Welcome to Gaia! ::

I think that even though we might find planets the are all hundereds of light years away and we could get there sending a small town to keep living ((this is if we can get any where near the speed of light)) it could have been distroyed buy the lime we get there because if its ten thousnd light years away then we are seeing it ten thousand years ago.

Another idea for depabate is what if it was alredy inhabited, the people landing there could be seen as intuders and choose to attack leaving us umpriepared ((see the next paragragh for why))

The final promlem that i can see is comunication, if you coud do it by light then it would be impossible to realisticly do it as the information is so old it would be useless the might as well leave a sigh post for us to zoom in on using a telescope.

What ideas do you have on my views.

Ah, another planet similar to earth? What is it named? Mind you, even if there was an organic un-cellular life forms, then it would indeed resemble the earth. However, plants can adapt to different kinds of environments (not all of them). An organic life form can adapt to their environment and evolve that way to form an kind of organic system, despite the fact its revolution takes only 13 days. I'm sure you know what I mean.

Catz-chan, I believe the planet they're discussing is the one they found in the Libra constellation if I'm not mistaken...
Yea, what Voija is saying is true, about the "Goldilocks Era" or "Zone" it just means it has the possibility of creating life like it did here on Earth, similiar to bacteria evolution but... given the state and the distance away from its star I'd say it'd take a bit longer, I'm not saying its impossible but given the fact that our planet's "creation" period was the majority and we're just taking up about 10% of its history.

Ok, enough of me rambling here's an article from NASA discussing it
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2NewPlanets.cfm

::edit::
I did some more research around this and I found an article from the NY Herald which was posted on April 25th
http://oheraldo.in/node/24284

and the other article was from last December from NASA
::end::

I remember my cousin and I talking about life on other planets. This was years ago, long before most of you were born, I'm sure...

He asked me what I thought, I said that there is definately life elsewhere. He wasn't so sure. So I explained to him...

We are in a galaxy called the Milky Way, no one knows for sure, but imagine that there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way. Now, imagine if 1 percent of those 200 billion stars had planets. That would make 2 billion with planets, now imagine that each star has an average of 5 planets each, making 10 billion planets, now imagine that .01 percent of those had life. Which, would be 10 million. Of course my numbers are speculative, but... being that the Milky Way is just one of thousands if not millions of galaxies in the universe. The odds are definately in the favor of there being life elsewhere.

Of course, life could mean single celled to sentience. But you get the idea.

Anyone that thinks otherwise, I would say... is quite clueless.

I heard this planet is at 20 lightyears of our Earth. I think the day when we could land on it, our planet will already be destroyed. I think Mars is a good replacement solution, for the moment, but I'm afraid we'll make same errors that we made on our planet. Human beings will no change

Mercury is not actually tidally locked with the sun. Rather it has a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance (it spins 3 times for every 2 times it orbits). Thus, all sides see the sun. This has been known since 1965 when radar observations were made.

Since we can't make radar observations of this new planet, we cannot yet say whether it is tidally locked or not.

Additionally, if this planet has an atmosphere (unlike Mercury), the atmosphere would serve to regulate the temperature.

Rulixs, I think you should stop to watch 2001 Odyssey...