Do you think we, humankind, are alone in the universe? Regardless of your religious views, to think that a universe 100-billion stars strong can only muster one planet full of life is pretty ridiculous. But some people need proof to believe, and that proof could be just a few short years away thanks to the Kepler space telescope.

Mankind has, for a long time, pondered what is out there beyond the reaches of our atmosphere. We know there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe and 100 billion Sun-like stars in our galaxy but we don’t yet know how many planets there are surrounding these stars. More importantly for mankind as a whole is whether any of these planets are capable of sustaining life.

The sole mission of the Kepler space telescope being launched in March by NASA is to answer that question. Kepler will be looking for Earth-like planets in a small patch of the sky, and its three-year effort could provide us with the knowledge that there are trillions of planets capable of supporting life.

Alan Boss, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC spoke about the Kepler space telescope and what he thinks it will find at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago.

According to The Times, Boss suspects that Kepler will find evidence to support the long-standing theory that most (85 percent) of the stars in the night sky have at least one Earth-like planet orbiting it. If this is indeed the case then there could be as many as 10 billion trillion planets out there capable of supporting life.

Dr Boss rather eloquently said:

If you have a habitable world sitting around for four, five, ten billion years around another star, it’s inevitable that some sort of life is going to form. It’s like running an experiment with your refrigerator turned off: eventually things are going to grow in there. If you’ve got a planet sitting there with the right temperature and water for billions of years, you’re going to get life.

Despite Boss’ utter belief in life on other planets, and for my money, anyone who does still think we’re alone is being ridiculous, he doesn’t believe Earth has been visited by aliens. I’m not so sure, and there are growing numbers of sightings around the world that add to my uncertainty. If Kepler succeeds on its mission then we will at least be a little way towards discovering the truth.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 9:27 pm under Opinion, Science and technology.

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