The answer is out there, isn´t that what the movies tell us? It just happens to be that 'there' is a little ambiguous and 'we' (yes, that would be yours truly and NASA) don´t know exactly where to find the answer (A little bit like the pot of g0ld, no?). However, reading this morning´s headlines, there is an article claiming that NASA have had some interesting new discoveries. Namely being, a hundred or so new planets similar in size and climate to earth, previously overlooked...Actually, to be precise, it was 140 planets. This quite bluntly puts the size of the galaxy into perspective, I mean, it´s a little suprising they´ve only just found these. Its not exactly a small number. Regardless, they´ve been found and there is indication that these planets would be inhabitable (not necessarily inhabited.) They were found in NASA's Kepler Mission, a space observatory designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University has said that our tiny, piece of scrap gold Milky Way contains about 100 million habitable planets. Of these, they will be able to identify about 60 in the next two years. Sixty! It seems such a miniscule number! Though, Sasselov said, "There is a lot more work we need to do with this, but the statistical result is loud and clear, and it is that planets like our own Earth are out there." Of course, it all comes down to this out there business again. But we´re getting there.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com