Reincarnation Rocks

It’s a Great Relief to Find Life May Exist on Planet 581 c

By Dan Rattiner

In the last issue of this newspaper, I sort of bared my soul about my spiritual beliefs. I said that I think I have a soul, or, to put it more accurately, a soul has me. When my body dies, my soul goes off to some special place and gets reassigned to a new body, which could be another human being, a dog, a leopard, a dandelion or a whale. My soul then lives that life. Then, it goes through the process again. And somewhere in the interval after one creature dies and another is born, my soul gets judged about how it did during each life it lived. How it does affects the next assignment.

I have believed this all my life. And during the last ten years, as I wrote last week, I have become quite depressed about this. Given global warming, coming back here is going to be quite a challenge. I really wonder if I could come back here or not. Could I really deal with underwater cities, floods, heat and typhoons? What’s a poor soul to do?

Well, I have been thinking, to buck myself up, maybe we’ll stop it. And everything will be all right. It’s a hope, anyway.

Now, however, I see that I have been looking at this with a very narrow perspective. I have been thinking about it only in terms of Earth. It turns out, I should have been thinking in terms of the universe. God did create the universe, after all.

Last week, astronomers announced that after almost a half a century of searching by telescope, they have found that there is a planet very much capable of having life as we know it on it, in another solar system not so far away.

It is called Planet 581 c and it is orbiting a sun somewhat like ours called Gliese 581 in the constellation Libra. That it is in one of the solar systems quite near to us is intriguing, because we haven’t noticed this before. But then again, we haven’t had telescopes as powerful as those we have now. Planet 581 c is half again larger than earth, it is half again heavier, and it seems to be made of the same stuff we have here. Certainly, it is quite capable of having water. The temperature on this planet ranges between a really quite pleasant 32 to 104 degrees.

581 c — they do have to get a better name for this place — was discovered by one of the half-dozen multi-national consortiums of scientist in the business of looking for life in outer space. Specifically, the consortium is called the European Southern Observatory, and the discovery was made at that consortium’s telescope in La Silla, Chile.

There are similarities between these planets, but there are differences too. Differences, as you know, are what make the world go ‘round. 581 c has a stronger gravity than we do, so a 140-pound person will think he weighs 230 pounds and will have to drag himself around to get from one place to another. The planet circles its sun every thirteen days, so just as you’re getting used to one year, on comes the next. 581 c does not spin as it orbits its sun, so one side of it is always in daylight and the other always in the dark. Its sun, which is cooler and dimmer than our sun (it’s a red dwarf), provides about as much sunlight as we get here, but only because this planet is much closer to it than we are to our sun. For that reason, the residents there get quite an amazing view — its sun appears twenty times the size of ours. And they can look right at it.

Well, I can live with this. And I can live with coming here and struggling along a few more times before getting the good ticket to Planet 581 c.

So things aren’t that bad after all. It’s all a matter of perspective. I’ve got a whole universe to consider coming back to, not just scraggly little Earth.

Sometimes, I think I should form my own religion with this reincarnation thing as its central belief. It also involves a belief in God. And it involves an afterlife, sort of. It involves judgment and morality. I’d call us the Reincarnationites. And I could be its leader. It’s good to be the leader.

Many astronomers have been interviewed by the media in the last few days about 581 c. One of them, retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, who is now the press officer for the American Astronomical Society, said, rather ruefully, that it was important to realize “we don’t know how to get to places such as 581 c in a human lifetime.”

And that’s true. Indeed, I remember being a small boy when they built the Arricebo Space Telescope in the mountains of Puerto Rico. They soon began sending out messages to creatures in outer space to see if anybody was out there. “Calling outer space. Anybody out there? Call us back.” We didn’t have astronauts and cosmonauts then. We were just broadcasting over radio waves. And if somebody out there DID hear our message and respond, it would take 20,000 years for the message to get back to us. What a big deal waste of time THAT is, is what I thought.

Well, us Reincarnationites have the shortcut. You don’t “get” there. You ARE there, you are here and you are everywhere. Your soul leaves your body here on earth and goes off to that central location where, like at a delicatessen, you pick a number, wait until your name is called and then just ease on down to somewhere else in the universe to your new assignment, just as easy as pie.

We don’t proselytize, us Reincarnationites. But if you believe what I say, come join us. We guarantee nothing but joy and hard work while trying to make the universe a better place. And you’ll live forever. Or at least until the big guy shuts down the deli because of some health violation or something.