Are We Really a Pale Blue Dot?

Carl Sagan once said a thought like, “We are a pale blue dot.”

What was he talking about? A few years before he died he had one of the cameras of a long range probe tilt back and take a picture of Earth. Now this probe was way out on the fringes of the solar system and Carl did it to let us know, picture wise, how small the Earth seems to other life forms in the galaxy. But, what he really did was let the people of Earth see how small we really look, from a planet, we once thought was huge and how hard it could be to find life.

A lot of people started saying are we really that insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I mean astronomers are launching better and better space telescopes trying to find a planet out there that might be full of life. Maybe we don’t have to go that far.

If you look in our solar system there are planets where liquid water once existed and where it existed to this day. Maybe going to these places first would tell us once and for all how easy it is for life to develop.

Mars used to be full of water but it either dried out and is only around beneath the surface or was lost to space. So in the future when people go to Mars one of the things they will be doing is looking for fossil life or bacteria that has survived in underground water reservoirs.

Europa the famed Jupiter moon along with Ganymede seems to have water and could hold life. There are missions in the planning stages to go to these moons and see if there is water under their surface.

If there is life on Europe or Ganymede it would probably be life like we see here on Earth near Volcanic vents. These life forms, plants, and fish survive by the emissions of these vents turning them into food and living quiet well without photosynthesis.

This would be what you would find on an ice moon of Jupiter. Just confirming this life could take decades while in the meantime space telescopes will look for life in other solar systems. I believe in a decade we will find a planet similar to Earth.

In the meantime humans would create faster and faster ways to rocket out into the solar system. By the time we confirm life on Europa and Ganymede we will have such fast rockets that we could actually go there in person, swimming under the surface gathering samples.

While this is going on astronomers would be cataloguing 10-20 new earth like worlds conservative guess, and want to send a mission there.

By this point it would have been at least a hundred years from now and we would have some kind of new rocket engine, Fusion? Antimatter? Whatever it would be would make going to these far reaching worlds possible. But it would take 50 years.

Unlikely? Think of how we send space probes out now to the seven other planets and it take a good 7-10 years to get where it needs to go. It is not impossible to believe that we could send out many probes. That way we get back tons of information from many planetary systems, every few years. We could do this indefinitely if there is support from the public. Now let’s say it takes us 50 years to get to a planetary system we feel may have life on one of its planets then we still have to wait for the pictures and data to come back by radio or light communications. This could take years too. So one would have to say why try and do this and not wait for the technology to exist to send out a faster situation.

My reasoning is this. It may take us hundreds of years to develop faster than light travel. In those hundred years if we wait we will get no data on places in the galaxy to visit. Better to send out a probe and pray you get back some info and later you can send out more with better speed and range. Meanwhile as the slower probes relay information the public will be happy and want to spend more money getting more info on other worlds and maybe even endorse a mission to a bunch of these worlds.

All I can say is the future is wide open. We don’t know what else is out there or who. But we know are entering an age where we can find out. Wouldn’t you want too?