[KevinDavis]

Good news!!!!

[KevinDavis]

[GeronL]

bump

start selling tickets!

[KoRn]

This continues to get more interesting. Too bad all we can do is observe....

[cripplecreek]

Reading about this earlier. We’re homing in on planets closer to earth similar.

[dragnet2]

And right under our noses.

[Larry Lucido]

And with mortgage interest at an all-time low, financing a small plot should be a breeze! Flip it a few times, and you can retire! :-)

[SamAdams76]

Most likely there are an enormous amount of earth-like planets floating out there in the universe that can support life as we know it here.

The trick for us will be finding a way to get to them. Our current methods of space travel will simply not be adequate.

[Drew68]

Good news!!!!

It's really amazing that what just a few years ago was breaking news is now routine. Planets, they seem, are everywhere.

I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where the optics on telescopes are so good we'll be able to simply focus on a planet and tell immediately if there is life there?

[central_va]

Sorry to rain on the life on other planets parade but we are alone. Read Enrico Fermi's The Fermi Paradox. Pretty much proves there are no other intelligent civilizations out there.

The Paradox: The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.

[LibWhacker]

Cool! In a sense, we’re way more than half-way there already even though the first ship going there hasn’t taken off yet. In other words, it’s taken mankind, what 100,000 years?, to find earth-like exoplanets. No way it’ll take us that long to actually land on one of them... We’re way more than half-way there already!

[GonzoGOP]

They are heat blasted rocks, rather that "Earths". But the fact that we can see something that small, that close to their parent star, is a major achievement. They are finding planets everywhere. Now they know they can spot something as small as Earth. Finding one in the habitable zone is now just a matter of probability and persistence.

What happens after that is of course just conjecture. We can do spectral analysis of the atmosphere, if it has one. Then if you find both organics and free O2 you know you have something. But all that is for later. Today just raise a glass to the Kepler team. Job well done,

[MasterGunner01]

WAIT!!

I thought NASA’s main job above everything else is “Muslim outreach.” What's all this nonsense about science and space exploration? Muslims are still stuck in the 7th century and they have no use for the 21st.

[ExCTCitizen]

Lets send 0 and the Marxists, Socialists, Liberals and RINOs to it so they can have their Utopia.

[BenLurkin]

We’ve found Klendathu?