Extrasolar Planetology - Finding Earth Like Planets in the Next 5 Years

I've sent my friend on Epsilon Cygni 7 a message to flick his porch light on and off a few times when the probe is looking his way. That ought to do it.

When did you send the message, and when do you expect it to arrive there, so we can calculate when to start looking??? Thanks.

I hope they find out were those aliens live that mutilate livestock and abduct our citizens

but on a serious note, i hope they find lots of interesting planets.

Any nearest star is some light years away. Can we reach it in life time with the speed of our current rockets? The first priority should be achieving the speed. Development of Spirituality and the mental power is the answer.

In 1974 one person asked an Indian saint whether she can have experience of the moon. The saint said "yes". The lady had the experience and noted down the same in her diary. The experiences tallied with the later experiences of the USA astronauts who reached the moon. This is in the books of Ramachandra Mission. It a pure meditation society without any idol worship.

Roger, is there any method we could use to design a telescope (optical, radio)to look for refracted radiation around a planet, from a distant star as a planet passed in front of the star? Like selective sound suppression, to hear the "message" in a field of random noise, we might block out the primary star radiation and look for a "halo" or such around the planet, which would move across the star? Or would the parent star's spectra mask any such halo?

What you can do, once you've identified a extrasolar planet, is measure the spectrum of the star when the planet is between us and the star, and when it isn't. When the planet is in front, the atmosphere of the planet should absorb some of the light from it's star, so if you subtract the spectrum when the planet is in front from the spectrum when it isn't, you should essentially get the spectrum of that planet's atmosphere.

By analyzing the spectrum of the extrasolar planet you could learn a lot, maybe even if there is primitive life on that planet (life can alter a planet's atmosphere in specific ways).

This has actually been done roughly already:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7130/abs/nature05636.html

http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Richardson_L/0/1/0/all/0/1

Pretty cool, huh?