A week ago, on July 23rd, NASA announced that its space telescope Kepler spotted the most similar planet to Earth that has ever been discovered. The planet, called Kepler-452b, is the first nearly Earth-size planet to be found in the habitable zone (the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet) of a star similar to our sun.
NASA can’t yet tell whether the planet is rocky like Earth, or has an atmosphere and water (since the Kepler telescope can’t spot water on planets in other solar systems) but it still is the closest match yet found.
There are various responses to the story, most are excited. Somehow when most humans are excited, we are worried. Not yet alarmed, since so far no signs of life have been found on this planet, and since it is way too far to be reachable (located 1,400 light years away from Earth).
But it is worrying since Kepler-452b has many similar features to Earth : about the same temperature, only 5% longer orbit (385 days), only 5% farther from its sun (Kepler-452) which is also similar to our sun (all the other Earth-sized planets that were found so far are orbiting stars that are cooler and smaller than our Sun), it is about 20% brighter and just 60% larger than Earth (planets of this size are more likely to be rocky and rocky planets have a larger probability to be habitable). In addition, it is 6 billion years old, about 1.5 billion older than Earth, so at least theoretically it had much time for life, even sentient, to develop.
Only the thought that there might be another planet even remotely similar to “our” horrible one…
But as it’s too soon to address Kepler-452b itself, we ask to focus on the responses to its finding.
Obviously most of them are the usual and expected astonishment from the “amazing” human brain, the same kind of brain that managed to land a man on the surface of the moon in 1969, but still doesn’t manage to protect and provide for its own children in 2015.
Humanity has skipped a few basic and, at least supposedly, simple stages such as nutritional security, hygiene security, domestic security, state security, equality (within the species), maintaining a just and fair global political system, and of course and most importantly stop tormenting every other form of life on this planet, and jumped to searching for life on others.