Space and Technology Part 2: Progress

What is the chance that alien life exists? Nasa’s latest mission – the Kepler Space Telescope due to launch on Friday night to survey the heavens for Earth-like planets – could soon give us an answer.

Was someone at NASA watching WordPress and my post just happened to be the one he saw? Regardless, at least they are finally taking some action and trying to find life. The biggest complaints against it are that Earth-like life would need Earth-like conditions to survive. They say that, for life to be sustained, it would have to so closely match the conditions here on our Earth. But honestly, do these people think that evolution constricts life to developing only in Earth-like ways? That is what evolution is, the adaptation of a species to an environment. Animal life on another planet could evolve to breath Carbon-Dioxide, or Oxygen, or Nitrogen, or what ever the primary characteristic of their atmosphere is. Botanical Earth life breath Carbon-Dioxide and release O2. Animal Earth life breath O2 and release Carbon-Dioxide. But given the fact that those two are major portions of our atmosphere, its no surprise that they do. But if another planet’s primary atmospheric component happened to be something like N2 (A two nitrogen bond) then any life to develop on that planet would probably breath N2. Of the infinite number of planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies in this Universe of ours, there is inevitably going to be more species somewhere. Earth, in all it’s wonder, is nothing truly unique. In our solar system, perhaps it is, but in our neighboring solar systems, let alone in our galaxy, there must undeniably be another instance of life. It may have passed its existence in the millennium that passed while the light from their world traversed the depths of space to reach us, but this won’t be the only one we find, and we will find one that is living eventually. Just because we don’t see them in the tiny iota of distance this can see doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and doesn’t mean at all that we should give up on other life. In fact, the absence of life would be all the more reason to step up research in to finding life and research in to space travel.