Room for humanity to stretch its ecological footprint...??

Hey, perhaps we don't have to worry about our species' growing ecological footprint so much after all! As you may have heard by now, the major news of the day is that astronomers have found what is the first possibly Earthlike extrasolar planet!

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy Blog is covering this HUGE NEWS:

"The European Southern Observatory is reporting that they have found the most Earthlike planet yet orbiting another star. It has about 1.5 times the Earth’s diameter, and five times its mass. This makes it the smallest extrasolar planet yet found (two other planets have already been found orbiting that star, with 15 and 8 times Earth’s mass).

This is amazing enough! But it gets far, far better. The parent star, Gliese 581, is a red dwarf, meaning it’s smaller and cooler than the Sun. The as-yet unnamed planet orbits this star much closer than the Earth does the Sun; it stays about 11 million kilometers (6.7 million miles) from its star, while the Earth is 150 million km (93 million miles) from the Sun.

But remember, Gliese 581 is cooler than the Sun, so at this distance the planet would actually be very temperate: models show it would be between 0 and 40 Celsius! If that doesn’t grab you, then consider this:

That is warm enough for water to be a liquid.

So what we may have here is a terrestrial planet with liquid water on its surface."

Exciting, isn't it? For, if there is water, there can be agriculture (getting right down to this valley's perspective!) - oh, and perhaps other life-forms as well... but we know how to deal with those right? But hold it, what's this in the next paragraph:

"Let me be clear: this is not a guarantee! We have not actually gotten an image of the planet; its presence is indicated by the gravitational effect it has on its star as it orbits (once every 13 days, incidentally). So we don’t know if the planet is dry, or covered in oceans, or even if it’s rocky like the Earth — though models indicate it will either be rocky or possibly even covered by oceans."

Oh, so this is all just a model then - just theory and some indirect effects based on gravity? We don't even have an image? And it is a mere 20 light years away... oh crap, so I better not start packing the bags, nor fire up expedia just yet! We're still going to have to fix house and deal with our footprint in the near term then... Bummer, man!!