You would think it would have been pleasing news, news that satisfies my Fox Mulder, the truth is out there, I want to be believe credo.

It did for a few seconds and then I remembered the other thing the fictional X-files Agent Mulder and I have in common — a basic distrust in human nature and humans' tendency to destroy things with our desire to conquer.

If you didn't catch it, just click on the link and read the CBS news report of NASA finding a new planet some 600 light years away in a habitable zone.

The planet, Kepler 22b, has a temperature of 72 degrees and is slightly more than twice the size of the earth.

This is good news to me because it means my firm belief there is life beyond this solar system is certainly more plausible.

Let's go exploring, let's build that ship that would make the “nanu, nanu,” separate their fingers like Spock and Luke Skywalker crowd drool.

Hold on there, Buzz Lightyear.

We don't need to go exploring because, you know what, we're, and I'm talking about humans, just going to screw it up.

You see, there'll be some crazy astronomer who figures out Kepler 22b is not flat. While the church labels him a lunatic, they secretly like this idea and the riches this new world may bear. The king or president digs the idea and gathers up money for an expedition while other countries, having also learned that Kepler is not flat, begin the same thing.

This results in a cold war between countries to see who can send the first monkey to Kepler and already we're off to a bad start.

Well, country X sends the first monkey to Kepler and country Z is furious. Country Z declares it will have a man on Kepler before the end of the decade.

The chimp, armed with all sorts of gizmos and golf clubs, detects life on the planet, a simple people who live off the land, are generally peaceful and respect it for what it is.

Now manifest destiny and a little testosterone kicks in and the race is on. The first explorer misses Kepler by some 300 light years and everyone goes, what the hay, he was close, we'll make a national holiday for him.

While this is going on, explorers facing religious persecution finally reach the new land. The first man to walk on Kepler declares, “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for the destruction of a new planet.”

Year by year, century by century, these intrepid explorers kill the native inhabitants to near extinction, not only with their Buck Rogers ray guns but their religious rhetoric, trying to make these now strangers in their own land more strange through assimilation, you know, wearing pilgrim space helmets and buckled pilgrim space shoes. The space pilgrims forget they left because they were persecuted for their own religious beliefs and instead of being tolerant, shove their beliefs down the throats of the natives or just kill them.

The survivors are put on reservation outposts in the desolate parts of this new world and build casinos, the only thing that does well.

The explorers are proud of killing off the native inhabitants in the name of their god and begin a rush to find new ways to make to their lives simpler, inventing atomic air conditioners and gamma ray Snuggies. The race for convenience also involves chemicals that pollute the air and water and lower life expectancy and Nobel prizes are awarded for the mass destruction of this new land.

As all this goes on the economy collapses, wars break out and we're left wondering what happened to our Xanadu. Simple answer to that, man got in the way until one day NASA sends another telescope into the universe and discovers Kepler200KB … Lance Martin