Earth 2.0 — Who Cares?

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered a rocky planet in the habitable zone of a star 600 million light years away.

Uh, O.K., you might say, and then check your smartphone email for the 311th time today.

With Newt Gingrich surging in the polls and Herman Cain’s 13-year mistress disclosing that she thought about shopping while having sex with the the former GOP presidential candidate, who’s got the bandwidth? Plus with the announcement of the Alabama-LSU rematch for the BCS championship and Ndamukong Suh’s suspension, we’ve got a lot of terrestrial topics to belabor endlessly.

History hinges on these developments, to be sure. But do take just a moment to consider, if you would, that one of the greatest discoveries in the history of astronomy is unfolding thanks to a group led by NASA Ames Research Center scientist Bill Borucki and the Kepler spacecraft Ball Aerospact built. I did a story focusing on Borucki in January 2007 and wrote a book about Ball Aerospace. Many of the folks on the Deep Impact mission I chronicled in “From Jars to the Stars” went on to build Kepler.

I won’t belabor Kepler’s specifics, but the spacecraft is a big, blurry-eyed telescope that stares at a patch of about 150,000 stars in a patch of sky about as big as your outstretched hand and looks for dips in light as planets pass. It’s found more than 1,000 extrasolar planets so far, and they’ve confirmed, through other telescopes, that one (of 48 habitable-zone candidates still to be checked out) indeed is in the Goldilocks Zone where water can be water (and not steam or ice or ionized plasma).

We have had, heretofore, precisely one confirmed example of a habitable-zone planet proven to capable of hosting water. Despite the presence of Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain, intelligent life has been found there.

If ET existed, he came from a habitable planet. The notion of humanity colonizing the galaxy hinges on finding a habitable planet (it also hinges on being able to travel hundreds of light years in non-geological time frames, a stickier problem). Geocentric views of the universe have been passe for a few hundred years; the idea that the sun is the giver of life will soon join them. The planet itself is less significant than the statistics it bolsters: They found this thing on Kepler’s third day of operation. Nobody’s that lucky — quite simply, there are most certainly billions of Earth-like planets swarming around stars all over the universe.

So many, in fact, that the law of large numbers dictates that not only are there human analogs out there, but that exact copies of Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain, Ndamukong Suh and even Ginger White also exist. And Ginger 2.0 will tell you that, after 13 years of sleeping with someone, women throughout the cosmos are thinking about shopping.