What Does the Discovery of Seven Exoplanets Mean?

Most of us here on the planet we call home are excited about NASA’s discovery of seven Earth-like planets, about 39 light-years from where you’re sitting right now.  That seems almost close enough to reach out and touch.  It appears quite possible that humankind, after gazing into the night sky and wondering about extraterrestrial life for the last 100,000 years or so, may find it fairly soon.  

Of course, it’s extremely improbable that we’ll discover life that happens to take the form of something roughly the same level of development and intelligence we have evolved here, which would be necessary to enable communication with these beings.  And that may be a good thing, for two reasons:

• Danger.  It’s not impossible that these folks could be malevolent, as depicted in so many of our science fiction tales written over the last 200 years.

• Embarrassment.  I, for one, don’t want to host a visitor from outer space, only to have him meet the leader of the free world, whom neuroscientist/philosopher Sam Harris has accurately described as a “child in a man’s body” and “a tyrant in the making.”, and Noam Chomsky, linguist/author/MIT professor emeritus calls “an ignorant meglamaniac who has energized neo-Nazis worldwide” and “a threat to the survival of the human species.”

I’ll be looking for a hole to crawl into if humankind has to admit that this person is the best we could find out of 7.4 billion. Fortunately, it will likely take at least a decade to sort all this out, by which time he’ll be a distant, albeit unpleasant, memory.

Seriously, there is a certain irony here: we’re in the process of finding life elsewhere at the precise same time that we’re destroying our environment–and ourselves–here at home.