I won’t say that I’m an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know… but I’m not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.
‘Skyline’ is an alien invasion film that really takes an interesting look at the genre. The writers did an amazing job of creating a new take at how life from other planets come and plan to invade Earth.
In elementary school, I read every single space book in the library about all the planets, about nebulas, about black holes. So for as long as I can remember, I’ve been just looking up at the stars and wondering what’s out there and even what may be looking back at us.
The sun and its retinue of planets drift as a group through the vast gulfs of space that separate the stars.
When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with different planets in the solar system, and I used to create, for every single planet, a different alien race with a certain kind of pet, a certain kind of house, a certain kind of water system, and everything. I would draw these pictures. I had hundreds of these pictures in a box.
Because of Hubble and other telescopes, we’ve now discovered that there are probably planets around every star, or virtually every star. There are solar systems around most stars. And the fact that we’re here on a planet, Earth, means that it’s likely there’s lots of other Earths out there.
The world, when you look at it, it just can’t be random. I mean, it’s so different than the vast emptiness that is everything else, and even all the other planets we’ve seen, at least in our solar system, none of them even remotely resemble the precious life-giving nature of our own planet.
I do hope there are other wonderful planets living and thriving out there, but ours is special because it is ours and ours to take care of. We really can’t take that too lightly.
It’s quite likely that planets and solar systems like ours could be forming in other galaxies in great numbers.
It now seems logical that all the stars, like our own sun, must have formed with a system of planets around them.
Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0, i.e. our consciousness on a disk which will survive even after we die.
New Horizons isn’t just visiting Pluto; it’s visiting this entire region. Whatever it finds, this will be a signal moment for planetary exploration – the capstone to our first reconnaissance of the planets of our solar system.
I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought.
We treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.
The occult sciences were simply ancient technologies for making the occult or unseen manifest in the world – whether that was the influence of the stars and planets, the mysterious meanings of lines inscribed in your palm, or forms of action at a distance like magic and spells.
Astronautics, strictly speaking, will be concerned with voyages to other stars. Remarkably enough, to achieve such feats, we might not even have to leave the earth. It would suffice to accelerate the sun itself to a very high speed and let it drag all its planets with it.
What if life is not carbon-based? Can life exist as a gas or a plasma? Could planets or stars in some sense be alive? What about an interstellar cloud? Could life exist on such a small or large scale, or move so fast or so slowly that we wouldn’t recognize it? Could you have an intelligent virus?
Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off long ago and not still be showing geological activity. Pluto is, in fact, showing numerous examples of geological activity on a massive scale across the planet.
There are other planets besides the Earth and Mars. I’d like to remind you that studying Venus is vital to understanding life elsewhere.
A ‘serious’ scientist in 1992 or 1993 had to admit the possibility that planets were really rare, that most stars might not have planets. We’ve gone from there to here – where most stars have planets.
Planets’ orbits are elliptical. It’s a very pleasing shape.
The force that keeps the planets revolving around the sun would be glad to handle the circumstances of your life, if only you would ask him to.
Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA’s Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If E.T.’s not out there, then Earth is more than merely special – it’s some sort of miracle.
I speak from a nerd’s perspective because I’ve been watching anime since I was a kid. I grew up on ‘Speed Racer’ and ‘Star Blazers’ and ‘Battle of the Planets,’ and those were some of my first A) cartoons and B) introduction to Japanese couture before I even knew they were Japanese.
As our sensitivity improves, we are finally seeing planets with longer orbital periods, planetary systems that look more like our solar system.
Planetary missions are great, but they’re usually only brief snapshots of those planets and also really very close-up.
I don’t see it as coincidence that the great acceleration of the Anthropocene influences on Earth came during the same decades as our first exploration of the other planets.
Um… Bulgaria is an interesting country. The people are lovely. There are potholes the size of small planets.
When Hubble was launched, it became clear very shortly thereafter that there was a problem with the optics.The mirror was not quite the right shape. And the one program that I had really been looking forward to doing with Hubble was studying outer planets in our solar system, the planets Uranus and Neptune.
It’s interesting – Pluto’s almost a brand unto itself. It’s the farthest. It’s the most diminutive of the classical planets. It’s been maligned by astronomers. It’s always the one with all the question marks in the back of the textbook in the table. I think children identify with it because it’s smaller, kind of cute.
It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets – all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.
The bottom line is that finding orphan planets – small, faint, and located who-knows-where – is not for the faint of heart. The task is comparable to observing a match flame at the distance of Pluto. The WISE satellite, a hi-tech, space-based infrared telescope especially suited for such work, has found only a few.
It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian.
We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth, and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets.
Planets that don’t currently sport plate tectonics, such as Venus and Mars, are scarcely habitable. Tectonics might be a requirement of any world that aspires to a rich diversity of life.
We don’t know how many planets we’re going to have to examine before we find life, and not finding it on 10 or 100 doesn’t mean it’s not there. This may be very tricky.
For the greater beauty of the instrument, the balls representing the planets are to be of considerable bigness; but so contrived, that they may be taken off at pleasure, and others, much smaller, and fitter for some purposes, put in their places.
Wonder if there is life on another planet? Let’s suppose there is. Suppose further, that only one star in a trillion has a planet that could support life. If that were the case, then there would be at least 100 million planets that harbored life.
As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt.
We do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive.
Saturn Return is just the return of your planets to their original position.
55 Cancri is extraordinarily rich in heavy elements and extraordinarily efficient at making planets – much more so than our sun – and those elements are the very ones you need to make planets that aren’t just gas giants.
I was interested in science or, at least, nature from an early age, learning the names of planets, cutting cartoons with facts about animals out of the newspaper and gluing them into a scrapbook, and, with a friend when I was five or six, trying to design a submarine.
It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.
