Monday 18 February 2008

Star Shift!


Lots of star news today, not celebrity type stars, but stars as in solar systems with a Sun (maybe more than one) and some planets orbiting the Sun. What news you say, pray doth tell? Well, firstly and probably as no surprise to anybody, scientists have proclaimed that there are likely millions of solar systems just like ours, with planets similar to ours, which probably have life, not necessarily like ours! Who'd have guessed? I hope you weren't thinking we're all alone in the Universe, because it seems that would be a wrong assumption. I would have told you that anyhow, but would you have listened?

Other news, which ties in with the first news. Apparently Titan, moon of Mars is hugely abundant in natural resources, scientsists have declared. Very fond of declaring things, these scientists. Perhaps there are a specific bunch of scientists who do nothing but make big declarations to the press, while the other scientists do the real scientific work. Anyway, since the Moon and Mars already have lots of natural resources, which the Superpowers are naturally eager to exploit, why not add Titan to the list. In fact, once we've done shafting this planet, why don't we just tear apart the rest of our solar system, then branch out across the galaxy, leaving massive open cast mines all over the place.

To be honest, my Sci-fi idealism suggests that the best course of action would be to build huge self-sustaining space-ships, fill them with "suitable" people, and send them out into the depths of space, to find new planets to inhabit. Meanwhile the rest of us can stay here and either wait for armageddon, massive global flooding, or some pandemic. We would be able to rest safe in the knowledge that humanity had rooted itself elsewhere, and had started to rip the guts out of another planet just like Earth! That started off idealist and ended all realist, my apologies. I'm tainted by the human genome!