- there could be another Rob, albeit one who massed at least 250 kilograms and who was 16 feet tall, typing out a blog entry about a puny midget living on a planet 22 light years away
What I mean is http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23032467
Summarised (if you fear the link will instead send you to a phishing porn'n'meds-flogging-spamsite) three new super-earths have been discovered in orbit around Gliese 667C, 22 light years away
Now, the youth of today - yes, that means you - are all very blasé about extra-solar planets. What they don't realise is that before 1995 we - all humanity yes including the delusional "I was kidnapped by space aliens" clan - did not know if our own Solar System was unique. Well it ain't! There are bloody hundreds of extra-solar planets out there: great big gas giants that are easy to detect, and planets only a few times larger than Earth, which are far harder to detect. In my lifetime I predict we will have orbiting telescopes a quantum level beyond Hubble that can image the atmospheres of these super-earths. And some of these planet's atmospheres will contain water. And be in the "Goldilocks Zone". And may thus harbour life -
And, being human, we will probably decide to go and conquer them (see my earlier blog about sunshine and conquest)
Then again, maybe not. By that time we will of course have a One World Government run by the sole world superpower, India, who will adhere to Ghandi-esque principles of non-intervention. And they'll be too busy running the OWG colony on Mars, anyway
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