New Earth like Planet Discovered

There is good news for those who are concerned about the growing overpopulation of our present planet which shrinks in natural resources every day: a brand new earth like planet with an M star has been discovered orbiting a dim star in the galaxy. The star has been named GJ 1214b. GJ 1214b is six times the mass of our earth and has substantial bodies of water on the planet. Water is a basic necessity for life on a rocky planet that is of an ideal distance from the sun, but in the case of GJ 1214b , the surface of the planet is too hot for life as we know it to exist. Even though the discovery in itself is quite awesome, the location of this planet is 40 light years away, a bit far to colonize at this point, and if we were able to colonize it, what would we do about the extreme surface temperature, which ranges between 300 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit? That is hotter than a sandy beach underneath your bare feet on a summer day in Venice, Florida, and if you were to try to cool off in the water on the surface of the planet, chances are you would wind up being cooked like a lobster. Unfortunately PETA does not make interplanetary calls yet, even if there was some form of shellfish life existing on the planet. The core of the planet is probably even hotter than the surface seeing that it is an earth like planet. But back to the facts of this discovery: the atmosphere of GJ 1214b is 75 miles thick and the year of this planet is 38 hours long. There is no documentation as to how long a day is on GJ 1214b (though that will probably be next) but one can only hope that it is much longer than the year. If humans were to live on this newly discovered planet, the day would have to be at least as long as ours so that we can get just as much work done with our busy lives. If the day turns out to be only a fraction of the length of time it takes to rotate around the sun, well, maybe the humans who settle there can mutate into a multi-armed and handed creature in order to get more done in a much shorter length of time.

Humor aside, the main sign in a discovery like this is follows: if there are other planets out there that are very similar to earth, are of a similar distance from a G-star like our world is, there is a very good chance that it can be colonized. Given the size of our galaxy, and of course the universe as a whole, there is a higher chance of intelligent creatures on their planet peering through telescopes, finding the earth, and wondering if they will be able to colonize the earth. The only problem is, once they find out how quickly our natural resources have been depleted, they may just give up, and look for another potentially habitable world to colonize.

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