KEPLER 22-B, write back if you read this.....

Michael Marshall

It will be at least 1200 years before we get your fastest reply, so I might not be around to read your missive.

Still, don't they say that it is the thought that counts ?

There may well be human-like life on planet KEPLER 22-B but it is 600 light years away from us --- which is probably why they don't come to visit us very much.

But writing?  Is it too much to ask that you at least write your fellow-humanoids once in a while?

Tell us how things are on KEPLER 22-B, or least how they were , 600 years ago.

It'll be like us getting a note from 800 AD Gaul talking about the start of the Dark Ages but by the time we get it, we're seeing the start of the Renaissance and the end of the Dark Ages.

Worse, by the time they get our reply, they are in  21st Century France and are so, homme, post this Renaissance/Enlightenment/Modernity thing.

"We're all so commensal now, mec."

Humanoid to Humanoid conversation can get a little disjointed at such long distances apart - talk about your troubling long distance romances !

His picture is of a young handsome guy and you get your hopes up , until you remember he's been dead, for like what ? - at least 550 years !

And your love letter is going to be read by his descendants 600 years later - that is if they can still read that old-fashioned version of their language.

I - personally - couldn't care less if there are rafts of livable planets out there, filled with people almost exactly like us --- except they are dead/were dead 600 years earlier.

But clearly this sort of stuff gets a lot of SKY GOD scientists excited - a lot more excited apparently than tidying up the ecological mess they - and they alone - created on this planet.

This earthling find this disaster-bound planet exciting enough to handle ---- I don't want to waste time visiting  -or even trying to talk to - to any other planet that is 600 or more light years into my distant past....