SHIFT: Gleise 581c

Science is marked in its ability to morph through progress. As the collective revision of human understanding, it is marked by what is known and what is not known.

A news release on Outside Magazine’s website today, April 26, 2007, described just such an unexpected and unprecedented discovery: Scientists have identified the first planet other than earth ever to be labeled as habitable.

Gleise 581c, as the scientists from Switzerland, France, and Portugal have named it, has an estimated temperature range of 32-104 degrees Fahrenheit, making it possible for liquid water’s presence. While the planet is 14 times closer to its sun than earth is to its counterpart, Gleise 581c’s sun is a red dwarf, which is a lot less powerful than earth’s sun. According to these statistics, this planet could have the climate of planet earth.

And there, in an announcement so blunt, a Kuhnian scientific crisis officially presents itself in that it presents an anomaly as "a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change," (52). While many may have not expected the discovery of possible life (as we know it) conditions to be discovered on another planet in their life time, it will be equally as hard for scientists to send a space mission almost 20.5 light years away from earth any time soon. The process of this investigation is slow, but the process of investigation now seems warranted in the anomaly such as a habitable planet.

In the terms of Kuhn, the possibility of extraterrestrial life is now part of the paradigm of normal science because its questionable existence is now specifically part of the process. Life on other planets is now not just imagined or discussed, but is a valid, researchable topic.

Discoveries such as the one of Gleise 581c are a reminder that Possibility exists, and that it is the slow process and prodding of science that can distinguish the impossible from the Possible.

Outside Online read, "We are confident,” Michel Mayor of Geneva University said in a statement, “that, given the results obtained so far, finding a planet with the mass of the Earth around a red dwarf is within reach."
Humans must be confident that the answer will come, one black box at a time.



WRITTEN IN REFERENCE TO:
http://outside.away.com/outside/news/20070426_01.html
First Habitable Planet Discovered
Outside Online
April 26, 2007

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn
Chicago University Press
Chicago, Illinois and London, England
1962, 1970, 1996