There's one place like home

This NY Times this morning has an article about the discovery of a potential earth-like planet 20 light years away. This is big news.

As the article makes clear, it's far, far too early to know if it actually _is_ earth-like. For one thing, it's five times more massive than earth. However, it has some of the primary preconditions -- it orbits within the "habitable zone" where surface water can exist, it belongs to a planetary system where larger planets orbit further out, to help sweep up debris such as comets and asteroids to help avoid regular impacts.

I know there is a lot of discussion about "wasting" money on our space program, and it's entirely possible our allocation of resources for space exploration isn't ideal (for example, maybe we should be putting a little more right now toward discovery and tracking of objects like this). However, it's unquestionably true, if our civilization somehow manages to survive, that we will eventually be forced to leave this planet in search of other resources. There is only so much here to be used, and no matter how efficiently we manage to recycle more will someday be needed.

The obvious first steps would include a moon base (where frozen water may be available near the poles) and Mars. A step beyond that would be the asteroids, which could be mined for their mineral content.

Sooner or later though, possibly millennia from now, there will be a need to expand even further. It's almost instinctual.

The significance of this discovery is not the planet itself. In all likelihood it will turn out to be barren -- it's too large, the atmosphere too dense, the atmosphere not dense enough ... something will be wrong and water will not exist.

However, this is just one planet. The first extra-solar planet discovery only happened in 1991. For planets around a sun-like star it was 1995, just over a decade ago. These planets were massive, Jupiter-sized or larger. It's only within the last couple years we've been able to detect planets approaching the size of earth. The fact we found one so quickly, and so close, suggests the first three terms of the Drake equation possess quite high values, and other potential bundles of desirable landscape may be quite common.

I would love a place with an ocean view.