NASA Telescope Confirms Alien Planet in Habitable Zone | Space.com.
Ok so I have held off several days on covering this story.
Why? Well I guess it’s mainly because, we have just discovered another planet. Ok so we have been doing so for some time now.
Yes, what about the great picture of this planet that may support life? It’s an artist’s rendering.
Wow, where’s your excitement about what should be a HUGE thing for space science, a planet with LIFE on it? Wait that’s what has me so NOT excited. We haven’t discovered LIFE ON a planet YET. We have only discovered a planet that we think is in the right spot to support life.
Let’s do a bit of thinking back about what we have considered in the past to be the right place to support life. We sent men to the moon to see if life existed there. No, it was a lunar desert with no atmosphere capable of supporting anything we would recognize as life. We have sent probes to Venus and Mars our nearest neighbors. No life there so far, infact we’d be surprised to find any life on Venus it’s atmosphere is so toxic it would be very hostile to life or any kind. So far Mar’s has turned up Bust as well in the Life category but we have a whole planet to look over there to see if we can find anything.
So what is my point. We as a human race really, don’t know what it takes to have LIFE on a planet yet. Science still has yet to have found a place that confirms they know what they are talking about. We are still just learning how to navigate and explore in our own neighborhood. Does that mean I think we shouldn’t be exploring, NO. I feel that’s what we should be doing and continue to learn more about life itself. Making wild statements that we know what we are talking about. Ummm.. Yeah no, that only makes you look like a Chimp to those in the future.
This planet we have discovered is, some 600 light years away. It is giving us a glimpse of what a remote place looked like 600 year ago if we could travel at the speed of light. Until man learns to understand his own planet and place in this Galaxy. We will have to resign ourselves to be cosmic voyeurs and never really KNOW WHAT’S out there.
Am I in favor of manned space flight to other world and planets. By all mean’s possible YES!! However there is still a TON we don’t know. However I don’t like the reckless journalism as I’ve seen in several media sources including my own community saying “WE HAVE FOUND LIFE ON ANOTHER PLANET” this has left me wishing for only the FACTS. I tire of the sensational journalism and wish for reality.
So with that in mind let’s look at the Graphic of what the Kepler space telescope has shown us about the Kepler-22 system. A single planet that is roughly 2.7 times larger that our own located at roughly the same orbit as our own planet orbiting a sun. We have no data yet on it’s atmosphere and can’t send a probe it would take 600 years to hear back from it.
Space.com has done a great job covering this story, and not recklessly either. In fact they did a bit of an update today on the likelihood that the Kepler space telescope could reveal to us. So until the aliens land, or we land on a planet with interplanetary buffalo, we will continue to vouyeristically, watch and listen, from our Culdesac in space orbiting a star called SOL.