If you haven’t heard about the Kepler mission yet, you should. The mission is set to launch in a little over two weeks so the excitement is building. Kepler is a mission that will search for Earth size planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy. For thousands of years, humans have looked up to the sky and wondered if we are alone. It is a question that nearly every human has pondered at one time or another.
Soon we may have an answer to that question.
The Kepler mission is designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets.
Stay tuned to find out more about how the Kepler mission will do this.
The belief that we are alone in the Universe seems most common among fundamentalists — at least that’s my impression. The Bible and many other religious traditions include a story of the creation of the Earth and humankind. It is tempting to think this is historical, literal, and narrow (Earth only), but I believe that’s a misinterpretation. The Bible is full of Truths that are often told by allegory, and I believe their purpose is not to serve as a science or history textbook but to help us understand our relationships with God and each other. I also believe God is large enough to have created life on many planets throughout the universe, and to have given a Bible to each of those planets in its own way. In this light, the search for other planets, especially those bearing life forms, is a quest to understand God’s greatness more fully.
I am an engineer, and I’ve worked for years in this field. I hope to witness first-hand the discovery of biological signatures in the spectra of exoplanet atmospheres.
Hi What about looking in the distance of about 400000000 lightyars away to see maybe how our solar system were made?
Even I'd been wondering the same thing. The Kepler mission seems to be quite interesting.