Living in outer space, the final frontier

Over the last few months, it has come to our notice on Planet ET that there seems to be a growing effort to locate and identify another planet that has Earth-like conditions. (No, as you may have guessed, Planet ET does not.) If in February, we were given reliable news that there is affordable real estate available not on one planet but seven circling a star named Trappist-1 about 40 light years away from both Noida and Gurugram, we now have potential property closer to civilisation.

A veritable stone’s throw away, 4.2 light years away from Versova and orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, scientists from the University of Exeter, Britain, now believe there to be a planet that may contain liquid water. Not bottled mineral water yet, but even this would do.

The planet, discovered last August and rather unimaginatively named Proxima B — we would have named it Paanipuri, if we had a stake in its naming — has been described possibly having an ‘Earth-like’ atmosphere. As always, scientists have displayed their excitement by stating that Proxima B could, because of water and atmosphere, support ‘alien life’. But we know what they really mean. Let’s just say when Christopher Columbus became the first European to ‘find’ America, he wasn’t looking for ‘alien life’. He was looking for a new world to have Europeans settle in.