Nice to meet you , cousin!

[This post was published in my second blog site at Wordpress on August 31, 2013]

​It’s been hours since our beloved earth’s distant cousin, Kepler 452b has been introduced to the earthlings. But the hype is nowhere to diminish a bit and threatens to continue like this for quite some time!

The announcement came only two days after NASA published the first picture taken by the EPIC (Learn how) on the DSCOVR mission from a distance of 1.6 million kilometers! It’s amazing how only hours separates the publishing of picture of two extremely similar floating orbs in the void, one of our home and one of maybe someone else’s to call home!

There’s been speculation about the conference for quite some days that it might declare the discovery of extraterrestrial life. So when it was announced that they found ‘merely’ a planet, some might have got disappointed. Good news for them, the nicknamed Earth 2.0 (as if it’s a new version of earth -_-) have characteristics that are so close to earth (closest yet, as of the date of discovery) that it’s quite possible to contain at least some sort of life forms. Although there are details yet unknown, but there’s no harm in hoping, right?

I’ll try not to bore you with minutiae , you can always check the IFLScience article. But if you’re getting too excited about intelligent alien life in Earth 2.0 to colonize and turn the 452b-lings to your minions, read the article to know that having a diameter 1.6 times of earth and possibly five times the mass of the Earth, Kepler 452b might as well be Krypton and the habitats being Superman to us. So your plan might not be a viable one, afterall it can be the other way around 😉

Anyways, to me personally, it’s a great achievement that was certain to come, with time as the only variable. I’m not rooting it to be our next destination or hoping to befriend the aliens living there, but I’m considering it as a great gift to see the future. Since the sun of Kepler 452b is so similar to ours that it’s being dubbed as the ‘twin’, (only that it’s a 1.5 billion years older twin :p and the planet too is much older than Earth) it’s currently in a state that our earth will reach about a billion years later! (if we don’t destroy it by then -_-)

So here’s to hoping we will someday come across maybe our future home or our cousins from a different planet. Interstellar doesn’t seem much of a thing of fiction now, does it?