Are we alone? The quest for other worlds

It’s easy to forget about the rest of the universe when there are pressing events happening here on Earth: a revolution in Egypt,  a looming election on the horizon, America’s increasing political polarization and the Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl win.

But it is nonetheless interesting to call attention to the 1,000 plus planets that were discovered last week by NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting telescope.

NASA’s website reports that 1,235 planets were found, 68 of them Earth-sized and 19 larger than Jupiter.   

“We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone — a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface.

Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water,” said William Borucki, the science principle investigator of NASA’s Kepler Missions, on NASA’s website.    

Fifty-four planets in a habitable zone, not too close but not too far away from their respective stars is a big discovery.

With this new planet-searching telescope, Kepler is likely to find a plethora of other planets, since the telescope only covered 1/400th of the night sky.
 
This is just the beginning of new discoveries that could change what we know about our universe, and answer the age-old question: Are we alone?  

“For the first time in human history, we have a pool of potentially rocky habitable-zone planets,” said Sara Seager, who works with Kepler, in The New York Times.

Although it will take years to figure out if these are all actually planets, this early discovery is a watershed moment for astronomy, and, well, Earth.  

NASA’s Kepler telescope is just the start of planet revelations — in 2014, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch, breaking ground on new technology that could look directly at other planets, possibly detecting “glints” of alien oceans reflecting back at us.

A hypothetical meeting of two worlds infatuates us as a culture, which is the reason for such curiosity in finding Earth-like planets. Hollywood in particular is obsessed with alien encounters, as evidenced in last fall’s flop “Skyline,” the 2010 pseudo-documentary style “Monsters,” and upcoming blockbusters “Battlefield L.A.” and J.J. Abrams’ “Super 8.”

But an actual alien invasion is not likely to be a CGI spectacle directed by Michael Bay. Alien contact will take a 4,000-year trip to reach us if we send a signal out to one of these exoplanets, 2,000 light-years away.

And the alien life we find might not necessarily be “intelligent” life at all, but rather, some single celled organisms.

The bigger question is what will happen to our society if we discover extra-terrestrials?

I imagine the foundation of our existence will be thrown into question. People will re-evaluate their views on God, religious texts and simple beliefs.

Will we as a world finally come together and be diplomatic when we realize we aren’t alone in an enormous universe?

Doubtful, our little Earthly quarrels won’t likely be put to rest over the discovery of life thousands of light-years away. It will probably take an H.G. Wells-like invasion before we put aside our human differences.

Regardless, this massive catalogue of new planets reaffirms how little we still don’t know about our mysterious universe and puts into perspective just how small we really are in the grand cosmic scheme of things.


E-mail: mfiandt@indiana.edu