European astronomers have recently announced that they’ve discovered another planet. According to the reports, it’s slightly larger than earth, has about five times the mass and orbits a red dwarf about 20 light years away. What makes this one special is that it may have liquid water on it. Other planets that have been found have largely been gas giants that are to close to their sun to support life, at least as we know it.
The discovery was made with the European Southern Observatory’s 12-foot diameter telescope in La Silla, Chile. The planet was first detected by the telescope’s HARPS Spectrograph, a sensitive device for analyzing the light from distant astronomical objects.
Geoffrey Marcy, a University of California-Berkeley astronomer who has discovered most of the so-called exoplanets orbiting other stars, called it “a marvelous discovery … the best case for a habitable planet†so far.
source: Mercury News
When I hear news like this I immediately start wondering about how the world would react to life on another planet, especially areas that are dominated by the Abrahamic religions as they put our species at the center of the universe.
Heck, most of them can’t accept that man evolved from other life forms and many who do insist that their invisible friend had to have something to do with it.
I suspect that if we so much as found a rat on another planet much less an “intelligent†species a good percentage would take to rioting in the streets.
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"People who advocate freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without the awful roar of the thunder and lightning.
Without struggle, there is no progress. This struggle might be a moral one. It might be a physical one. It might be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. People may not get all that they pay for in this world, but they certainly pay for all that they get." ~ Frederick Douglas
If we found rats on another planet, one of Earth’s so-called leaders would cook up a phony charge that these alien rodents were creating weapons of mass destruction, and we’d launch a preemptive strike.
Then Haliburton would be sent to rebuild.
I always preferred South Park’s stance to what would happen if intelligent, peaceful life was discovered on another planet. Conservative Christians would try their hardest to bring “the message of Jesus” to these heathens.
I’m more inclined that they would label them heathens and then want us to destroy them, backed by the powers at be who might think we could benefit economically and/or politically from “liberating” their natural resources.
It would certainly call into question the concept that the Universe was created for man and man alone and our “special and unique divinity” nonsense.