I FEEL guilty when I watch footage on TV about planets and find it more boring than being stuck in a ten-mile traffic jam.

New images beamed from space are met with such excitement that I wonder whether I am abnormal in failing to react with jubilation.

The new ‘high resolution’ pictures of Pluto are said to reveal dramatic mountain ranges made from solid water ice on a scale to rival the Alps or the Rockies.

But to me they aren’t any different from anything we have seen before.

There’s much controversy about Pluto – whether it is, actually, a planet. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be – it shows the same characteristics – barren, lifeless, BORING, as the other so-called planets in our solar system.

It’s like the images of Uranus, which was known as the ‘most boring planet’ before pictures emerged showing something that was deemed to be less boring – bands of varying widths encircling it. To scientists the pictures revealed ‘an astonishing amount of complexity in Uranus’s atmosphere,’ but to most of us they reveal nothing.

I can’t be the only one to find zero stimulation in these images. According to news reports, Mercury is ‘less boring close-up’. For years scientists did not express much curiosity about this planet as it ‘looked grey and cratered’ , but NASA’S Mercury Mission spacecraft beamed back images that ‘paint a more vibrant picture’.

Well forgive me, but they still seem pretty grey and cratered.

It’s all a bit Emperor’s New Clothes. What I’d like to see is a planet with life and movement. I don’t mean motorways and ring roads and bustling shopping malls but maybe a few spacecraft scudding around.

Scientist Brian Cox says alien life is all but impossible and humanity is ‘unique’. He blames a series of ‘evolutionary bottlenecks’ for the lack of extraterrestrial life on other planets, despite there being a mind-bogglingly vast number of them in the galaxy.

Rubbish! We can’t be the only life forms in all that space. NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan, who is probably better informed than Brian – with all his TV commitments he’s bound to be out-of-touch – recently said: “I think we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we’re going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.”

When those images are beamed back I will take notice.