I'm not sure how accurate they can be in revealing planets enough like ours to offer possibilities of a new promised land. They claim there is one 20 light years away, or 300,000 years at current space travel speeds. One can feel that this at least puts us somewhere near the position of 'Columbus'. Our current 'tin-foil' technology won't do, but at this kind of distance we are talking about something other than worm-holes, 'relativity flight' or the kind of physics in which distance is an illusion.
For someone like me who can't take god-stories seriously and quite likes the idea of a human future (or at least the idea of evolution not just ending through catastrophe), there is an opportunity to believe in something distant in time and a need for us to direct ourselves towards it. A time, perhaps in which a form of conscious life can live very differently from now, and a project worth attaching to - perhaps a reason for spirituality. Comments on this or the technology welcome.
