NASA to Reveal "Big News" From Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Thursday

Pure fantasy speculation here...sci-fi at best but meh, might as well daydream big.

They will announce a planet with not only ideal conditions, but signs of advanced life...a slow burn into disclosure about UFOs but under the guise that its all trackable via public on when the discovery was made, allowing for a complete forgivness and forgetting the previous 60+ years of UFO talk while ushering in ETs into the mind.

Once they give this announcement, they will publically come up with a couple year plan to communicate with the planet, send a message, then a couple years later, voila, we make contact and they come over for a cup of tea and whatnot...(they are in on the gig also of course, very hush hush).

Alternatively,

They have discovered a planet made up entirely of fossil fuel and we must go liberate the inhabitants.

Finally

They just found a earthlike planet in size and traces of water..unfortunately it would take us about 1k years by conventional craft to even get there...but cool anyhow...time to freeze up a few thousand people and get them on their way to spread out.

ha! Nice! Well I'd be up for a bit of freeze dried flying and re-populating any day :p

Now we just need to figure out how to get our names on the list

Big Announcement Prediction-

New planets MAY have water and might support simple life such as algae.

Why do they keep doing this to us?

reply to post by c3hamby


Sadly, some small minority would become rather unstable if NASA declared a planet - with all the right signs - plus possible detection of "activity" detected from the surface (such as light, etc)

There are individuals who think an Independence day scenario will happen.

On one hand, I think it is good that NASA tries to spike interest in the Kepler mission with creating stories that generate excitement. The more people interested, the more money will go to such missions.. buut..

I have a feeling that this intriguing find (while definitely still intriguing) will pertain to something like a hot jupiter with some previously thought impossible orbit. Or planets orbiting a pulsar, or something to that effect.

Basically, I don't think this is going to have anything to do with habitable planets. That would be too good to be true!

I dislike speculating on anything - always seem to get disappointed. Okay, just this once - they have discovered a new life substaining planet. How is that for "way out there".

Originally posted by ngchunter
They will say they have found a whole slew of candidate worlds much smaller than gas giants, more analogous to earth size, and that if you extrapolate the data it means that rocky worlds like ours outnumber gas giants by quite a bit.

Maybe there will be a planet like Pandora? Meh, I've never seen the movie avatar but I really must say that the shots of the alien world that I saw were tremendous. I really need to see it. A new planet that's like Earth but more beautiful? I'm there. Wait, though...no one ever said that it WAS more beautiful than Earth. Sorry, my own speculation thrown in there. I can dream though!

Most of you still buy into our scripted news? It's funny to watch how all of you line up still to be spoon fed this garbage. One day you'll understand how and why the news has been laid out in front of you the way it has been for quite some time.

Originally posted by c3hamby
Big Announcement Prediction-
New planets MAY have water and might support simple life such as algae.
Why do they keep doing this to us?

Because for the future of humanity, it's big news. If you can look further ahead than your life or the lives of your kids, it'd be good news indeed.

what makes you guys get so excited about this? since when does nasa ever do a followup on a 'discovery' they make???

there will be no followup theyre just keeping you guys in a drone like state where you think the truth is coming out but never does lmao.

reply to post by MysterE


It's incredible that they've found Waldo amidst billions of stars.

They probably found a planet with water, vegetation and life as we know it but they will just tell us they found a planet with mathane that could possibly have water under its polar crust. Same ol, same ol.... ;-)

Originally posted by infinite

 

There are individuals who think an Independence day scenario will happen.

.....and then there's those who believe aliens will arrive on December 21, 2012. Their major reason for coming here is to depopulate an over-crowded planet - they will begin by eating overweight people first...

It will definately be seemingly small potatoes news to us. NASA needs to claim "big news" every now and then to keep some funds rolling in. If they never had these press conferences about new finds then people would lose what interest they have left. Even the smallest of news needs to be exaggerated into BIG NEWS.

What if they found a planet EXACTLY like ours? Same continents, oceans, moon, etc.?

Can you imagine what that would do to the average human beings' world view? The implications would be mind blowing.

Maybe I've watched too many Star Trek episodes.

reply to post by OneNationUnder

Care to elaborate a bit for those of us that aren't really aware of the ramifications of all this?

Originally posted by Bonified Ween
Most of you still buy into our scripted news? It's funny to watch how all of you line up still to be spoon fed this garbage. One day you'll understand how and why the news has been laid out in front of you the way it has been for quite some time.

Althought today certainly isn't the day and we won't hear it from you. Maybe next year.

reply to post by SaturnFX


no


first they will announce simple life

then evidences of complex life

than confirmation complex life

than evidences of intelligent life

than confirmation of intelligent life

all that in a time span of 200 years

If they send another signal I swear to god I am going over there and I am going to destroy their equipment.

nasa should stop playing us and bring out the real stuff

Originally posted by MarkusMaximus

Originally posted by Ezappa
Wonder if they have found a planet in the goldilocks zone.
Maybe a planet with water and an atmosphere.

That would be awesome, but unlikely, I think.

Going back to Kepler's stated scientific goals:

• Goal 1: Determine the frequency of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of spectral types of stars.
  
• Goal 2: Determine the distributions of sizes and orbital semi-major axes of these planets.
  
• Goal 3: Estimate the frequency of planets and orbital distribution of planets in multiple-stellar systems.
  
• Goal 4: Determine the distributions of semi-major axis, albedo, size, mass and density of short-period giant planets.
  
• Goal 5: Identify additional members of each photometrically discovered planetary system using complementary techniques.
  
• Goal 6: Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems
  

Finding water and atmosphere over many light-year distances would involove detailed spectrometry observation, but it doesn't appear tha Kepler is equipped to do that. It's observing mass, axis, and density of planets, with only minimal spectral observation of the host stars, not the planets.

This.

Kepler has not been up long enough to find any "Earth like in all respects" planets. Right now its catching all the planets with fast transits across their parent stars. So Nasa will probably just give a "Gosh look at all the planets" speech to calm the masses. After Kepler has been up for a few years then we will start to find the planets that are not Speed Racer wanna bes.

Of course if as we look outward we find that most planets are on caffine we have to ask ourselves how we ended up in a decaf solar system.

Kepler is a not only a mission of discovery, it is also a mission of perspective. Once we have perspective we can begin to answer some of the "big questions".