Crusty_Ass

Light spectography. Take the spectogram of liquid water or water vapour and see if you can find it out there. Absolutely not foolproof but a nice start. Next step could look for stuff like chlorophyl and complex carbohydrates. But that requires finding rocks first. Only because current detection methods only detect those types. We can't see the small ones yet. Nor can we see those that take 20 years for one orbit. BTW, having habitable planets much bigger than Earth isn't impossible. Most of the Earths mass is made up of Iron, which is a relatively heavy element. Half of the table of elements is lighter than Iron. Since the mass of a planet creates it's gravity, you could have a ball of mostly aluminium and other stuff that's 4 times the size of Earth but still has the same gravity as Earth. One thing we have learned from the discovered exoplanets is that they keep surprising us. So are corporate tax-breaks. How much do those cost this year alone again...? That's funny. Old estimates 'hoped' for roughly one in ten stars having one planet. They calculated that just in this galaxy alone several million intelligent civilizations would exist over the course of the age of the galaxy. Now we have probably several planets per star to add to that calculation. My guess is: Life is everywhere. In incredible abundance and diversity. Just imagine a supergiant planet with 5 G gravity, liquid metal and a silicon-based evolutionary process....Life goes where it has time and energy. We'll probably try selling them stuff. well similar in size is not required, similar in gravity is more important. This is also the main reason why Mars is a 'failed' Earth. Being only 1/3 as big as Earth, it lacked the gravity to contain an atmosphere. Even Earth vents about 5000 tons of atmosphere daily into space. Mars used to have running water, in large amounts. For that you need temperature or air pressure. We know the Sun wasn't as hot as it is now, so that leaves only one thing to have created running water on Mars: an atmosphere. Results will come in very slowly over many years, so don't hold your breath. I think up to 1.5 G would be reasonable. And we have absolutely no idea what the minimum amount of gravity needs to be. If we want to terraform Mars we need to weigh it down a bit to sustain an atmosphere. Smash some asteroids into it. That's an important issue. But the galaxy is very diverse. For instance, the distance between us and Aplha Centauri is 4.6 lightyears. But for a lot of stars in our galaxy that distance is much smaller, sometimes less than a lightyear. So cross-pollination is quite possible for stars that are very close to each other. And at the same time, life on Earth is over 3.5 Billion years old, but that also means we can safely assume life in our galaxy is 3.5 Billion years old. Probably a lot older. I think it's quite likely that life is now much more present in absolute terms than it was 3.5 Billion years ago, accros the entire galaxy. This would make not only cross-polination much more likely, but also the dispersal of life-precursors, stuff like proteins, carbohydrates etc. Once you've got those complex chemicals in place, the creation of life would very likely go a lot quicker. Do notice that I use a lot of probably's and likely's, because in truth, nobody knows. But I think that life is simply a form of complexity, a form of entropy that just tends to get everywhere. We see that happen al the time on Earth, irrespective of habitat. So why should the galaxy be any different, besides being amazingly bigger and more diverse?

Yes and Yes. It is also succesful, I know of at least one planet being discovered like this. This link shows you guys that are doing this type of research. http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/ Their FAQ: http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/faq.html

Glial cells also make the nervous system work faster. A neuron with glial cells surrounding it transmits signals much faster than one without.

LOL...gravity IS faster than c. If gravity would travel at c then the gravitational vector would be identical to the vector of all other items travelling from the Sun to Earth at velocity c, i.e. the light. It isn't. Well I don't really think adding more dimensions is going to do the trick. More research is required for Planck scale cosmology and Quantum Physics. That's where the answers are. Not only that, if gravity is mediated by photons, how come it's bound by the mass of matter only and not influenced by other specifics like electric or magnetic charge, spin etc? Unreconcilable. Well there's really little evidence for gravity in this way. Gravity doesn't cancel itself out, unlike photons. However, there is antigravity research that combines both electrical and magnetic fields to counter gravity. But these are based on fundamentally different theories. Ah... more on Mercury.

It's waaaayy more complicated than that. First of all, even scientist don't really understand light completely. What we do now is that it behaves both as a wave in a medium, like a wave on the sea, and as a particle. Sometimes it behaves more like one kind, sometimes more like the other. The easiest way to look at light is it being a sort of wobbly part of matter, that occasionally gets tossed by one matter particle, travels either between the TV and your eyes or accross the galaxy, until it gets picked up by another matter particle and contributes to that particle's wobbliness. We know light is quantized, that basically it is a limted entity. We also know that when atoms and light interact, they do it in very distinct quantized ways. An electron circling an atom's nucleus absorbs an light-particle, or photon, and this adds a bit to it's energy. The electron then speeds up a bit, and proceeds to an orbit a bit more further away from the nucleus. Just as if you would strap a huge rocket engine to the moon to give it a boost. After a period of time (scientist have no clue why it is that specific amount of time) the electron decides it doesn't like the new orbit anymore and pulls closer to the nucleus. The photon gets released and travels away again. Now the interesting thing is that the photon doesn't have the hold as much energy after this encounter as it did before. Most of the time it is less. So if you have an ultraviolet photon getting absorbed by the electron, it might decide later to send out another, less powerful photon like a visible photon or infrared photon. In real life: -Ultraviolet photon --> electron --> visible photon = Luminescense (when you light up a banknote with an ultraviolet light. Also the shiny colour of gold and silver and most other metals is due to this. -Ultraviolet or visible photon --> electron ---> infrared photon = heat radiation during the day. BTW, scientists also have no clue how the actual 'tossing' of a photon by an electron actually works.

Well somebody managed to lift a mouse as cargo with one of them devices. If you need to move mice then that's useful. But personally I think there can be a lot of improvement made, because it's not so much the current as it appears, but more a matter of very quickly pulsed high voltages that do the trick. But that's difficult to create using household engineering.

Exactly, strenght of matter is finite.

You can find the corresponding science article of Horatiu Nastase here. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0501/0501068.pdf I doubt we'll be seeing any black holes on Earth soon... What it basically boils down to is probably a matter of density. You still need more mass.