Earlier on the day of this noding,
astronomers announced
the discovery of Gliese 581g, the first relatively small
planet (as little as three or four times the size of
Earth, meaning a surface with a biologically reasonable 150% of Earth's
gravity) to be found within the another star's
habitable zone -- that is, the zone wherein
water on the surface of the planet will consistently tend to remain
liquid, and so able to support the sort of
life which we are familiar with. As the name of the orb implies, it orbits the star Gliese 581, a
dwarf star some 20
light years from Earth.
Now, this may seem a topical leap, but it reminds me how, as a
child, I enjoyed playing that most ancient of
computer games,
Oregon Trail. We were
pioneers, in that simple educational role play, travelling to an unsettled
West, fording rivers with our
wagon train and hunting
buffalo and
bear. And the game designer was thoughtful enough to place food and supplies at conveniently reachable points along the way. Naturally, were there no hyopthetical animals to hunt, nor
bullets to buy, we would all have ended up laying beneath
tombstones, dead from
exhaustion (or
dysentery).
When Oregon Trail was released, man had no firm knowledge of even a single extrasolar planet existing. True, such worlds had been a subject of
speculation and
imagination for centuries and a staple of
science fiction for decades or more --
Star Trek was itself affectionately known by its creators as 'Wagon Train to the Stars.' And at least one such inhabited extrasolar planet (
Kolob) even occurs in the
Book of Mormon. But man's longtime
conviction that such bodies exist was not borne out by
observation until the early 1990s, which the first extrasolar planets were confirmed by examination of the wobbles of other stars, which inicated the presence of
Jupiter-sized objects and bigger. Today, the number of planets confirmed is over 650
and growing steadily now, soon to be at a boom. And all indications point to
multitudes of smaller planets just like Gliese 581g dotting our
galaxy and similarly laying within the habitable ranges of their stars. Such worlds ought not to be particularly different from ours in terms of available
elements; true though it is that our biota has changed our atmosphere over millions of centuries, rendering its current composition, but that is simply a matter of
reorganization, the essence, the
chemical capacity for the support life having been here since the start. So it seems we are discovering our galaxy and perhaps our
Universe to be stocked with more and more potential convenient stopping points along the way to colonising our neighbouring stars. It seems, indeed, built into the very fabric of our Universe that we ought to be able to spread out into it, reaching those habitable worlds and thriving from one to the next.
It has been observed before that the capacity for
intelligent life to
evolve quickly enough
to be able to appreciate the physical means by which our Universe originated appears built into the physics of our Universe, as well. Perhaps, then, we were meant not only to figure out the
Big Bang and the expansion of our Universe and all of that -- but to glean a
perspective from that
knowledge, feeding the enablement of the means and motivation to engage in interstellar travel. And now we know that other stars have planets around them as well, possibly many more earthlike planets revealing themselves to our far-reaching
telescopes and sensory arrays. And if this occurrence is more than sheer dumb luck, if it is built into the fabric of our Universe that we ought to be supported in spreading out into it, it seems almost absurd to suppose it not built in as well that there is other intelligent life out there whom we might encounter in these travels, and learn from and teach to.
Perhaps, then, in some greatly distant
future, the children of the far off descendants of our
species will be encouraged to play games which teach them how we made our own tentative steps outwards into our
galaxy -- the Oregon Trail of our own time -- as we began fording our way across the
Milky Way.