Scientists think they may have discovered a habitable planet! They call is Gliese 581D, which is a really cool science fiction type name, actually, but I’ve got no idea how that’s pronounced. Does it rhyme with ice, spicy, eyes, surprisey, fleece, fleecy, grease or easy.
Not an actual photo of Gliese 581d
Whatever, we’re never going to see it. It’s 20 light years away and, Star Trek notwithstanding, we aren’t anywhere near achieving light speed. With current propulsion methods it would take approximately 300,000 years to get there, and there’s no way we can build a big enough ship to keep a viable gene pool of humans alive for that long.
It is amazing to me, though, how scientists can know so much about something so far away. I took an astronomy course once. Hats off to those people, I could never do it. They speak of stars, but they are speaking of a speck on a slide, a couple of lines on a graph. It’s mind numbingly boring. I suppose it gets more interesting if you actually know what you’re doing, but still- unsung heroes, if ever there were unsung heroes.
For instance, Gliese’s gravity is about 2 times Earth’s. If they have humanoid life, they’d kick our asses at wrestling and weight lifting and be short, tough little bastards. Then, it doesn’t spin, which should make one side light and warmer and one side exposed to the cold of deep space, like Mars or our moon, but apparently the atmosphere is thick enough to trap the sun’s rays and spread them around the planet, meaning everywhere, all the time, the temperature is pretty much the same and the sky is sort of a hazy red. Now, how the hell do they know that?
We will probably never see it. But next time I watch a science fiction movie and there are aliens from another planet, they’d better not say Mars. That has always pissed me off, and now they’ve got a better alternative.
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