Earth 2.0 is in our sights. Checking it for signs of life will be the next big issue.
The thousands of probable worlds discovered in orbit around other stars are making our corner of the universe appear a lot friendlier to life these days.
The Kepler space telescope, which has its eye on 150,000 stars, is beginning to home in on Earth-size planets. Can Earth 2.0 be far behind? What will it be like?
Earth 2.0 would be a rocky planet the size of our own, orbiting a star like the sun at a distance where the surface temperatures would allow liquid water oceans, assuming the planet was sheathed in an atmosphere containing greenhouse gases.
In other words, it will be a world that we might find habitable. We won't be able to see this other Earth directly, but we will know it is there because of the influence it has on its star. Even so, we will inevitably ask: "Is it inhabited?"
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