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Science Fiction is an amazing genre which never fails to inspire feelings of awe and wonder, as we imagine the amazing possibilities of what the future may hold. Narration provided by JaM Advertising New Mexico www.tasteofjam.com Ever since man took one small step and landed on the moon, we've known our second step would be Mars, but it feels like our trip to the red planet is long overdue. George Bush said we'd be back to the moon by 2012, and that we'd have a Martian outpost in 2020, but he also said his favourite book was the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar, so we really should've known better than to trust him. Mars has long been considered the most promising location for life in our Solar System, but mostly for the same reasons you hope your house keys are in your back pocket after a night on the sauce - it's the closest place to look, and it's gonna be damn hard to find if they're not there. In August of this year the world collectively lost its s**t when the European Southern Observatory announced the discovery of a potentially habitable planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is the closest known star to the sun, with this red-dwarf low-mass star a measly 4.25 light years away, and it is orbited by an exoplanet, the creatively named Proxima Centauri B. I would've called it Planety McHarambe-Hillary-face, but I guess it's up to them. Proxima Centauri B was discovered using an instrument known as HARPS, which is a spectrograph attached to a 3.6 metre telescope in Chile. This instrument detects planets by looking for the effects of an orbiting body on its parent star, but such a telescope is incapable of taking a direct image of a planet so far away. Scientists believe that the universe is made up of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, and only 5% actual matter. So when we use our super fancy telescopes to peer out into the universe at planets, stars and gas clouds many light years away, we're only getting a tiny glimpse of that 5% of matter. We know barely anything about the remaining 95% of the universe.