The Galaxy May Have Billions of Habitable Planets 380
The Bad Astronomer writes "A recent astronomical report (abstract in Science) came out stating that as many as 1 in 4 sun-like stars have roughly earth-mass planets. But are they habitable? A simple bit of math based on some decent assumptions shows that there may be billions of potentially habitable worlds in the galaxy. '... astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. What they found is that about 1.5% of the stars have Jupiter-mass planets, 6% have Neptune-mass ones, and about 12% have planets from 3 – 10 times the Earth’s mass. This sample isn’t complete, and they cannot detect planets smaller than 3 times the Earth’s mass. But using some statistics, they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets orbiting them!' Getting to them, of course, is another problem altogether..."
Re:How many sagans is that? (Score:3, Informative)
5x10^-1sagans.
sudo mod me funny
Re:and I may... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Getting to them has always been the problem (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this. (Score:3, Informative)
Our materials technology has going to have to advance considerably. The only way some of the equipment like the Voyager probes have survived is because they are, relatively speaking, extremely simple with very low energy requirements.
You start talking multi-generation biosphere ships or cryo ships you're talking about a huge set of problems that go hand in hand with maintaining an isolated spacecraft for centuries or thousands of years, without meaningful help or even raw materials to be used to fix problems. I'm not saying it isn't impossible at some point, but everything from the kind of materials we build ships out of to robotics and computer systems is going to have to improve radically. We're also going to have to have an economy that has freed up sufficient wealth to produce such a ship.