to spurn! 
Do they ever divulge the atomic number of Unobtanium, and explain how something with an atomic number that high has a half life long enough to mine?
I'm guessing not!
Or else, the stuff is a naturally superconducting magnet that makes mountains float in the air. That's not really explained, so this won't spoil anything for you.
I don't know anything about this move (except it involved 3D blue people) but after reading about unobtainium and floating rocks, I think I'd have to watch an hour of [link:http://www.ted.com/talks| before and after!
Probably a good thing.
?w=580&h=362
No more "manifest destiny" bullshit.
Gliese 581: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581
Gliese 581 g: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_g
Only main issue is the tidal lock, since we don't really know how a tidal lock will affect a system in the "habitable zone."
