July 16th, 2016, an international team of astronomers with the European Space Agency, led by Guillem Anglada-Escude published a paper which laid out their discovery of the exoplanet known as Proxima b. Proxima b is about 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, rocky, and orbits within the habitable zone of the closest star to our own, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. On August 24th, this news went public.

Proxima b may have some obstacles in the way of it being conducive to life, let alone complex human life. Proxima Centauri occasionally spews X-Ray and UV radiation at the planet with about 400 times the intensity that our sun does. Being so close to her parent star, the planet might be tidally locked, meaning one side constantly faces Proxima Centauri, making it very hot, while the other remains freezing cold. But these are not definitive problems, and if the planet has a strong magnetic field, or a suitable atmosphere or ocean system, it could still be perfectly habitable.

This is one of the most significant discoveries in astronomy in a long time, and you should be very excited. Astronomers in the past few years have been discovering thousands of exoplanets, and the proportion stars with potentially habitable exoplanets has been surpassing every estimate that would have been considered ‘reasonable’ 10 years ago, and now, we have discovered a planet which could very easily harbor life right next door. It could not be closer to us if it tried. Proxima Centauri is our closest star, and it just so happens to have a habitable planet.

This brings into further focus, the Fermi Paradox, and the implications it has for our civilization. If the universe is so full of habitable planets, where are all the aliens? A species that attained some level of intelligence anywhere in the galaxy should have, within a cosmological timescale, already be everywhere, or at least, have already left the signs of their enormous use of power behind. And yet, after listening to the skies for decades, and having our own messages blaring out for nearly 100 years, we have heard from no one.

One possible solution to the Fermi Paradox is that life almost never forms. If that is the case, then we may be the first. A second is that life almost never becomes Eukaryotic or multicellular or evolves at a reasonable rate (life was single celled on Earth for over 1 billion years with almost no changes until Eukaryotes appeared, then almost no change again for eons until multicellular organisms came into the scene.) If this is the case, we may be the first, or one of the first. A third solution is that intelligence almost never forms, or that tool use almost never forms, or that social communication almost never forms, or some combination of abilities that allow us to develop culture and civilization and develop independently of a biological timescale almost never form, in which case, we may be one of the first. These factors are aided in the conclusion that we are alone because we are the first by the fact that the Earth is likely a very early bloomer in the scheme of the universe. Our planet may be one of the oldest potentially habitable planets in the galaxy. Which means we could very well be the first consciousness to arise anywhere.

You should hope and pray that is the case, because the alternative is that we’re not the first, that intelligent life develops very often, but it always wipes itself out before it can expand or send many messages. And that does not bode well for our chances.

The optimist and the pragmatist in me agree, that it is far better to assume we are not doomed, that we are one of the first civilizations to arise in the universe, and to make every effort we possibly can to ensure our continued survival.

Which brings us back to the recent discovery of our closest neighbor. Now, I am not a religious man. I understand fully that the universe and our world seem hand crafted to support our lives because of selection bias. If the world wasn’t perfect for us, we would have never evolved to notice that it wasn’t. The fact that Earth is in the habitable zone of a stable star with a relatively safe amount of radiation, neither so much as to kill any developing life, nor so little as to make random mutations and the drivers of evolution too uncommon, the fact that our atmosphere and geology shield us from the hazards of open space, the fact that we have a large gas giant that shields us from most larger threats by simply being a bigger target, the fact that life developed at all, or the fact that it developed in a way that gave rise to consciousness, this is all perfectly understandable to me. But the universe didn’t have to be this empty of other life, and yet so full of habitable planets for us to have arisen. The universe didn’t have to put a neighboring star within 4 lightyears of us, and just happen to have a habitable planet right on our doorstep. The universe didn’t have to give us the desire to expand and the means to do it. And yet, it has.

Again, I am not a religious man. But if I were, this looks a lot like Manifest Destiny. This looks like God, or the Universe, or the unknowable forces of the Cosmos conspiring together, beckoning us forward, giving us every opportunity we need to become masters of our little corner of the galaxy, in much the same way as American frontiersmen saw the oceans of plains stretching westward before them and saw God’s plan for them there, I can see now the shadow of that same human impulse in the void of space, in the scattered jewels of habitable planets and welcoming stars. It seems I should believe this, whether or not any ontology is behind it.

Whether or not you buy into the Romantic grandeur of such an idea, I believe it is in our best interest to act as though it were true. We undoubtedly have the potential to succeed. It is perfectly plausible and feasible that in many of the infinite variations of reality, humanity spreads successfully, colonizes the surface of Mars, sets up outposts on Eris and other asteroids, floats cities in the temperate clouds above Venus, sends probes, and eventually people to our neighboring stars, and ensures our continued survival for eons to come. This is not impossible. And we have a moral obligation to see it come to pass.