If your first instinct it to tell me all the reasons this isn’t exciting or give the statistics regarding little chance there is of anything coming of this, I’ll see you at 335 of 365.
For the rest of you, I’ve been consuming information about Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f.
This is what I learned about when I watched Star Trek as a kid. It’s what excited my imagination when watching the short-lived Earth 2, and it’s what makes looking at the stars on a clear night while I’m home in Illinois so exciting.
Though the first two earth-sized planets to be orbiting a sun like ours existed long before the discovery was published in Nature, there’s something different now. Though the likelihood of life as we know it existing on the planets is almost inconceivable, there’s a reduced sense of aloneness attached to knowing they’re there.
This is the value of STEM in schools, the ability to incite wonder in the world and beyond.
We noticed a dimming of the sun using a satellite Galileo would have swooned over and then measured wobble of the star caused by the gravity of the planets.
And we haven’t even seen them.
We think they’re there.
The evidence says it’s likely they’re there and they’re planets..
It’s as close as scientists get to faith.
It’s beautiful.
Though we haven’t seen them, exactly, humanity cannot help but try to imagine what these distant neighbors look like.
I’m going to go get some butcher block paper and my crayons.