APOSL Event #2: Extrasolar Planets

"“We go to the moon. Space enthusiasts say, ‘Oh, we’re on the moon in ’69, we’ll be on Mars in another ten years.’ They completely did not understand why we got to the moon in the first place: we were at war. Once we saw that Russia was not ready to land on the moon, we stopped going to the moon. That should not surprise anybody looking back on it. Meanwhile, however, that entire era [of space exploration] galvanized the nation — forget the war as a driver, it galvanized us all to dream about tomorrow.” - Neil Degrasse Tyson.

On Saturday, 30 June 2012, APOSL successfully held a discussion with Afiq Hamid, also known as Science Epic. Mr. Afiq talked about the very recent phenomenon of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets; namely the ever-expanding catalogue of them and what they mean to us.

It's an exciting time.

The first extrasolar planet was only confirmed in 1992, 20 years ago (coincidentially the same age as our speaker!), but since then a whopping 777 have been discovered, mostly gas giants, the occasional weird rocky planet, scorching hellholes to icy wastes. And as Mr. Afiq is keen to point out, we are only able to detect a silver of the planets out there, not to mention we're only able to study a tiny fraction of the stars out there for planets. Of the billions of stars out there as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach, we're only picking individual particles up. No Earth-like planet is found yet, but we're still looking.

(C) xkcd

So where is the economic value of looking for other planets? This was briefly touched on by Mr. Afiq but expanded during our post-talk discussion. At APOSL, we're willing to promote science just because its awesome. But the world doesn't work that way, and Professor Stephen Hawking gives us a pretty good reason why we need to continue, nay, speed up our search for other worlds.

"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."  -Stephen Hawking

But we also live in a time where corporations are beginning to see economic value outside Earth's gravitational pull. The fact that a proposal to mine asteroids, that classic science fiction trope, is being proposed by Google's founders suggest maybe the era of true space travel isn't that far away. This, of course, veered our conversation into science fiction territory, justifying (or pooh-poohing) each other's ideas with stories from Warhammer or Dune.

This only proves though that space travel is moving out of the pages of science fiction into science fact, and that space exploration is beginning to pick up again. The human race this time has already achieved wonders scientists in the 1960s never dreamed of. And the scientists today are those that grew up dreaming of the stars. Who knows what this wave of space exploration may inspire in the next generation?

Join us for our next round of talks coming soon. If you'd like to find out more about our speaker, please visit his Youtube channel. Our Facebook group is here. Check us for more updates.