Now all we need in an FTL drive

[threemonkeys]

This made my day. It seems the orbiting Kepler observatory has found over 1200 exoplanet candidates in the two years it has been in operation so far. There are some caveats but compare that to the 500 or so found by other observatories in the last 5 years or so. Some of the potential planets are earth sized and some of them are in the habitable zone. The intersection of these two sets may be small but Kepler is only observing a millionth of the stars in the galaxy, so the potential number of earth-like planets out there is starting to look sizable.

I have been a reader science fiction since not long after I learned to read at all. In all that time it has been an article of faith that there are lots of planets out there and that some of them will be similar to Earth. Confirmation is wonderful. Now we just need to get there.