(Photo courtesy of mirror.co.uk)
Good afternoon everyone! Found an interesting video today on Yahoo! News today- the Kepler telescope is continuing to find planets similar to our own that may be hospitable to life:
The caveat, of course, is that these planets are 950 lightyears from Earth- meaning that present space transportation technology is nowhere even close to allowing us to travel to them. A little perspective may be of use in illustrating just how far away these planets are: according to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light- which travels at a rate of about 300,000 kilometers per second (or, in terms more familiar to us, 671,000,000 miles per hour). If Kepler-20E and Kepler-20F are 950 lightyears from Earth, that means it takes the light reflected from those planets' surfaces 950 years (traveling at the unfathomable speed of light that I illustrated earlier) to reach the Kepler telescope's lens. In other words, when we see these planets through the Kepler telescope- we're not seeing them as they exist today, in the year 2011; we're seeing them as they existed around 1061 AD. Kepler or a telescope like it, wouldn't be able to capture an image of those planets as they exist today until 2961 AD- simply because the light those planets reflect can't get here any faster than that. Such unimaginable distances and speeds seem utterly impossible for human beings ever to surmount in our quest to become the masters of the secrets of the universe, but contemplate how unimaginable it would have been to a caveman that members of his species would one day walk on the moon, let alone be able to even observe planets 950 light years away. The more I've studied human history, the more I've learned that only fools bet against the human race or its capacity for progress and scientific advancement.
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