Dreaming Of life Among the Stars, For Real, for Once

WHEN I WAS A KID IN the nineteen sixties, I became fascinated by astronomy, and in high school I spent more time in the back yard with my telescope than indoors doing homework. Always the big question: is there life out there, and how many, if any, planets orbit other stars? Eagerly awaiting the forthcoming moon landing, everyone else asked the same questions. The answers began coming in in 1995, when the first of thousands of planets was discovered orbiting a far away star, and the last twenty years have been perhaps the most exciting time of discovery in human history, exceeding in interest even a Donald Trump insult, Hillary Clinton FBI investigation, or extra racy episode of Keeping UP With the Kardashians. There is an astronomer at Harvard with a smart watch which sings a cute song every time a new planet is announced; she turns it off at night, as it keeps her awake. The most exciting discovery yet occurred just the other day, when a planet of earth size was found orbiting Proxima Centauri, which is the companion star of the famed Alpha Centauri, the closet other star to the sun. This planet is the right size, shape, and distance from the star it orbits, all within acceptable parameters, indicating that the potential exists for life to evolve upon the planet. Let the dreaming resume! Maybe if we send a probe there, we can find out all we want to know. A probe the size of a smart phone, with all the bells and whistles, should do the trick. Expect to hear talk of this soon. They were already talking about such things in ivory tower think tanks, now Richard Branson can expect to start getting annoying phone calls. Tiny space probes cost much less money, can do the same things huge ones can, and can travel faster to boot. We may be able to photograph all the people who have been abducted by Proxima Centaurians, toiling in their slave labor camps, waiting for a chance to go home. We might no longer be reduced to inventing imaginative scenarios involving Andromedans and Galactic Federations, and can turn our attention instead to the real deal, in the real world. It sure as heavens is about damned time.