We're just one of many...

In the (primordial) soup

We're not alone. Apparently there's billions of planets similar to ours (rock, paper, scissors, water, potential to support life as we know it (Jim)) knocking about in our neck of the universe ('the galaxy' as they like to call it) alone. That gives me great heart. There's got to be planets full of playful dolphins and peaceful apes running the show.

Now, I have a blind spot (one of many) to admit to. Does anyone else have a problem with the concept of these gas giant planets? Is it a planet you can land a spaceship on, and have bit of a wander about, or is it just a big ball of gas floating around a star? If it's the latter, how is that a planet? I'll take the too near the sun (land, immediately evaporate in a puff of evaporated bloke), the too far from the sun (land, freeze at near zero Kelvin, shatter into a quazillion tiny shards of bloke), and the Goldilocks alternative (preferable: gravity, not too much, not too little, same for the heat, cold, oxygen, all those factors). What happens if you visit a gas giant? Is it all atmosphere and no planet? Do you just pass through? Is there a core, somewhere, under all the gas? What's the point?

If there's billions of rocky, watery planets, it's a giant leap to the conclusion that we're anything special and that there's no life elsewhere, in which case there's some questions. If there's intelligent life out there:

• Surely they'll not be in the process of killing the planet that supports their intelligent life?
• Surely, if they had an equivalent of Ant and Dec, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Littlejohn, and Simon Cowell, they'd've drowned them at birth?
• They must have an equivalent of cricket. Or, actually, cricket.
• Ditto football.
• Ditto rugby.
• Can any other dominant species be so cruel and unusual to their planets other species? Will any other intelligent life form fall for the bull about everything else being there just for their convenience (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”) That's the bible. We have dominion. Apparently. Too many go for that. Too convenient by far to do that.
• On the same lines, would any other intelligent species be wiping out large numbers of their badgers (or badgerlike species), or driving endangered creatures to extinction because they believe their powdered horns increase their sexual potency?

So. It takes a huge leap of something to think that we're something special, which has to be a massive dent in the main religions' point of view. That special dominion thing? Gets devalued when it's put in the context of us being just one of very very many, don't it?

How many billion upon billion must there be, when our galaxy is just one of countless billion similar galaxies floating around?

Remember, remember...

...that the last bloke to enter the house of commons with sensible and honourable intentions was Guy Fawkes. He's left a legacy of more fun and etc. than anyone who's gone in there ever since.