July 7, 2017

Launched in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope went into forced retirement in 2018, when its reactor ran out of fuel. Its purpose was to search for planets outside our solar system, and it found a slew of them over its lifetime. To be exact, it is reported Kepler located 2662 planets among half a million stars surveyed, but astronomers and astrophysicists still are poring over the satellite telescope’s multitudinous data. In fact, a team of astronomers from the University of British Columbia has crunched the numbers from Kepler (and made not a few assumptions) and come to the conclusion there could be six billion earth-like planets among the 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This is a scientific extrapolation of the information available, of course. The empirical evidence only suggests the possibility. You might call it a wild-ass guess, but I wouldn’t. Admittedly, I know nothing about the scientists’ methodology or their information and wouldn’t understand it if it were explained to me. However, their conclusions seem perfectly logical and plausible to me. It supports what every kid who’s looked up at the night sky has thought.