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Earth's 'Bigger, Older Cousin' Maybe Doesn't Even Exist (npr.org)
Ever since astronomers started to detect planets beyond our solar system, they've been trying to find another world just like Earth. And few years ago, they announced that they'd found a planet that was the closest match yet -- Kepler-452b. Trouble is, some astronomers now say it's not possible to know for sure that this planet actually exists. From a report: "There's new information that we can now quantify which tells us something that we didn't know before," says Fergal Mullally, who used to be an astronomer on the science team for NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. In 2015, NASA declared that Kepler-452b was the first near-Earth-sized planet orbiting in the "habitable" zone around a star very similar to our sun. The space agency called it Earth's "bigger, older cousin," and scientists were so enthusiastic that one began quoting poetry at a news conference. The original science wasn't shoddy, Mullally says. It's just that, since then, researchers have learned more about the telescope's imperfections.
All this excitement, I know what you're thinking, and you apes need to start taking better care of what is likely the only planet in the entire universe capable of supporting life.
Ref; Fermi's Paradox.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
The fundamental thing that everyone should understand about science -- and most people don't -- is that science is nothing more and nothing less than an error correction process.
Everything we know is wrong, at least in some way and in some degree. Science is the process by which we identify errors and fix them, but science is itself an error-prone process and all scientific results are erroneous, at least in some way and in some degree. The fact that errors are discovered is not evidence that science doesn't work, it's evidence that science does work, that it identifies and corrects humanity's errors -- including those generated by previous science.
What makes science works is that although we always introduce new errors in our understanding when we correct old errors in our understanding, the new errors are nearly always smaller. We approach the truth iteratively and asymptotically, getting ever closer but never arriving.
And if anyone ever tells you that science is pointless because scientists "keep changing their minds", you need only point at the wealth, comfort and plenty in which we live, as compared to the poverty, hardship and scarcity in which our ancestors lived, just a few generations ago. The fact that science has not yet achieved perfection doesn't mean it doesn't work, it just means it's not yet done (and it will *never* be done; there will always be more errors to correct).
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