We keep going back in time for these col­umns, but, for a change, let’s take a peek into the future. After all, time travel occurs both ways! So, let’s go to a time, say, 200 years into the future, by when, if we haven’t totally wrecked our planet and if our species has managed to survive, we may be vacationing among the stars, firing up the FTL Drives, and jumping light years to visit earth-like planets. What would that be like? NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Laboratory, which is about as good at putting ships in space as marketing itself, has recently come up with a set of three beautiful, retro-looking posters (think sci-fi book covers from the 1950s) for space travel. Its focus? A gaggle of ‘exoplanets’ that were spotted earlier this year by NASA’s Kepler space tele­scope, in star-systems hundreds of light years from our own, with as many as ten of them deemed to have several features (being rocky, having a similar mass, orbiting stars similar to our sun, at a similar distance) that made them very earth-like.

These beautiful posters feature three plan­ets, one of which is as large as Neptune (and therefore has massive gravity), while another has two suns, and so a future traveller there would cast two shadows.

This particular poster is for Kepler 186f, discovered in April 2014, the most earth-like of the lot. Orbiting the habitable zone of a dim red dwarf star 490 light years away, it’s certainly rocky, probably has liquid water, maybe also vegetation. So NASA’s artists imagined a cooler earth, where, due to the star’s red-wavelength photons, the light is red, as is the colour palette of the vegetation. So, if you’d like to travel to a world much like our own, but ‘Where the grass is always redder on the other side’, Kepler 186f is your exoplanet. You can see the posters in all their glory at planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/images.





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