It's a planet Jim but not as we know it

The news last month of a new potentially habitable planet that has been discovered on the constellation Libra was certainly an interesting one. Given the catchy name of Gliese 581g, this is apparently the sixth planet to have been discovered orbiting the star of Gliese 581. The others presumably are Gliese 581a to Gliese 581f, which brings into question somebody’s ability to count.

Anyway, the science boffins are very excited by this discovery because none of the other planets they have discovered outside our own solar system have been able to sustain life. This is apparently because all of the hundreds of other planets discovered prior to this have either been Gas Giants or have been too hot or too cold. They have imaginatively called this the “Goldilocks Zone”. This Gliese 581g is apparently “just right”. Its distance from the star it is orbiting means there is a high likelihood of it containing water.

Dr Steven Vogt was the astronomer who discovered this planet. He has claimed it is like a “super earth” because it may have similar conditions to our own planet but is about 10 times bigger. He even says there is a strong possibility that it could already have living organisms on it. Some have gone as far as suggesting it could even have the potential to sustain human life for future colonisation.

Now, I’m no scientist and I certainly don’t want to tell these boffins how to do their job or anything but there are a few things that I fear they may have overlooked.

Firstly, this planet is estimated to be around 20 light years away. This means that it would take 20 years to get there if we travelled at the speed of light which, by the way, is impossible unless you happen to own the Starship Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon.

So let’s entertain the worst case scenario of Bruce Willis failing to save us from that meteor, resulting in a worldwide evacuation in space-faring versions of Noah's Ark. How long would it realistically take us to get there?

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second or 671,000,000 miles per hour. The fastest rocket we have sent into space left our atmosphere at about 36,000 miles per hour. This is almost 20,000 times slower than the speed of light. Now I’m no mathematician but I don’t need a calculator to work out that if it would take 20 years to travel to this planet at the speed of light, the fastest we could realistically get there would be roughly 40,000 years – give or take an ice-age or two. That’s almost as long as an average journey on a Network Rail Express train.

Also, given how many of our probes have crash-landed on Mars I’m not sure I’d trust the pilot to get my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren there in one piece. That would be rather an anticlimactic end after such a long trip. Also, given how intolerant we are as a human race I'm not convinced people would get along too well being cramped on a spaceship for such a long time. They would probably end up making a reality TV series out of it called “Big Brother: In Space” that would run for millennia.

The other thing I’m not sure about is whether this supposed planet is in the same state now. What I mean is that if, as they suggest, this planet is 20 light years away, it means that the images they are seeing have taken 20 years to reach them. Or to put it another way, they are viewing the planet 20 years in the past. When you consider how much our planet has changed over the last 20 years, it’s not unrealistic to think that in 40,020 years from now the planet will have suffered the same fate as Earth. Worse still, an alien race could have evolved to a higher level of intellect than us meaning that we’ll arrive like the Poles have in this country and end up having to wash cars for a living. We’ll then be resented by the indigenous Glieseans because we’ll be put on alien benefits and given a housing allowance. We’ll become outcasts and persecuted, which will ultimately lead to an intergalactic war resulting in the destruction of Gliese 581g and the entire population.

Of course this is all nonsense anyway because they can’t actually see the planet. This is because planets that orbit distant stars are too small to be seen by telescopes. What astronomers do is look for gravitational wobbles in the stars that show a planet is in orbit around its star. In other words they are just guessing. The chances are that the wobble they saw was just a piece of dust collecting on their thick-rimmed national health glasses.

This theory was backed up by some clever Swiss cheese who claimed that the planet doesn’t actually exist due to conflicting data. Put simply, Dr Vogt had probably had a Star Wars marathon the night before and dreamed the whole thing.

One of the most common philosophical debates – or drunken pub discussions – involves the mystery of the universe; how it all began; the meaning of life; whether or not we are alone in the universe. And, of course, what ever happened to Glen Miller.

Given the number of potential stars and planets that exist in this infinite cosmos, the chances of life existing on another planet are quite high. I’m sure there are probably numerous planets out there teeming with life. However, the chances of ever making contact with them are extremely slim given the rather simple maths I mentioned earlier.

Of course there is the argument that an alien race might have a technology well in advance of our own and might come and visit us. But my argument is this: If such an intelligent race exists; a race of such hyper intelligence that they are capable of bending the laws of time and space, traversing the galaxy at many times the speed of light in spaceships using materials that we couldn’t even dream of, why, in the name of E.T's wrinkly bottom, would they want to visit us? A dirty, polluted and disease-ridden rock inhabited by obnoxious, fat, intolerant, war mongering vermin... and Americans.