Awesome Extrasolar Planets
 

http://www.cracked.com/article_19662...-to-shame.html

Thought you all might find this interesting. Among them are planets that orbit freakin' pulsars, planets getting sucked into stars, and, of course, Gliese 581c.

That asteroid belt sounds amazing.

I want to go there... and probably never will :(

Edit: Fail reference is fail.
As for the message to Gliese 581c, read some of the messages that were transmitted. If there is life there and they ever do decode them, we can expect an invasion fleet on its way to Earth :P

Well, let's see. It takes 21 years to get there in 2029, and 21 more for even a MESSAGE to get back, so it would be 2050, when, IF, a return message got here. I'd either be One Hundred years old, or long in the ground, so it doesn't matter to me.
Niri Te

Well, thanks to all the newly-discovered extrasolar planets, SETI and other radiotelescope projects can do some more-selective hunting for our galactic neighbors. I predict that we'll hear an ET within the decade.

And then we'll *hear about* hearing an ET from WikiLeaks within another year or two. :)

same site talk **** about pretty much everything on Pandora :(

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:shock: I hope it won't take that long for us to find out.

Ice... but on fire.
What will the universe think of next.

GOD has never been mundane, or boring, and neither is HIS handiwork.
Niri Te

...there's no need to make such statements that many people don't necessarily follow :( - you can talk about how amazing something is without turning it into a personal lecture.

Except that I was answering Iron Jones who I know is a Christian. I will go to my room now.

Much as I wish this was certain, I fear it isn't. Not because ET may not be out there, I just suspect that he won't be "speaking" loudly enough for us to hear... if you take my meaning.

We are told that the signals that we broadcast here on Earth; radio, tv and so on travel off into space and that other cultures may find and listen to them... and they may, but only if they are using equipment of such sensitivity that we, as scientists, barely have any conception of how it might be constructed. The power of a (non-beamed) signal decreases in proportion to the square of the distance travelled (twice as far travelled = four times as weak). Beaming messages with radio telescopes may well work (because a collimated energy source holds its energy density for longer) but normal signals? Not so much.

Hence why we might not hear from ET any time soon... they might not be broadcasting at the right power, in the right direction or with the right equipment. Here's hoping I am wrong though ;).

And it BETTER be clean when I come back! i'm checking under the bed and in the closet, too!

Is there somewhere I can read what the actual messages are? I just saw they would be from politicians, and about how we need resources, which yeah that's not a nice way to greet someone.

Well, ok... if we can't have kilometer-in-diameter radiotelescopes on the far side of the moon (I suspect signal-to-noise ratio is a bigger problem than sensitivity), then I'll settle for dead micro-ETs on Mars. I'll give that the same 10-year prediction. ;)

Yeah, I'd say that's far more likely given the problems of radio transmission that far.