Macrolog
Out Of This World
I was about to post this to the Linklog, but it really deserves highlighting here. According to this BBC News report, 50 planets outside of our own solar system could have life:
Astronomers estimate about half the planetary systems so far discovered in our galaxy could contain Earth-like worlds.
And they say that space telescopes will be capable of observing these planets and investigating them to see if they support life in about 15 years’ time.
This news is startling enough, but what’s also amazing is the fact that no one seems to care very much. The fact that I only found out about it via the web speaks volumes.
I guess I’m sensitive to this since I’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, Bill Bryson’s excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything — which has by all accounts been a tremendous success commercially, but does not appear to me to have had any significant effect on today’s pervasively apathetic attitudes towards science in general.
I can certainly see some factors that would dissuade enthusaism for space exploration in particular, most notably the Columbia shuttle disaster, but I can’t see any concrete reason why a report as exciting as this one hasn’t generated the excitement it deserves — especially since there didn’t seem to be a such a problem with news of the Cassini-Huygens mission, or the Mars landings last year (although they did fall out of the news quite swiftly).
So I pose some questions to you: What do you make of it? What happened to the public’s awe of scientific discovery? Am I blind to something that everyone else can see?
Sun 20 Feb 2005 at 17:27 ·
Comments (4 responses)
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There must be, all you need is a planet so far away from a sun and thats the right conditions for life. Or something. I honestly have no idea.
But it’s a silly notion really I spink. If so much life can exist on one tiny planet, surely in the entire universe there must be thoasands and germillions of lifeforms out there. Unless God got lazy after makin’ Earth.
The public awe of scientific discovery has been taken over by it’s awe for celebrity news and gossip.
And no you are not blind to anything.
I’m about to start Mr.Bryson’s book, and I’m looking forward to it.
As for the lack of wonder displayed these days maybe it’s down to over saturation? Every week another discovery is made, or new project is announced, and as Dave R mentions they are frequently after the latest celebrity gossip in the order of the news. A sad indictment of our generation I’m afraid.
I don’t think it’s a generation thing, myself, and that’s because I can remember stories like this making the news at a much bigger scale only a decade ago, and that’s noty exactly a generation ago.
Have things really change that much in the last ten years? Maybe it’s just my perspective, but the difference between the ’90s and the ’00s is not nearly as pronounced as that between the ’80s and the ’90s.
Posted by Matt
Thu 24 Feb 2005
at 10:07
Hey Mac, As I understand it, the odds of a planet being just the right distance from a sun, in order for it to be just the right temperature for water (giver of life and all that) to happily exist on said planet and for all these extraordinary events to occur at precisely the right time to support life is on the order of billions to 1, and yet having begun to read Brysons book I understand that the number of planets we may be able to happen upon in our stargazing is many many times these odds so doesn’t seem that astonishing really when ya reduce the numbers to mere ratios!
As for the difference between the 80s/90s and 90s/00s I think its hard to judge when we’re still living in the 00s (some sort of bastardised version of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle I guess)
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This is the personal website of MacDara Conroy, a twenty-something journalist, editor and all-round creative type living in Dublin, Ireland.
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You are reading Out Of This World, a Macrolog entry by MacDara Conroy. It is filed under Science & Nature, and was published in February 2005.
Tags: astronomy billbryson culture media news opinion science space
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