Greetings From the Planet Exo

One of the ways I find out what is going on in the world is by checking out what Google is distracting us with on their title page.  Yesterday it was all about exoplanets.  For thousands of years we thought (or at least hoped) we were alone in the universe and now suddenly we're hip deep in exoplanets.  Excited articles chattered about the possibility of finding alien life and how cool that would be without asking the obvious next question; if we do find alien life, what the hell are we going to do with it?  Put it in a zoo (possible)?  Conquer it (likely)?  Attempt to make contact and then through a series of misunderstandings, personal ambition and political duplicity get involved in a horrible war that will wipe out one and possibly both of us (based on past experience the most likely of all)?

But before we and whatever godforsaken species has had the misfortune to be selected as the target of our first contact trigger off the chain of diplomatic catastrophe that will inevitably lead to the eradication of life in this section of the galaxy another question has to be asked!  What the hell is an exoplanet?

I'm glad you asked.  "Exoplanet" is a term given to planets that orbit stars other than our own.  The main purpose the word serves is to give the impression that the person using it knows more than you do.  By extension I would presume that we are currently living on an endoplanet.  Another word for "exoplanet" is "planet".  Please feel free to use this at any moment when you might think the term exoplanet is appropriate. 

With the entire exoplanet issue satisfactorily sorted out does that mean that we can now undertake the necessary preparations for contact with alien life (polishing up our diplomacy, learning to eat exotic foods, placing our nuclear weapons on a hair trigger; that sort of thing)?  Well possibly not.  We haven't actually discovered life.  What we've discovered are exoplanets or, as traditionalists would have it, planets.  The first few paragraphs of the article I read waxed lyrical about the life finding possibilities of the sudden plague of exoplanets but buried in the last couple were all the caveats.

We have indeed discovered exoplanets, a whole mess of them, sitting within what might be considered the sweet spot for supporting life.  However said exoplanets orbit a star much cooler than ours and thus are very much closer to it.  They also are so close to each other that if life on one of them stretched in the morning it could very well inadvertently punch life on one of the others.  Also these planets don't appear to rotate which means that, cool though it is, their sun is permanently baking one half of the planet while the other is shrouded in darkness.  This leads me to assume that any life present is either nocturnal or terribly sleep deprived.

What searchers are actually hoping for is water.  This would be a good indicator of life because life as we know it can't survive without the wet stuff.  If nothing else it means that when we travel there we'll only have to take drinking supplies for a one way trip.  If life has indeed evolved it means the explorers will have a supply of fresh meat as well. 

But in all likelihood said explorers will spend their days clad in armoured spacesuits wandering around the boiling hot or freezing cold (depending on location) new world sticking flags in things and looking for amoeba so they can cheerfully inform said amoeba that they live on an exoplanet.  To which the amoeba will no doubt reply, "huh?"  First contact will probably occur when we inadvertently step in it.