The search for Earth 2.0
There’s been lots of talk lately about Kepler-452b and how it could be another planet much like our own. It’s pretty amazing to discover something that could inhabit life. Whether it interests us or not, at some point in our lives, we ask the question ‘what else is out there?’
Planetary habitability is the measure of a planet’s potential to develop and sustain life. When we question what other life could be out there, we are essentially looking for planets that have similar conditions to Earth, our sun and solar system.
When NASA launched Kepler on 7 March 2009; a space observatory to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. It was named after the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler.
Kepler-452b orbits its own star Kepler-452 which is known as a G-class star, the same classification as our sun. It takes 385 days to orbit it’s sun, is 60% bigger than Earth and lies in the Cygnus constellation. As much as this all fascinates me and wills me to learn more, it also makes me question things.
Finding Kepler-452b has a massive downside. It would take about 26 million years to get there from Earth. And it’s sad to say that even if we were to create a space shuttle that could reach Kepler-452b and other Earth-like planets, you would need several generations of people. Instead, experiments are underway to transmit messages to other galaxies. But this too poses a problem. If Earth were to transmit a message at the speed of light to Kepler-452b, it would sadly be 1,400 years before communication was made.
This then leads me to think about our own planet and what we haven’t yet discovered. To date, we have explored less than 5% of our oceans. That strikes me as pretty low. Considering our oceans, the lifeblood of Earth make up a staggering 70% of our planet’s surface, much more discovery needs to be done.
Just how little do we know about our oceans? NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its ocean exploration and research is leading efforts to explore unknown and poorly known areas of the ocean. Many of its expeditions involve mapping the sea floor using multibeam sonar.
It is estimated that 50–80% of all life on earth is found under the ocean surface. The average depth of the ocean is 3,795 meters and the average height of land is 840. 90% of all volcanic activity takes place in the ocean. The speed of sound in water is 1,435 meters per second, which is 5 times faster than the speed of sound in air. Now, I don’t know about you, but these figures astound me.
If we can find out more about our oceans, we might better understand mother nature’s natural disasters, find new deep-sea life, or even massive reservoirs of water beneath our oceans. Last year, scientists discovered an ocean 400 miles beneath us that could fill our oceans 3 times over. This suggests that the Earth’s surface water came from within, as part of a ‘whole-Earth water cycle.’
Even though this was last year, I’ve only just found this out now, and its pretty phenomenal. It strikes me that ocean discovery must be far less talked about in the public eye than that of space discovery. Now I’m not saying one is more important than the other, but I truly believe that we should actively promote all new discoveries that helps us learn more about where we are born, live and die.
Until then, I will use this blog to educate myself about space above and our deep oceans below. I hope you find my articles insightful and interesting.
