I am having computer problems up the wazoo, I guess I was late with a payment, so the evil bureaucrats at UPC have slashed my connection with the outside world, leaving me adrift on a desert island of the cybersea. Not to worry, it will be sorted by tomorrow and meantime, we’ve got a cockamamie mish-mosh of wires and cables attached to my son’s computer, and the central brain of the system is a mobile phone.
I do not understand modern technology, but I am in awe of it.
One result of this, however, is that access is slow and reading the news is a slow and frustrating process. So, I haven’t. I did notice one headline, though, on which I’d like to comment. Two earth-sized exoplanets discovered. Now, I don’t want to rain on my own parade, but I’ve seen this headline before and it always turns out the planets are only 2 or 3 times as big as Earth and only 10 times as dense. But maybe this is different. If so, I’ll read about it tomorrow and be excited as hell.
Because it’s truly amazing news. We know that there are gazillions of planets out there. We know that water is about as common throughout the universe as pedophilia throughout the Catholic church. If we know that some are earth-sized there’s a pretty good chance that some of them have gravity similar to the Earth’s. Maybe some of them even have an atmosphere like ours and, if they are in the so called Cinderella zone, a tolerable temperature.
In other words, life as we know it, more or less, could have evolved on a planet that is close enough for us to have figured out that it’s there. And, since species evolve to meet the survival needs of their planet, and if life has evolved there, and evolved into intelligence, than they might be like us in many ways. Bi-pedal, two eyes, two ears. An opposable thumb. Maybe a different number of fingers. Evolution may converge, but that would be just too much to expect.
Anyway, it’s the way I’d like to imagine it. That there are, sprinkled around the galaxy , hot Bajoran babes and Vulcan vixens, and girls from whatever planet Deeanna Troi is from.
It’s much more pleasant than worrying about the giant, spacefaring intelligent cockroaches we are equally likely to encounter.
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