Is Someone Looking at Us?

While the night sky over Bend is cloudy and there still isn't much to see, maybe we should talk for a minute about us.

There was time when we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Nicolaus Copernicus's 1543 book, "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres", moved Earth from being the center of the Universe to just another planet orbiting the Sun. He was not popular because of this and told only a few people about what he thought. In fact, he was so sure that this idea was not going to get him any fans he decided to mention it - after he died.

If you fast forward to now, we know that we might not even be alone. Not only is the earth not the center of our solar system. but it isn't even near the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. We now know that the universe doesn't even have a center!

Science has determined that something like earth may exist in other places in the universe.

Here's why. We are located in a solar system and that system is in a galaxy. In order for a planet like ours to exist somewhere else, folks believe that we would need to be in a galactic habitable zone or GHZ. The Hubble Telescope has looked at 69 different galaxies within 30 million light years of where you are standing and do you know what they found? No galaxy is the same as another.

Looking even deeper into these galaxies (which can be made up of millions of solar systems (planets circling a star like our sun) we now know that planets have to be just the right distance from their sun to be worth living on.

Not only are we looking for water - which we think is the only way life could exist - but we are also looking for a moon around those planets. The moon pulls and tugs a planet and if we didn't have ours, we would be tilting in all sorts of directions. Sometimes the north pole would be tilted towards the sun; other times it would not. This would cause the temperature to change a lot. It might be hot in the summer and cold in the winter but without a steady tilt (the kind the moon gives us has been steady for billions of years), we wouldn't be able to survive the harshness.

Having a good position around the sun and a moon to make earth worth living on, it is possible that the sky might have as many as one million earths. Science figures that this is only about 10% (one in ten) of all of the planets in the universe. Once again, this is only a guess but a pretty good one.


Believe it or not, if it wasn't for earthquakes, we probably wouldn't be here. If it wasn't for Jupiter blocking large objects from banging into us, we wouldn't be here.

So the chances that someone may be looking for us the way we are looking for them is pretty good. As you look to the sky, somewhere, someone just like you might be looking back. Be sure to wave!