Earth Calling Earth: Are You There?

Is all that money spent on outer space exploration justified? It costs millions, no billions, to send the shuttle into space, to maintain the International Space Station, to send probes to Mars and the other planets for scientific studies, etc. Some critics say it’s all money wasted.

Ah, but what if we discovered life on other planets? According to Jim Kasting, the chair of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group, other Earths may be quite common though we have not seen any yet. Why? Because stars are very bright and planets are very dim. Telescopes with very wide apertures (8m, which is more than three times bigger than that of the the Hubble telescope), called Terrestrial Planet Finders (TPFs), are what we need…

Read the article at: Toronto Star.