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Trillions of planets, billions of years should cause amazement and humility

Cosmic numbers are so big that it is difficult to visualize or understand them. For example, a month ago, Dr. Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomer at Yale University, announced that in the universe there are at least 300 sextillion stars (a “3” followed by 23 zeros), according to new calculations.

And that, according to the astronomer, “also increases the estimate for the number of planets in the Universe. “There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars,” van Dokkum said in an article published in Nature. And that number “greatly increases the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos.”

Most of the newly discovered stars are red dwarfs, smaller and cooler than the sun. However, those stars are 10 billion years old, several times older than the sun. (“10 billion years” is another number difficult to understand.)

Because of the number of stars, and because those stars are so old, van Dokkum thinks that there has been enough time “for complex life to evolve on planets around them.”

So, it seems there are more stars in the universe then we previously thought and they are older than we thought. And those stars last longer than our sun, van Dokkum said.

For that reason, life in the planets of those until recently unknown star systems had enough time to evolve, and perhaps it did evolve in ways very different from life here on Earth.

Of course, here in our planet there are very strange life forms. For example, think about those animals living at the very bottom of the ocean. Or think about the recent announcement by NASA about a possible arsenic-based life form.

At the same time, it seems we don’t even know our own human past. A few weeks ago, Dr. Avi Gopher, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, announced the discovery of a human tooth in a cave in Israel.

The tooth belongs to a Homo sapiens (that is, a human like us) who lived 400,000 years ago. Until now, the oldest Homo sapiens remains were 200,000 years old, and they were discovered in Ethiopia.

Gopher said more research and analysis are needed to properly identify the species and the age of the remains unearthed in Israel. He is confident future excavations in the same cave will lead to skulls or possible skeletons. If that happens, it will be easier, he said, to arrive to a definitive answer.

If the preliminary results are confirmed, then, “This changes the whole picture of evolution,” Gopher said in an article published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Whatever the case, it seems the universe is bigger and humankind older than what we thought just a month ago. Therefore, please allow me to share just one question:

If the universe is perhaps 20 times bigger than we previously thought, and if humans have been on Earth perhaps for as twice as long as we thought, how come we still think we are the only ones and the most advanced ones?

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