Mission possible: Kepler offers hope

AS many readers will know, two earth-like planets were discovered by NASA’s Kepler Mission just before Christmas.

The discovery of a reachable earth-like planet could scarcely be more timely as we deplete our remaining energy sources while simultaneously seeming incapable of safely developing non-renewable resources.

Science Now reports, “Astronomers have found a planet smack in the middle of the habitable zone of its sunlike star, where temperatures are good for life.”

Called Kepler-22b, it orbits its sun every 290 days. The temperatures are around 22C, the equivalent of a warm spring day in the Ireland. Scientists believe Kepler-22b may not only be habitable, but possibly even inhabited.

Kepler-22b is 2.4 times the size of Earth. A second earth-like planet, smaller than Earth, has been discovered close by. To-date, the mission, dedicated to searching for habitable Earth-size planets around other stars, has found 45 planets where humans could one day exist.

So far, only these two, lying thousands of light years beyond the reach of our space shuttles, match the exacting criteria. However, respected scientists aver that other planets like them and closer to ours could be discovered in this lifetime. Already 2,326 candidate planets have been detected by Kepler. Dr Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science says “This [Kepler-22b] discovery supports the growing belief that we live in a universe crowded with life.”

Outer space has always been the realm of the imagination. Is it not possible that, while habitable planets are now far away, over generations we might discover energy-stars, stepping stones which, although not farmable, would fuel us to move towards planets which could be settled? Seeding other planets with our race would not only provide security for our species in the face of burgeoning population and depleting resources, but in reducing the danger of a rogue meteor wiping out much of life on Earth: it has happened before. It would be comforting to think we could go elsewhere if we saw it coming.!

In the mid-1960s, when my friends and I dreamed of a world where peace and love — rather than Cold Wars and nuclear bombs — prevailed, I read a seminal work by the French philosopher, Tielhard de Chardin. The Jesuit, was an eye-opener for a boy reared in a country where Joyce, O’Casey and their like were cast out of sight and out of mind for chronicling the true nature of the human soul and, as Yeats put it, “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”.

De Chardin fired my imagination. As I understood it, he spoke of a human destiny that would release us from the hard-wiring that led us to create weapons powerful enough to annihilate the Earth, ourselves and our children, of whom I already had a few. I have never forgotten a discourse in which he presented a concept of our species eventually moving through and colonising the stars, not with hate but with enlightened benefice.

In my lifetime, I have seen the destruction of the Eden we inherited increase exponentially. Some of us will remember corncrakes, corn buntings and yellowhammers, once common and now largely gone. Eminent biologists, like EO Wilson at Harvard, estimate that 30,00 life forms become extinct every year.

Upon reading such figures, I cannot but think that, with these ecological support systems in such rapid decline, we will soon face a crisis ourselves. I then recall de Chardin and wonder if, almost unbeknown to ourselves, we are using the last joules (if that is the word) of energy to fuel us to a salvation star, and so the Kepler Mission gives me some — albeit tremulous — foundation for hope.

Will unborn generations one day reach a mirror-earth where there is already life or potential for life, liquid water and temperatures we can live with? Might there be life forms as beautiful and benign as butterflies and bees? Since Homo sapiens evolved, we have conceived of an Eden, and we have always looked towards the sky. Earth was once Eden, if the legends are to be believed but we destroyed it.

If, one day, we can settle other worlds, we must not carry that which is malign in our nature with us. Perhaps, evolution isn’t yet ready. Only when we have transformed will we deserve to have the universe at our feet.