Let's get the dumbest and most arrogant of human questions out of the way a.k.a. are we alone in the universe?
A model to help get your head around things. If you could count every grain of sand from ever beach and desert on earth, the number would still not add up to the number of stars in the known universe. And if only one advanced tech society existed in every know galaxy in the universe (ours being the Milky Way galaxy with a hundred billion suns, so that's us, folks) the universe would still be filled with billions of advanced life species.
Now, having got that out of the way...the discovery of seven Earth-like planets orbiting a nearby star has really gotten everyone who has an interest in the possibility of space colonization thinking. Found by NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope and the ground-based TRAPPIST Telescope, there seems to be at least seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1.
The biggest surprise was that three or four of these planets are in the so called Goldilocks Zone - not too far from the star, not too close, not too big for a planet, not too small – a sweet spot where liquid water is stable on the right-sized planet with an atmosphere on which life could develop or survive if transplanted.
But this very young sun - only 500 million years old, 39 light years away from our Solar System - is an ultra red dwarf; so no sun tans to be had there, then.
Even if complex life had not yet evolved in the TRAPPIST-1 system, the distance to these new worlds for humans to screw up, is not reachable with anything that we have - or likely to have - for who knows how long.
Even traveling at near the speed of light, 39+ earth years is still be a bugger of a long, one way journey. Nope, this is for your future robot cousins to contemplate, not we organics.
A model to help get your head around things. If you could count every grain of sand from ever beach and desert on earth, the number would still not add up to the number of stars in the known universe. And if only one advanced tech society existed in every know galaxy in the universe (ours being the Milky Way galaxy with a hundred billion suns, so that's us, folks) the universe would still be filled with billions of advanced life species.
Now, having got that out of the way...the discovery of seven Earth-like planets orbiting a nearby star has really gotten everyone who has an interest in the possibility of space colonization thinking. Found by NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope and the ground-based TRAPPIST Telescope, there seems to be at least seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1.
The biggest surprise was that three or four of these planets are in the so called Goldilocks Zone - not too far from the star, not too close, not too big for a planet, not too small – a sweet spot where liquid water is stable on the right-sized planet with an atmosphere on which life could develop or survive if transplanted.
But this very young sun - only 500 million years old, 39 light years away from our Solar System - is an ultra red dwarf; so no sun tans to be had there, then.
Even if complex life had not yet evolved in the TRAPPIST-1 system, the distance to these new worlds for humans to screw up, is not reachable with anything that we have - or likely to have - for who knows how long.
Even traveling at near the speed of light, 39+ earth years is still be a bugger of a long, one way journey. Nope, this is for your future robot cousins to contemplate, not we organics.
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| A mock up view of the TRAPPIST-1 system. |
