[Let’s back away a few trillion steps from our world’s tragedies, comedies, inspirations, follies, triumphs, losses, meaningless accidents and meaningful enterprises, to muse upon the otherworldly. It gives me some tranquility at a time when tranquility is hard to come by. To do so, I will have to venture far into Nerdland. If big numbers leave you cold, stop right here.]
Zillions of Planets Akin to Ours?
While here on our own planet things are lurching from bad to worse, I was comforted to hear the news of nonzero odds for the habitability of several planets in the “nearby” solar system TRAPPIST-1. Located a mere 40 light years from us, these planets are rocky, not too big and not too small, not too heavy, not too light, and at a distance from their sun that liquid water could exist on them, and harbor Earthlike life forms. Their distance from their sun is smaller than the orbit of Mercury around ours, but the star is so cool—an “ultra cool dwarf”—that three of them are evidently situated in the “Goldilocks Zone” amenable, with the presence of water, to life as we know it.
Continue reading “The Consolation of Big Numbers: The Long View”