Star Fields

Chapter No.24 Impossibility

Chapter No.24 Impossibility

Nothing is impossible. It's just highly improbable.

After we moved away from the cloaked planet system, we traveled to another promising candidate exo-planet system. This one supposedly had an Earth-like planet orbiting a G2 V class main sequence yellow dwarf star, which is identical to our sun.

The instant we came out of warp, Molly was working her navigation station tools to determine just how good the planet is.

"I don't get this!" she exclaimed.

"What?" I asked.

"This planet looks a lot like Earth," she said while concentrating on her screen.

"It's supposed to be Earth-like."

"Yea, but there's a big difference between Earth-like and Earth's twin."

I got up and stood behind her to view her screen, and what I saw blew me away.

"What the hell! Is that even possible?"

"I would say that the chances of this are next to impossible."

"This has got to be a joke!" I said adding a guffaw. "I could understand a planet forming that would be Earth-like, but this planet looks almost exactly like Earth. The continents are shaped the same and the islands in the pacific are identical. The chance of a second Earth being formed has a probability in the trillions to one. Even more amazing is the fact that it has a large moon about the size of our moon."

"Maybe we could do a mask test," Molly said. She punched a few buttons and superimposed an image of Earth on the image of the planet.

"That's close to a total match," I said. "How about the moon?"

"It's close to the size of our moon. The chance of that happening twice is astronomical."

I frowned. "I think it's impossible." 

"I'm not detecting any satellites in orbit about that planet," she said. "If there is an intelligent species living on it, they haven't advanced to space flight."

"The question I have is; would evolution take place on this planet the same as it did on Earth?"

"We'll soon find out," Molly said.

We entered orbit around the Earth planet and settled into an intense study of the surface."

"Well, one thing is different," I said. "The cities don't match up to those on Earth. I also don't see any evidence of air ships."

"Maybe they're still too primitive for that."

"Yea, that could be." I turned to Judy. "Launch a Class-A probe and land it in an uninhabited area next to the Lake Erie duplicate of Earth."

After several minutes had passed, we received data from the probe.

"The readings match those of Earth plus or minus a few," Molly said.

"I'm not surprised." I tuned to Judy again. "Launch the insect probes and have them go to that major city near where Chicago once was."

"At least we know this is not a complete duplicate of Earth," Molly said. "There's no Eifel Tower."

I chuckled. "Maybe these people haven't advanced to that stage yet."

She gave me a smirk.

The video feeds from the insects blew my mind. "This is totally ridiculous! They look like humans."