Distance Relative

Years ago, during a long nighttime flight over the Atlantic, I was looking straight out into the sky, level with the plane. Perhaps it was right at dusk, but at any rate I saw a blinking light, miles and miles away, and realized that a plane like ours was flying on a parallel course. We were both five miles above the ocean, separated by more miles of thin, frigid air, but inside that other plane there were people sleeping, reading, eating, holding hands, walking up and down the aisle, talking, thinking about the next day, flipping idly through magazines. A couple hundred people, settling down for an evening, like a distant village, the fires of which I could just barely see. It was comforting to see it out there, that little village, like mine—it was company of a sort, an island of warmth and humanity amid the vast expanses of water and air and blackness.

I won't say that's exactly how I felt when I heard this week that the Hubble telescope had taken an actual photograph of a planet circling a distant star. The photo is grainy, and you can't really see the planet in question, but the first photos of objects on the Earth were pretty damn grainy too, and I'm not inclined to find fault. This is visual confirmation of planets out there—previously the planets were all there by implication. This is the real deal.

On Star Trek, they used to talk about Class M planets, which had two main characteristics: They could support human life without the need of breathing or protective gear, and they could be simulated with cheap, tacky-looking sets. This new planet we're hearing about isn't a Class M—it's more like Jupiter, and it's hard to imagine humanoids or any other kind of critter living on a planet that's composed mostly of liquid metallic hydrogen. But if there's one planet, for real, then there are almost certainly billions more. I mean, really, for real. And there's probably life on them. And maybe intelligent life, and maybe life we could communicate with. Way, way, off over there, across a much wider ocean than the one I was crossing that night.

So anyway, if there is, and this particular message can get through somehow—uh, hi!