Intelligent Life

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.