The Evansville Courier Press has a column entitled EDITORIAL: Still more planets are found. The column notes that there seem to be about 1.6 planets per star and about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. The universe is lousy with planets, and we’re huddled up on one of them. And a stray meteor could trash the joint at any given moment.
Of course, as Bill Bryson pointed out in his book, a Short History of Nearly Everything, space is extremely aptly named. Despite all the stuff, space is still so large as to separate the stuff with vast, vast emptiness. As yet, we don’t have the technology to get from place to place in anything like human lifetimes.
When I think of the immensity of the universe, it always brings to mind The Total Perspective Vortex from Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide” series; described as the most horrible torture to which a sentient being can be subjected:
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”
No real point to this post; I’m just kind of rambling since last night’s storms made the night less than restful.
Space isn’t “emptiness” anymore. See matter, dark and energy, dark. The universe is full of “stuff”. We just can’t see it all. Kind of like with anything else.
My gut feel is that there are some bad statistics here. They’re extrapolating their findings to estimate the number of planets, but in actuality, they’ve only found 700 exoplanets. There seems to be a disconnect in the numbers.
The fact that astronomers have developed techniques to discover even the 700 that they have is kind of amazing.