Maybe one night when you’re out in the country, somewhere far away from the noise and lights of the city, the chirping of the crickets the only sound you hear while you’re looking up at the night sky with its thousands of brilliant, twinkling, stars, will you wonder how long it will be until the large, mother-in-law of all asteroids (namely, 2009 JF1) careens into the Earth and destroys all life as we know it? I didn’t until just now. I can almost hear the dinosaurs somewhere laughing and saying, “You all thought it was a big joke when it happened to us.”
I was interested in astronomy as far back as I can remember. My father built a 640-power refractor telescope when I was a small kid. It was a powerful enough that on a clear night out in our backyard, we could get a decent look at the craters on the moon, see Saturn and its rings, and Jupiter and four of its moons. I thought how cool it would be to visit those places, never thinking there might be other planets spinning around somewhere outside of our Solar System.
In the past couple of years, I’ve read that scientists discovered some planets far out in space, exoplanets they’re called, which I thought that was nice. But I recently heard that they’ve actually discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets 37 other solar systems with planets that more likely than not could have thriving civilizations. How did I miss all that? Probably because I was too engrossed in the Jackass movies.
If you expectant parents have trouble coming up with a name for your impending child, think about the scientists who have to come up with a name for each of these new 5,000-plus exoplanets they’ve discovered. A few samples: Kepler 10-B, Trappist 1-B, J1407B, WeaselVomit, HD189733B, 3DeadGuppies, HAT-P-12B,Kepler 69C, and Ralph. Some are considered able to support life, if you don’t mind a temperature of 2200°F in the shade or getting water from underground lakes miles under the planet’s frozen methane surface. Compared to these space bodies, a life on Mars seems like a weekend in Bermuda.
The only hope of reaching one of these planets light years away is by discovering a “wormhole” in space and time, and traveling through it. On the off chance that Donald Trump should be reelected, I’ll be watching the robins poking in the grass in my yard. Hopefully, they’ll find a wormhole large enough for me to crawl through. Then it’s Planet YakSpit, here I come!