Thursday, April 26, 2007

Exolife excitement

In the Daily Telegraph (Australia) there is an article from the Daily Mail (also Australia) which says, way, way down at the bottom:
It is difficult to speculate what - if any - life there is on the planet.
Of course most of the top of the story is filled with just such speculation, including these florid opening lines:

ABOVE a calm, dark ocean, a huge, bloated red sun rises in the sky - a full ten times the size of our Sun as seen from Earth. Small waves lap at a sandy shore and on the beach, something stirs...

Now this surely is a neat discovery and much better news than anything else in the news today, but I have to chuckle and wonder how many readers understand how faint the signals on which the planet's existence and nature.

As an old science fiction fan I'm glad to hear it, but I will get really excited when we go there or they come here.

It's nice to see other people getting excited about something this positive, instead of hate-driven fantasies about what their human neighbors are like.

1 comment:

Yellow Melon said...

What i found most interested is that this world is potentially much older than ours, giving several billion years for life to evolve. 120 trillion miles away though? I doubt much will come of this discovery in my lifetime...