MMeM, Vol.12 Issue 18 – Underwhelmed

I’m SO not im- pressed.

Recently, it was announced that the other big space telescope launched in 2009 by NASA, Kepler, discovered 1,284 planets. Excuse me, some reports like to term these as “exo-planets”. “An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun.”

Now, I don’t mean to sound exo-sarcastic, but I guess I always assumed that among the trillions of stars in the universe there was a pretty high probability that there were some big rocks hanging around some of them.

ShowImage   kepler_patch

Apparently, since the late 80’s we’ve now discovered around 3,000 planets outside of our own solar system. Wow. I had no idea how truly limited we really are. But, I guess it shouldn’t come as such a surprise since we’re still arguing over whether we have 8 or 9 planets in our system or not.

I don’t know, this just seems so, 5th grade science project like. I thought we were well beyond the shock and awe of finding planets that are so far away we’ll never ever go to them.

I mean, 1,200 planets? Whoo! Wow! I’m so NOT IMPRESSED!?!

  • We are part of the Milky Way galaxy.
  • It is estimated that there are more than 200 BILLION galaxies in the universe. AT LEAST.
  • In the observable universe, as far was we Earthlings can estimate, there are around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 exo-planets.
  • So, if we add the recently discovered 1,284 to the previously logged ~3,000 since 1988 that totals 4,284 discovered exo-planets.
  • ….OR a whopping 0.0000000000000000004284% of the possible exo-planets out there.

Yeah, I stand by my original reaction. I’m SO not impressed with this recent “discovery” of 1,200 exo-planets. Woopity-doo. Sorry.

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