I can’t stop thinking about Kepler 452b. I have no scientific background, so all facts are based on a quick google, but isn’t it really incredible that we are looking at something that is 1,400 light years away. This means that traveling at the speed of the New Horizons satellite, it would take us 226,263,979,875 years to get to this earth like planet. To give perspective that is over 17 times the current age of the universe.

So why does it matter, why am I fascinated? What is important about there being a planet like that out there? Well firstly it is really interesting to think that there is something else out there that could support life. That really fascinates me. But what is really interesting is the idea of driving imagination, which will ultimately drive innovation. The possibility of what could be is such a huge stimulant. The discovery of a planet like Kepler 452b creates a tangible experience for so many, that is critical for science to continue. Scientists understand that you have try things that don’t have a definite outcome, that it is the journey that can so often lead to the discovery, and that having a clear objective can narrow the potential of scientific discovery hugely. Science is after the unknown unknowns, and they are genuinely unknown. It is not a case of trying lots of random experiments and shooting in the dark in the hope of achieving a certain outcome, it is that there is no defined outcome.

Whilst this is understood in the science community, it is not necessarily understood by those funding it. Giving them something like Kepler 452b to cling on to is great. When in the future there are discussions about investigating some aspect of physics, and an argument can be made for traveling faster, or just communicating faster than the speed of light, or testing if it is possible to challenge the speed of light, Kepler 452b will be in the back of peoples’ minds.

But beyond the practical benefits of Kepler 452b to the scientific community, I am just fascinated that we are literally looking back 1400 years in time. That is incredible! We are looking at a planet from 615AD. When you think of what was happening on Earth then, and what has happened in between, it makes me wonder what has happened to Kepler 452b in between. Electricity only became viable in 1831 when Michael Faraday invented the electric dynamo, that’s only 184 years ago, and the Industrial Revolution only more recently. That means that if Kepler 452b was looking at us, it would not be until the year 3231 at the earliest that they would be able to tell that there is life on earth. This is assuming toxins in the atmosphere and lights at night are the earliest way of telling that there is life on another planet. So what has happened to Kepler in the last 1400 years.

But the discovery of the planet is such an early stage in the potential discovery of life. The first assumption that I always make, and am wrong to, is that the discovery of life is the discovery of intelligent life. Of the 4 billion years that there has been life on earth, man has only been around for only 200,000 of them. I’m making the assumption that man falls into the definition of intelligent life, though as Bill Watterson says —

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

But if you think of the convoluted route our planet had to take in order for man to exist, the likelihood of there being life just because there is a suitable planet is low, in fact beyond low, it is tiny. The universe is only 13.8 years old, and for 27% of that time there has been life on earth, and for 0.00144% of the universe there has been man, not necessarily intelligent life on earth. That is a long time for intelligent life to come in to being. Think also of the process that had to happen, where we have a moon, which is essential for life, and we had to have the dinosaurs wiped out by a meteor in order for mammals to dominant. There are so many other variables to consider.

That’s what it really comes down to; volume. Are there enough galaxies with enough stars with enough planets at the right distance that it becomes statistically guaranteed that there is life out there. I don’t know, that is really a lot of variables, and a lot of very large numbers and a lot of very small numbers dividing into, and being multiplied by each other.

But then again, when it comes to our understanding of life, we only have a straw poll of one. What if we are the exception, and that dinosaurs are the outlier, and intelligent life normally happens a lot quicker in other solar systems, and it was just that we were very slow to develop, that life on earth has evolved in spite of itself.

I think it is time to re-read Douglas Adams.