One of the sessions of the aaas meeting was dedicated to planets in other solar systems, a field of enquiry which has blossomed as thousands of them have been detected. Finding such exoplanets is interesting in its own right, of course. But you do not have to scratch far beneath the surface to realise that the planets themselves are not the real motive. William Bo-rucki, an astronomer who pushed for the construction of Kepler, the orbiting telescope responsible for locating most of the exoplanets that have so far been found, puts it plainly. He says that the whole enterprise is about discovering whether human beings are alone in the universe.
展开▼
