Wednesday, 1/8

I think we've lost our ability to be amazed. And that's a sad thing.

With all the controversy going on in the world today, everything from the contentious high school sports team name change here in Marquette to the specter of war in Iran, there's a news story out there that has received absolutely no attention at all. Admittedly, it might be a news story that wouldn't receive much (if any) attention outside of a small circle of people, even if there wasn't all this hate and rancor and division swirling around, but it's a news story that could have major implications for humans and our place in the world.

For the first time, one of NASA's planet hunting missions has found an Earth-sized planet  in the Goldilocks zone of another star system. A rock just as insignificant as the one on which we live has been discovered. And if our insignificant rock sprouted intelligent life (well, humans, so sometimes you might have to wonder about that whole "intelligent" part), who's to say that this recently discovered insignificant rock couldn't do the same?

This is a big deal for a couple of reasons. First of all, almost all exo-planets, especially those that orbit in their system's Goldilocks zone (the area where it's not too hot nor too cold for things that life needs, like liquid water, to exist) have not been Earth-sized. Most have been gas giants; some have been Neptune-sized or even what's called a “Super-Earth”, a planet about twice the size of ours. Technology just wasn't good enough to find smaller planets like ours.

But technology gets better. Scientists get better at interpreting data. And now, you have the discovery of TO1 700d. That, in and of itself, isn't that big of a story. But if we live on a planet that supports life, and now we've found another planet of the same size, in the same orbital area, of another star, odds are that there are a LOT of planets just like our in a lot of planetary systems just like ours. And if life sprouted on our little insignificant rock, odds are that it can—or already has—somewhere else.

I realize no one cares. I realize that everyone's caught up in whatever controversy du jour their preferred form of media or their preferred political party has cooked up. But this is a big deal. Even if nothing ever comes of it—and, in this case, probably nothing will ever come of it, because that's what the odds say—this discovery has pulled back the covers on the possibility that one day, perhaps sooner rather than later, we'll discover that humans are not unique in the universe. We may discover that the biology and chemistry that led to us exists on other worlds. Heck, we may even discover that we're just bickering little kids in an intergalactic neighborhood of adults.

It's just too bad that there are other things that grab our attention these days.

(jim@wmqt.com)