Will Earth 2.0 be an ideal place for humans? But before that, will humans even get to reach the newly-discovered planet?
After NASA announced the discovery of a new planet, dubbed as "another Earth," in July, as HNGN reported, a ticket for travel to Kepler-452b appeared for auction at TaoBao, a Chinese site.
Sold as an "immigration status ticket" for those looking for "handsome teenagers" from another galaxy, the auction is starting off with an affordable bidding price of $.03 or .2 yuan. No other details to the offer has been enumerated and the transaction has yet to receive a bid as of press time.
It may just as well be the case, however, as it is still uncertain whether Kepler-452b could be an ideal planet for humans to survive.
Still, it's a planet of great interest to NASA because of its ideal temperatures, which scientists have determined as a "Goldilocks zone," meaning it's not too hot and not too cold. Given this, it's possible the planet has the ideal environment for growing crops, according to NBC News. But scientists have so far determined Kepler-452b's surface is rocky and they still don't know its exact composition.
Reaching Earth's cousin is also a challenging problem, as Kepler-452b is 1,400 light years away, which has roughly 5.8 trillion miles for every light year. Traveling at that distance will require a faster spaceship that could warp its speed to shorten the time it takes to reach the destination. Yet, that type of technology is not yet available today.
To put this in a better perspective, New Horizons, which recently made its landmark flyby near Pluto in the farthest reach of the solar system, as HNGN reported, took 10 years to reach the dwarf planet's distance. It has been traveling at the speed of 35,187mph. At that speed, reaching Kepler-452b would take humans 26 million years to arrive at the Earth-like planet, according to Express.
Still, another scientist sees Kepler-452b's gravity as another problem. "Based on an Earth-like density, Kepler-452b would be five times more massive than our planet," said Elizabeth Tasker, an assistant professor at Hokkaido University in Japan, via the Express report. "This would correspond to a stronger gravitational pull, capable of drawing in a thick atmosphere to create a potential runaway greenhouse effect, which means that the planet's temperature continues to climb," she further said.
"Conditions on a planet's surface are dictated by a myriad of factors - including atmosphere, magnetic fields and planet interactions, which we currently have no way of measuring."
To date scientists from NASA are still gathering more data of their new discovery.
