WHEN I WAS A KID, way back in the nineteen sixties, i, like millions of other kids, was fascinated by the race to the moon, and outer space in general. I kept wondering whether there were planets orbiting around other starts, whether they were earth like, and whether they evolvoed intelligent life. You know, the big questions.
Its time for all of us nineteen sixties kids to rejoice (quietly, at our age), because the answers are starting to come in, and they are just what we were hoping for.
In 1995, using advanced telescope/computer imaging, a very large planet was discovered orbiting a rather nearby star. Soon thereafter, other large easy to see planets were discovered, one at a time, with slowly increasing frequency. Before long, there was a list of several dozen planets orbiting other stars.
The list continued to grow, and started including smaller and smaller planets to go with the large ones, circling around stars farther and farther away, to go with the close ones, as our dectection and imaging techniques kept improving, and more people joined the productive search.
Now we have more planets outsede our solar system than we know what to do with.They're coming out of our ears, and we can't give them away. It now appears that any star that's worth its salt (hydrogen), any star that's anybody, any star at all...has planets!
And this has got to be just about the most exciting thing that has ever happened to the human race. We should all be dancing in the streets. There seem to be millions, billions of planets in the universe, and many of them seem to be about the same size as earth, and many of those seem to be orbiting at a good distance from their star to allow liquid water and stable chemical and biological conditions.
So how long will it be before we start cataloging life on many of those planets? I have always dreamed ad hoped that the extraterrestrials who monitor us would reveal themselves in my lifetime. Who hasn't?
Scientists are now using computers, telescopes, and math to try to estimate how many earth like planets there are out there; preliminary results are staggering; it looks like, according to the laws of astronomy and mathematics, that there are billions of other earths in the milky way galaxy. Hell, scientists now believe that at least one out of every six stars has earthlike planets! Amazing!
And for you true believers, consider this; all these exciting calculations and extrapolations occured right around the time the earth was crossing the galactic equator, december twenty first just past. maybe the mayans knew what they were talking about after all!
right about now all these people who channel and talk to aliens must be saying "i told you so".
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