I is for Interplanetary
How big is your world? What is emerging is a growing sentiment that desires to be a part of a bigger, greater community. It’s the understanding that we are simply one species floating on this tiny pale blue dot. That we are not only citizens of the planet but, in fact, children of the solar system. That our home is merely one star among 30 billion trillion stars, which scientists now even suspect is really just a speck of a much greater yet-unseen totality. For this is the time where planets are being discovered every day, and according to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, there have been 342 planets found outside our solar system to date, 289 which are stars with planets, and 0 that are Earthlike. And while NASA’s Kepler spacecraft soars up-up-and-away to spend three-and-a-half years surveying 100,000 stars inside our Milky Way, scientists realize that our universe is just one bubble born out of quantum fluctuations and that, perhaps, there are other bubble universes out there where life is possible. This desire to be interconnected has led to the development of the Interplanetary Internet, the first deep space communication network developed by NASA and computer scientist Vint Cerf, which will enable signals to maneuver with celestial motions to provide delay-and-disruption tolerant communications between planets and astronauts, and from Earth to space. And as we begin to wire the cosmos, scientists will continue to search for clues as to what our civilization may look like, hundreds, thousands, and millions of years in the future, because according to physicist Michio Kaku, we are a Type 0 civilization today, whereas type 1 civilizations can harness and manipulate planetary energies like hurricanes and volcanoes; Type 2 civilizations use the power of stars; and Type 3′s are interstellar, capable of expanding across multiple star systems utilizing energy on the scale of galaxies. Undoubtedly, it’s going to be fun dropping a few white dwarf stars into our cars and off-we-go, but the chance that sooner or later we’ll bump into an extraterrestrial, well, perhaps only the birds of The Aviary, an elite group of individuals with extremely high national security clearances working on various aspects of UFO research knows. Up, up and away!