I am a technological tweener: Young enough to communicate almost entirely by email, but old enough to have once actually printed out emails and stored them in shoeboxes in the closet, like (gasp!) letters.
Young enough to Tweet, but old enough to carp that Twitter is a waste of time. Young enough to call my parents on Skype, yet old enough to get all nostalgic over dialing a rotary phone.
We tweeners are comfortable enough with the technology that surrounds us, but we still get an occasional flash of recognition at just how amazing it all is. I can play Scrabble with my mom, 600 miles away, while I wait for the bus? Really? Did I fall asleep and wake up in the distant, golden future?
But it's not just technology that we take for granted. It's discovery, too. For instance, last week, I spotted a news release in my inbox. The headline was something like, "Newly discovered planet could support life." Ten years ago, I would have jumped out of my chair. A newly discovered planet? That could support life? How incredible!
Instead, I thought: Oh, another one? And then I deleted the news release.
How quickly we have all become cosmic tweeners. Barely 20 years ago, there was no robust evidence of planets outside our solar system. Not even one. Then came the first confirmed exoplanets, a pair of worlds circling a dead star called a pulsar. A few years later, in 1995, the first planet was discovered around a "living" star.
Today, the number of confirmed exoplanets hovers near 1,000, with thousands more potentially tucked up in data from the Kepler Space Telescope. Over time, the discovery of one more planet has come to be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders rather than a flutter of the heart.
And yet, every once in a while, we wake up to the astonishment of it all. So, I undeleted that news release (undelete: another modern miracle to be thankful for) and learned about the new planet.
Located 42 light-years from Earth, the planet HD 40307g is about seven times more massive than our home, making it what astronomers call a "super Earth." Though it orbits somewhat closer to its star than the Earth does the sun, its star is also a little dimmer, putting the new planet well within the range of orbits at which a planet could harbor liquid water.
HD 40307g joins three previously discovered super-Earths around its parent star. By reanalyzing the data that yielded these original detections, an international team of scientists was able to ferret out the signal from HD 40307g as well as two other, close-in planets. But HD 40307g is the only planet in this solar system believed to have a shot at hosting life.
That brings the tally of potentially habitable Milky Way exoplanets up to seven, according to a tally maintained by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, which makes HD 40307g a rare creature indeed.
But my jaded attitude toward it wasn't entirely unwarranted. Though headlines may scream of life and oceans, we just don't have enough information about any of these planets to say that they definitively harbor liquid water, much less life, on their surfaces. In many cases, we can only make an educated guess that such a planet even has a surface. HD 40307g, for example, might be a bigger version of Earth, but it also might be a smaller version of, say, Neptune.
So what's a tweener to do? Next time you find yourself momentarily astonished -- by the latest app or the latest cosmic discovery -- and ask yourself, Did I just fall asleep and wake up in the future? You can answer: Yes. That's what we do every morning.