The Kepler space telescope continues to provide evidence that the universe could be teeming with planets that may not be so different from Earth. According to the latest data released from NASA, Kepler has found as many as 1,235 candidates that could be planets orbiting stars and 54 of them appear to be orbiting in the habitable zone that would allow for the presence of water and possibly life. That’s a small percentage, but Kepler has not even completed its survey of a small portion of the sky. If we extrapolate those results to the rest of the unsurveyed sky, there could be thousands of Earth-like planets out there in the depths of space. We’ll probably never get to actually see any of them, but it’s comforting to know that our blue world may not be the only one that drew the lottery card for life.
