Scientific breakthrough! Society celebrates in all its glory! The ancient mystery has finally been solved! We are not alone in the universe! Wait, what? Oh, that’s right. Another Earth-like planet has been found. Aliens run amok. Yes? What is it now? What? No aliens? Fine. Extraterrestrial life! Goddamnit what is it? No proof of life? Fuck it! Surely there has to be water? Maybe? MAYBE? Well the aliens have to live somewhere Bob, they can not just float in space you know. Maybe if you weren’t such a pessimist we would have seen them by now!
Recently, astronomers found an Earth-like planet. What ‘Earth-like’ really means, no one has been able to tell me though. Apparently it means any planet in the so called ‘habitable zone’, which is a specific distance to a star that the planet orbits. According to this logic however, both Venus and Mars are Earth-like planets. The planet will probably have a temperature between 0 and 400C, not really accurate if you ask me, but the perfect temperature to keep water liquid. This is important because water is considered to be essential to life even though this is not proven in any way at all.
The planet can be found at a distance of roughly 20,5 lightyears or 193 trillion meters to your right. The planet (does it have a name anyway?) is about five times heavier than the Earth and is roughly 50% larger in volume. Using formulas for the strength of its gravitational pull shows that the gravity is about three times larger than here on Earth. Not pleasant, but not fatal either (not fatal immediately anyway).
So what does this have to do with anything? Not much. But it is always fun to think about it and keep the idea of an ‘Earth-like’ planet in the back of your skull. Chances are slim it contains life, let alone intelligent life, at all. In order to explain that, know that I am of ‘one of those’ who thinks it absolutely plausible that we are the only intelligent (*sigh*) lifeforms in our galaxy and maybe even in the entire universe. But then what [can] we do with it? In true scientific nature we can study it. Observe it. Look at it through multiple lenses until our eyes bleed. Hopefully we’ll be able to view it with our own eyes one day, but that is a story for a different time…
What would you do with Earth 5.0? Drop us a line! (alternatively, if you have a good idea for its name, drop us a line!)
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