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Extrasolar planets are one of the major discoveries of the last century. I don't understand why most people don't consider that as one of the most awesome disco

Extrasolar planets are one of the major discoveries of the last century. I don't understand why most people don't consider that as one of the most awesome discoveries ever.

jarin 16y ago
I think a lot of people just assumed they were there, because of TV and movies. It's easy to forget that things like driving a rover around on Mars are EXTRAORDINARY FEATS OF ENGINEERING when you forget that not a single human being has ever set foot on a planet other than Earth.
- wlievens 16y ago
  Absolutely. In fact, I think you can extrapolate this to many other things. We've become so accustomed to the idea of the future that we're not noticing the fact that we've well entered it. XKCD regularly features this as a topic so I'm surely not alone with this feeling. I mean, we have a world-spanning information network that contains just about every bit of knowledge we can think of. We build devices the size of a thumb that can calculate more in a second than a thousand people could in a lifetime. We control these devices by touching a thin display that can show millions of different colors spread over a surface comprised of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots. All of these things were science fiction thirty years ago. Some of them were fifteen years ago. These are interesting times! But somehow, the democratization of science fiction has made people numb to this realization :-)
patio11 16y ago
"A rock exists. It is far away. You will never go to it." does not quite hit my care threshold. I love science fiction -- it makes extrasolar planets matter.
- wlievens 16y ago
  There are almost 200 different countries in the world. You will never visit the vast majority of them. There are six and a half billion people in the world. You will only meet a tiny fraction. I still care about this planet and what it means, even though most of it I will never experience.

Extrasolar planets are one of the major discoveries of the last century. I don't understand why most people don't consider that as one of the most awesome discoveries ever.

jarin 16y ago

I think a lot of people just assumed they were there, because of TV and movies. It's easy to forget that things like driving a rover around on Mars are EXTRAORDINARY FEATS OF ENGINEERING when you forget that not a single human being has ever set foot on a planet other than Earth.

wlievens 16y ago
Absolutely. In fact, I think you can extrapolate this to many other things. We've become so accustomed to the idea of the future that we're not noticing the fact that we've well entered it. XKCD regularly features this as a topic so I'm surely not alone with this feeling. I mean, we have a world-spanning information network that contains just about every bit of knowledge we can think of. We build devices the size of a thumb that can calculate more in a second than a thousand people could in a lifetime. We control these devices by touching a thin display that can show millions of different colors spread over a surface comprised of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots. All of these things were science fiction thirty years ago. Some of them were fifteen years ago. These are interesting times! But somehow, the democratization of science fiction has made people numb to this realization :-)

patio11 16y ago

"A rock exists. It is far away. You will never go to it." does not quite hit my care threshold. I love science fiction -- it makes extrasolar planets matter.

wlievens 16y ago
There are almost 200 different countries in the world. You will never visit the vast majority of them. There are six and a half billion people in the world. You will only meet a tiny fraction. I still care about this planet and what it means, even though most of it I will never experience.