The Earth-like planet Kepler-452b is situated 14 million light years away from our home planet. (Photo : Kepler/NASA)
One Chinese online vendor is selling cheap tickets for the right to migrate to Earth-like Kepler-452b on the e-commerce site Taobao. Despite being inexpensive, however, the tickets remain unsold, according to China Business News’ website, Yicai.
According to the page, one ticket priced at just 0.20 yuan or roughly $0.03 grants an individual the right to migrate and live in the Earth-like planet recently discovered by NASA.
One reason why nobody has snapped up the opportunity might be because Kepler-452b, which has great potential to host life according to NASA, is 14 million light years away from Earth. It will take over 500 million years to get there even at the impressive travel speeds modern spacecraft are capable of.
Although the hopes of migrating to another planet have once again been dashed, interest in the newly discovered planet as well as NASA continues to increase. This is based on the 19-percent increase in searches for the space agency in e-commerce platforms like Taobao and Tmall over the past week.
According to the data collected, most search queries about NASA came from men. The city of Beijing was the source of the highest number of searches, while Liaoning Province in northeast China as well as Shanghai both produced the second highest number of searches.
Another interesting tidbit is that most of the people who searched about NASA were Geminis and Virgos, taking up 23 percent of the overall searches.
What the retrieved data failed to answer was the product Chinese netizens were looking for when they looked up NASA on the mentioned e-commerce platforms. Perhaps they were hoping to purchase something closer to reality, like a 38-yuan NASA spacecraft model or a 9-yuan NASA phone case.
The fact remains clear, however, that the discovery of the Earth-like planet has once again sparked the general public's interest in the mysteries that lie deep within the universe.
