Ch. . Ch. . Ch. . Ch. . Changes,

I've decided it's hard to blog. Take today, which is a lot like most every other day. I took the kids to swim. For an hour I throw the eight-year-old boy up out of the water while I'm keeping close tabs on the 20 mo old. By the evening when I have free time after the kids are in bed, say 10ish, I'm usually disinclined to think about writing 'cause I'm beat. If this is what 40 feels like. . . .

I need to headline every entry with an easy to see subject header. My interests, now, tend to be future oriented. Kids factor into that, but it's always been my nature. So, I won't be blogging about my ancestors, which is my Dad's hobby. But I will be thinking lots about how technology and nature and values are developing in ways that are re-making the world and re-making us.

In college, I was trained by some very good historians. Historians are averse to saying that changes are "radica." Usually, they are not. When talking about change, do you mean change of degree, or change in kind. Is change of a qualitative nature? What is the baseline for measuring change?

Tonight, the subject is otherworldly, literally. One of the most awesome things about being alive at this juncture in history, and I do mean awesome in its fulsome sense, is that you and I can be sure that the universe is full of worlds beyond our own solar system. As of this posting, the official roster of NASA-JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) exoplanets is 453. But, the discoveries are happening so fast now that another site lists 464 planets.

The rate of planet detection will dramatically accelerate in the coming months thanks to the Kepler mission. The observatory was launched last year and uses photometry, a new detection method. Super sensitive light-gathering instrumentation focuses on a star and looks for the minuscule dimming that occurs in starlight when a planet in orbit transits in front of its star. The Kepler team recently released data on the mission's first 43 days. In that time it had observed 156,000 stars. The result was about 400 "objects of interests" that will get increased scrutiny in coming days. It is estimated that about half of this number will turn out to be confirmed planets. At this rate, by the time the mission ends, Kepler could add thousands of worlds to the list.

The big picture is that planetary star systems like our own are typical and they are abundant. The next question that's just in the offing -- do any of these worlds harbor life? Such a discovery would be a change of kind. The confirmation of simple organic life on an extrasolar planet would have staggering scientific and philosophical implications.

The planets heretofore discovered are poor candidates for life as we understand it. They are almost all supermassive gas giant worlds with orbits that bake or freeze them. The smaller, rocky worlds like Earth and Mars with stable orbits in the star's habitable zone have, before Kepler, been beyond the means of detection. Kepler will change that, once the data is analyzed. It will find planets whose size and orbits commend them to future missions.

The Europeans Space Agency is preparing that mission. More on ESA's Darwin mission in a future post.