A Second Earth in Our Solar System

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:30:25 PST

Traveling to another Earth-like world just got a lot easier. It turns out that there may be many other dirt-and-water planets lurking at the edges of our solar system in places like the Oort Cloud. These planets, which could be roughly the size of our own, would contain all the elements we need for life. They're just sitting in a cold, dimly-lit part of the solar system, waiting to be defrosted and colonized. Yesterday, NASA scientists announced that this changes the prognosis for nearby livable planets.

NASA's Alan Stern said these planets are so far away from the sun that we haven't seen them yet:

Our old view, that the Solar System had nine planets will be supplanted by a view that there are hundreds if not thousands of planets in our Solar System. It could be that there are objects of Earth-mass in the Oort cloud (a band of debris surrounding our planetary system) but they would be frozen at these distances. They would look like a frozen Earth.

So all we need to do is haul one of those babies into our orbit, defrost it, and start populating. Earth 2, here I come!

Beyond our solar system, millions more Earth 2s await. University of Arizona astronomer Michael Meyer, co-author of a study about extrasolar dirt-and-water worlds, told reporters:

Our observations suggest that between 20% and 60% of Sun-like stars have evidence for the formation of rocky planets not unlike the processes we think led to planet Earth. That is very exciting.

Image from Guardian Unlimited.

Planet-hunters set for big bounty [BBC News]

The Most Immature Thing We Did at AAAS

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 11:40:50 PST

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a pretty serious organization, and every year they have a very serious conference devoted to things like helping people in the developing world, saving the environment, curing cancer, and solving the global energy crisis. We at io9, however, are not quite as serious. In fact, we're the kind of people who shouldn't be allowed off leashes, especially in places where science is being done. Here's what we did at AAAS after we escaped from the security guards who tried to stop us from stealing skulls from the evolution exhibit and replacing them with little models of the monolith from 2001.*

So here's what we did: we went around the AAAS exhibit hall and took pictures of any sign that made us think of something sexual or made us want to yell the word "dude!" really loudly. When we took the picture of the PNAS sign, the guy in the booth looked all suspicious and said, "Are you making fun of our sign?" We admitted that we were, but he was really nice about it. Nobody else even noticed that their signs were dirty. Even the chick whose poster said "talking dirty" on it.

OK, fine. So what we did wasn't really that mean and just shows that we are a bunch of immature dorks. But in our defense, we did do a public service. We took a stack of "pocket guides" on WMDs from the FBI's booth and handed them out at the airport. You know, for science education.

* Actually, we didn't really steal the skulls. That guy in the picture did.

io9: aaas conference

A Second Earth in Our Solar System

The Most Immature Thing We Did at AAAS