Scientists Estimate 40% of Red Dwarfs Have A Rocky Planet 114
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Science World Report: "Astronomers hunting for rocky planets with the right temperature to support life estimate there may be tens of billions of them in our galaxy alone. A European team said on Wednesday that about 40 percent of red dwarf stars — the most common type in the Milky Way — have a so-called 'super-Earth' planet orbiting in a habitable zone that would allow water to flow on the surface."
Drake equation (Score:4, Insightful)
We Are Not Alone (Score:5, Insightful)
We're eventually going to find out that not only we aren't alone, but we're pretty fucking insignificant and late to the party.
The answer to the question "if intelligent life is out there, where are they" will be "not here because we're boring and common". Like the unpopular kid who throws a party and wonders where all the cool kids are, we're in for an ego-bruising answer.
On a side note, it is looking more and more like we can shave 3-4 terms off of Drake's Equation. R, f(p), n(e) and L are looking to be more and more equal to some big number.
Re:We Are Not Alone (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been explosions on this planet orders of magnitude greater than anything that man has ever produced... and some have even happened during the period while man was walking on this sphere. Yet mankind survived... while many thousands were wiped out in the region of devastation, mankind endured on a global scale... as of course did life itself.
The total nuclear yield of every bomb currently in existence is the equivalent of about 5000 megatons of TNT, which is over an order of magnitude less than the last eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, which occurred circa 74,000 BC. Homo sapiens evolved circa 500,000 BC, and modern man has been around since at least 100,000 BC, so there were definitely people on the planet at that time. In spite of the explosion, and its effects on global climate, mankind endured.
Heck, it's still barely a quarter the size of the Tambora volcano explosion, in Indonesia in 1815, and that wiped out fewer than 100,000 people.
Re:Not so fast (Score:5, Insightful)
The Drake Equation is still useless like that, we have no idea what half the probabilities are, and any one of those can be so exceptionally small that the other ones being near 1 won't matter.
The Drake Equation is useful as a tool for understanding which probabilities are unknown. That's all it was ever meant to be.