Over the past several months I've seen many articles in various scientific and space journals which celebrate the discovery of worlds outside our solar system which (may be) habitable. Here is a link to one such article: http://www.space.com/20733-alien-life-search-next-phase.html
Here’s a quote from that article: “On Thursday (April 18), scientists announced the discovery of three more potentially habitable exoplanets — Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f and Kepler-69c — further suggesting that the cosmos is jam-packed with worlds capable of supporting life as we know it.”
Yes, you read that right. “The cosmos is jam-packed with worlds capable of supporting life as we know it.” According to scientists and astronomers, there are approximately 4.5 billion alien earths. Their criteria is simple. They say that these planets orbit their sun at just the right distance to support liquid water and therefore life.
We have the Kepler Space Telescope to thank for these discoveries, as well as the cleverly thought out names of these alien worlds. But what does the Kepler telescope actually see? Kepler watches distant stars closely, waiting for the opportune time when a planet passes between the star and the telescope, creating a tiny little dot in the image of the larger dot that is the star. Then it measures the size of the planet against the size of the star. Seems pretty straightforward. The problem though is that this is two dimensional. How do they know how close the planet is to the star? And without a very VERY good answer to that question, how do they know the size of the planet? For that matter, how can they really be that precise in measuring the size of the star itself? How good are the measurements of the distance of that star from the telescope? The answers to all these questions are answered by computer models which rely on theory to work. Theory isn't fact.
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| This picture is an artist rendering. Kepler cannot see this clearly. |
Nobody is actually able to MEASURE the distance of an object several light years away. Even if we had lasers that were powerful enough to project a beam that far with a reflection that could make the return trip, the time it would take to complete such a measurement would be double the number of years that it takes the light to travel that distance in the first place. Additionally, if they cannot measure the distance, then they cannot measure the size. Everything in this "science" is based on estimation.
Billions of dollars are spent annually on various projects searching for life on other worlds. This is a very expensive industry which depends on public and private investment. In order to keep these scientists and astronomers working, they need to produce results. Well here you see the results of their work.
So while it's fun to write stories and make films about aliens on other worlds, until we actually go there and see for ourselves, there's simply no way to know what, if anything, is out there.
