When I recently read of the discovery of two Saturn size planets orbiting a sun size star 2,000 light years away I was absolutely amazed. The existence of the planets did not surprise me but simply the fact that we could detect them at these distances. For those of you who do not normally think of distance in light years; that is 63,000,000,000 miles from earth. We were not only able to detect them but to determine their approximate mass. That is truly amazing and also humbling for a number of reasons.
The universe is estimated to be 4,730,000,000,000,000,000 miles in diameter therefore the distance to the planets is 1/77,000,000 of the diameter of the universe. We have now detected over 500 exo-planets and have only been able to detect them for the past 10 years. With the new (2009) Kepler telescope now in orbit we are likely to expand the number of planets detected by several orders of magnitude and yet we will still have only been able to see extremely close stars.
Are we truly alone in this universe? The scientific data seems to point in the direction of life existing in multiple places in the universe, but because of the immense distances involved we may never interact with any other life forms. Steven Hawking thinks that is a good thing and points to the destruction of the Native American population after Columbus. I would like to live long enough to see that question answered definitively but I think that highly improbable. Hopefully my grandchildren will know with certainty, but they and all of mankind will have to integrate that knowledge with our present primitive religious beliefs.
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