Ex-planets

Oh look, they aren't actually there...

Gliese 581g seemed to be the first rocky exoplanet to orbit its host star at the right distance for liquid water on its surface.

Now the verdict is in: Gliese 581g is an ex-planet, not an exoplanet. A new study, published in the journal Science, showed that what seemed to be the sign of a planet was more likely to be from the star’s “weather”—the same sort of magnetic fluctuations that cause prominences and sunspots on the Sun. Not only that, but a second planet in the same system, Gliese 581d, probably doesn’t exist either, for the same reasons.

A therein lies the problem with inductive logic: it's wrong at least as often as it's right. Every method used by these so-called exo-planet hunters are inferential techniques. Inferences are guesses, nothing more. Observing a peculiarity in a star's light spectrum and inferring from it that a giant terrestrial planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone of that star is no less crazy than seeing an unknown light in the sky and assuming that it's little green men on their way to steal some cattle. It's not science, it's wishful thinking -- nearly to the point of being superstition.

Until we send a set of human eyes (attached to a human, preferably) to actually look at one of these so-called exo-planets, none of them actually exist. They're pseudo-science phantoms which were created by the great god Funding. In that sense, Gliese 581g and -d were nothing unique at all, they're simply the first example of why the exo-planet "discoveries" of the early 21st century will be viewed by historians as a case of mass hysteria.

And yes, I told you so.