Thinking About Exciting Things Like Life

MIKE BROWN, AN ASTRONOMER at the California Institute of Technology (CIT), is a very intellectually excited man these days. He and the rest of his profession, using a combination of proven facts and verifiably accurate statistical methods, have extrapolated that in the milky way galaxy, there are approximately nine billion planets which are similar in size to the Earth. It turns out that our planet is the size it is for a reason: it is the size which natural gravitational forces tend to produce often. Just as often as stars are born, live, and are seen by humans, planets orbit those stars, and soon will also be seen by humans, through improving telescopes.The telescopes of the future will be able to look close up at a billion planets, and see whether there is life on the surface, and what it looks like and acts like. If we could see our way clear to take a tiny chunk out of the military budget, and use the money to build a super telescope, we could find out sooner, rather than later. Mike Brown points out that there is only one question remaining to be asked. How hard is it to start life in the universe? Is it hard, and infrequent, or easy, and common? As far as we know right now, we are the only life in the universe, and it may be that we truly are alone, because starting life may be very very difficult and rare, or, it could be that there are billions of planets with life, and that starting life is very easy, and very common. Your choice. The exciting part, and what Mike Brown is excited about, is the fact that whereas we cannot yet answer the question about life, we can indeed answer the question about planets, and until now, we couldn't. Planets are as numerous as stars. More so. And that's what excites astronomers right now, including Mike Brown, who published a book "How I killed Pluto". And, by the way, Mike is a believer in the "easy start" theory for life. He thinks that life is very common in the cosmos, but he frankly admits, he believes that because he wants to, because its just more exciting to believe it and think about.