Will We Find Another Earth??

NASA has just sent a giant telescope into space to look for other planets similar to "Earth" in the far reaches of the Milkey Way Galaxy.

Will we find life out there?
What will it be like if we do?
Will we be able to communicate with whatever life we do possibly find?
What if we stumble upon something that we really do not want to??

All sorts of questions....
I hope we can find some of the answers.

From the article:

Once it's settled into an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun, Kepler will stare nonstop at 100,000 stars near the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, between 600 and 3,000 light years away.

The telescope will watch for any dimming, or winks, in the stellar brightness that might be caused by orbiting planets.
Astronomers already have found more than 300 planets orbiting other stars, but they're largely inhospitable gas giants like Jupiter. Kepler will be looking for smaller rocky planets akin to Earth.

Kepler is designed to find hundreds of Earth-like planets if they're common and, perhaps, dozens of them in the habitable zone, Borucki said.

The telescope is so powerful that from space, NASA maintains, it could detect someone in a small town turning off a porch light at night.

It won't be looking for signs of life, though. That's for future spacecraft.

Read on for more on this story:
JSOnline.com Associated Press News

And a video of the launch of the telescope:
http://video.ap.org/?t=By%20Section/Sci-Tech&p=&f=WIMIL&g=0306dv_kepler_launch