European scientists announced on April 24 that a possibly habitable planet has been found only 20 light-years from Earth. It’s orbiting around the red dwarf star Gliese 581, and it’s thought to be only slightly larger - 50% larger - than Earth. People are talking about it, and it became the most-viewed story on our website for a day or two.
And no wonder. Another Earth only 20 light-years distant? In our office, people immediately began joking about our needing to flee to this planet once we had “used Earth up.” And then the thought occurred to everyone at once: this possibly habitable planet might already be inhabited.
The idea of an already inhabited world only 20 light-years away caused one EarthSky community members to post a link to the poster that Special Agent Fox Mulder had on his wall in the TV series The X Files. Remember? The poster showed a UFO. The words said, “I want to believe.”
Looking at that poster today made me want to believe, too
But why? What is it about the idea of another possibly inhabited world that’s so compelling?
Astronomers have an axiom they call the cosmological principle, which states that we’re not in a special place in space. For example, Earth isn’t in a special place in the solar system (it’s just another planet orbiting the sun), and our sun isn’t in a special place in the Milky Way galaxy (just another star, among billions, orbiting the galactic center). But if there is a cosmological principle in space, should there also be one in time? In other words, could it be that we’re not in a special place in time, either?
And if that’s the case, what does it say about our understanding of the universe? What do we really know, anyway, about this possibly habitable planet, or any planet, including our own? Do we really understand what any of it represents? After all, our perception of the universe as a place where we live on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy is only a few hundred years old. In billions of years of Earth history, and millions of years of human history, we’ve had only a few hundred years of this particularly structured cosmos of planets, solar systems, galaxies.
What will sort of cosmos will people perceive 100 or 1,000 years from now?
Thinking about the long time scale of history - and the short time scale of our understanding of planets and galaxies - makes me wonder what the cosmos might look like to possible beings on the possibly inhabited planet in orbit about Glise 581 … just 20 light-years away.
That’s what I find so compelling. How about you?
Read more: Astronomers find first habitable Earth-like planet
The green photo above - called “I Want to Believe” - is from Ezu’s photostream.
I’m all for finding planets and trying to search for other life in the universe. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute is a pesonal hero of mine. However, after reading that this planet is a close 20 light-years away, I think to myself . . . that’s farther than we could ever hope to travel. We’re not going there and knowing about it isn’t going to save our skins.
Or is it? I think about the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Every one of the movie characters who knew somehow that aliens were in our midst were changed forever. Is that fundemental perspective shift possible on a human population scale?
What would that first “hello” from a planet 20 light years away do for us? Given the size of the universe, asking a question and having it answered 20 years later - time on a human scale - would be almost unthinkable good luck . . . like winning a lottery a million times. But I can dream we’d be that lucky.
It’s alittle spooky to think that it might be occupied and by whom?
Does this mean we have love our own planet before we can hope to move in with another?
ha ha i loved anonymous reply, i have this conversation often with people that talk of ufos. i do in fact believe that there is other life in the universe, i believe that the odds by sheer numbers of stars like our own must be amazing, however i do not believe we are being visited. any civilization that has the capability to produce a craft that cannot only cross interstellar distances but also block out the radiation and cosmic rays of deep space while avoiding collision with stray objects, yet their technology is so limited they come into our atmosphere with lights blazing and crash.i mean even we have radar evasion tech and can see in the dark with optics, surely they would not be bumbling about and wreck. no i believe life is out there but not visiting us. but it is a fantastic thought life could exist and how alien it trully must be.perhaps in our lifetime we will detect radio waves generated but not actually aimed at us. or we will design a telescope array on the moons dark side and have better answers but im sure its out there.even if it is as primitive as we are
Is just the first and smaler step to know that the Universe have bilions… of Planets similars to Earth. But we are so far away of that reality, not only in light years ,but also far away in light years concerning our mentality about to care our own beautiful Earth.
cool site
Hello everyone, wanna be part of some kind of community, possible here? anyone here?