Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Water Elsewhere

Don't know if you heard, but about a month ago, liquid water was discovered on a moon of Saturn. This seems rare and almost impossible for water to be in liquid form out in the far reaches of the solar system where the sun's heat barely touches planets, but the water appears to be coming from within the moon and shooting up like a geyser. Somehow, there's heat there to keep it from freezing. Cool!

This got me thinking: where else is there water in the solar system? There appears to be ice on the moon inside of perpetually dark craters. There is also a large ice cap at the southern pole of Mars and recently, a small pool of ice was discovered inside of a crater on Mars. So since there's water on Mars and the Moon, life could also be there.

Now with liquid water being discovered elsewhere, is there truly life outside of the Earth? I think there could be.

It seems that history has taught us that us humans have always perceived the Earth to be the center of the universe, but time and time again, we have discovered that there's more to the universe than just Earth. We travel around a sun with other planets. Our galaxy spins relative to other galaxies in a large cosmic dance. The universe really is a grand stage that the imagination cannot even perceive.

To help you get an idea of how big our universe really is, download Celestia. It's a free space simulator that lets you fly around space looking at all the planets and zooming out far enough to rotate the whole Milky Way galaxy like it's in the palm of your hand. Then you can click on a neighboring galaxy and watch it zoom away from "home" to millions of other stars. Then use the hotkey "h" to select our sun and press "g" to swirl around and watch it zoom in from afar, right onto our sun among billions of stars. It's nothing less than breathtaking.

This makes me think that life could be out there. It's exciting to think that there are other organisms out there, simple or advanced. Imagine the day when we do discover other life forms.

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