Reply To: Hey! I’m New Here!

[Anonymous]

Oh, busted! lol Well, thank you very much for the compliment about communications–and right back at you! 😀 As a Language Arts teacher I definitely have a thang for articulating intelligent sentences. The degradation of contemporary written communication in our contemporary Information Age is inexcusable, imo–but I won’t be a grammar-Nazi about it unless people invite advice, either. lol

I just keep reminding myself: “It’s just a rough draft, it’s just a rough-draft, thought-experiments out loud, not the final essay or a public presentation…” Even though I suppose it is a public presentation when shared on the Internet, & as such reflects our contemporary social expectations in a most unfavorable light… *sigh* I mean, *how* you communicate shares so much more about you than what you actually say that I do actually wish we’d hold each other at least a little more accountable as intelligent, caring, civilized & respectable people. Reminds me of Peter Shilling’s song from once-upon-a-time, “Zone 804″…

Because we most certainly are not alone as an intelligent species in the galaxy, sooner or later someone will happen across us, & what will their first impression/s be? Chaos? Scorn? Unworthy? “An amazing planet, really–too bad they left such a squandering, covetous species in charge…”? Did you ever watch Jodie Foster & Matthew McConaughey in the movie *Contact*? I can definitely see a scenario similar to that playing out.

Do you remember the unveiling of the now-legendary “Hubble Deep-Field”? Where they found the apparently darkest patch of outer space, zoomed in, & snapped shots with countless *galaxies*, let alone stars??? Did that ever spark the fires of curiosity in my imagination! Ha! Coupled with Spitzer’s IR filter to show just how much of our view–esp. of our galactic core–is blocked by the sheer volume of non-illuminated matter between us & the core or us & other stars was just so compelling to want to “part the veil” & view the hidden mysteries deeper in! Add to that Chandra’s x-ray-range details, & a lot of those hidden mysteries were at least acknowledged, even if not clearly viewed.

Similarly, do you remember when Kepler tore into the exoplanetary “hunt” rather than just “survey”? I was just on the edge of my seat as I learned about light-absorption for the various elements, & came to understand that we could finally tell a lot about exoplanetary material composition just from scanning candidates with a spectrometer. “What’s this? You mean we can just snap a picture of a planet *that* many light years away & discern if it has an abundance of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, et al, in its atmosphere (or even little or no atmosphere if the results pulled up rocky rather than gaseous elements)???” Haha!

Oh, I just love living in a day when we not only theorize whether or not life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, but we have the means to tell which planets are indeed Earth-like worlds capable of supporting life similar to our planet! With all the vast diversity of ecologies that flourish & have flourished or ages across Earth’s history, forget hope–what *promise* of answering the long wondered about question about life being possible anywhere else!

Tell me, Starbound (I love your name even more now that I understand its significance)–did you ever watch that movie *Singularity* with John Cusack? What are your thoughts–with all of your research, especially–about, say, Gliese 581d as a promising Earthlike candidate? Or any others that have caught your eye as you’ve pursued your passion with the stars?