Like many baby boomers, I'm a space nut. As a boy, I read and clipped newspaper articles about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. I watched Neil Armstrong make that "one small step for a man," and then cheered on adventures like the Voyager missions, SETI research and the sublime images from the Hubble and HiRISE space telescopes. More recently, I mourned the mothballing of the STS space shuttle missions.
But I was fascinated anew a few weeks ago when NASA discovered Kepler-22b, a planet in a "habitable zone" they described as "a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin."
No matter that Kepler-22b is 600 light years from Earth, it orbits a sun like ours and from a similar distance, making scientists speculate it could have water and an atmosphere amenable to life.
Now astrophysicist John Gribbin has written Alone in the Universe: Why our Planet is Unique, debunking the notion that a habitable planet is the same thing as an inhabited planet. In a review of the book in today's Wall Street Journal, they report that Gribbin concludes that "Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life in the galaxy, the product of a profoundly improbable sequence of cosmic, geologic and climatic events—some thoroughly documented, some inferable from fragmentary evidence—that allowed our planet to become a unique refuge where life could develop to its full potential."
Who really knows? I think Calvin's logic is as good as anyone's.
