Peek - a - boo!

We are a fantastic group of specimens. We can do lots of fun things that we think are important. We can travel in airplanes, cross our oceans, we write books and make art. We build buildings up to outrageous heights, explore the sea floors, and we can even tell our weather in advance and that the magnetic fields are shifting. The sun has spots! Who knew?

We also love fight, start wars, divide ourselves from each other, take advantage of others for a dollar, get drunk, smoke, smoke the other stuff, get high, and many of us have untreated mental health issues.

We also love things that go boom - fireworks, guns, bombs, atomic bombs and we really have no idea what is on the drawing boards.

When it comes down to it though, on the cosmological scale, we’re still a zero. We’ve only been as far as our moon, and we haven’t been back in 50 years. We’ve sent probes out into the cosmos, and they send us back data, and that’s pretty cool!

We can even put some shiny bits together with radios and boost them out far enough to take really amazing pictures of places unimaginably far distances away. We have even been able to find exoplanets, since 1984 when two NASA scientists in Chile captured a picture of Beta Pictoris. As of the last time I checked, we have found over 5,800 exoplanets! We can even determine their size, rotation speed, orbital speed, what each one is made of to a general degree. Here’s a few examples, below.

• The closest is Proxima Centauri b, at around 4.22 light years. I’m told that’s 1.3 parsecs if you want to do a Kessel Run.

• Farther? K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb is estimated to be 16,960 light-years from Earth.

• PSR B1257+12 A is also known as Draugr. About twice the size of our moon, or about one third of Earth.

• The smallest is probably Kepler-37b, which is barely bigger than our moon - about the size of Mercury.

• WASP-76b rains molten iron.

• WASP-12b absorbs at least 94 percent of the light that hits it - one of the darkest exoplanets.

• HD 189733b rains molten glass sideways.

• Gliese 1132b grew a second atmosphere after being stripped of its first.

• Kepler-10b has a surface that seems to be mostly lava.

• HR 5183b has a bizarre looping orbit.

• HR 2562 B is about the size of 30 Jupiters!

• Kepler-22b was the first to be discovered in its star's habitable zone, which could have liquid water.

• Kepler-452b is almost certainly the most Earth-like planet found so far.

• Kepler-186f is Earth-sized and receives about one-third of the sunlight Earth does.

• 55 Cancri e is a rocky planet that is tidally locked and has a molten surface.

• One of the big boys is ROXs 42 Bb, in the Hercules constellation, orbits a gas giant 1,400 light years away. It has a mass of about 9 Jupiters.

• Kepler-138 c and Kepler-138 d are two planets in the same system, only about 218 light-years away from our solar system. They are nearly identical in size, but have a much lower density than Earth. This indicates that they are made up of mostly water, and are considered a new class of "water planet"

But follow me here, while I connect a few more dots. Aliens, as you’ve always read, are from outer space and they are way more advanced than we are by thousands or millions of years. If we can see almost 6,000 planets from our first space-based telescopes made of polished shiny bits and radios, it is absolutely certain that Earth with its abundant resources has had nowhere to hide for millions of years. If anything, Earth makes an excellent way station for galactic navigation.

We have gold, iron, water, radioactive elements, diamonds, and the entire menu of metals, gasses and minerals. We’re special. We are sitting on a planet full of good stuff! If an alien culture were looking for any of the stuff we’re sitting on, I’m sure we’d light up their sensor arrays with a row of cherries, at least. Maybe Lucky 7s? Since nobody has come by to collect the Milky Way Rent for the landlord, I guess we’re okay?

That’s also why I don’t think the ETs are hostile toward us. We’re still here, sitting on a pretty rock that is essentially a beacon into the darkness saying, “There’s life here”.

This is the theme of this new blog - how we got here, what the current events really are, where can we go from here and how do we get there?

Hold onto your butts, sometimes it’s a bumpy ride.

If you enjoyed this article, could you maybe buy me a coffee, please?