Milky Way Stuffed With an Estimated 50 Billion Alien Worlds 331
astroengine writes "Using data extrapolated from the early Kepler observations of 1,235 candidate exoplanets, mission scientists have placed an estimate on the number of alien worlds there are in our galaxy. There are thought to be 50 billion exoplanets, 500 million of which are probably orbiting within their stars' habitable zones."
There's no intelligent life close by (Score:5, Funny)
Any truly intelligent life would've detected us and fled to another galaxy long ago.
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There probably is, but apparently none of them have either invented FTL travel, or they have some prime directive crap going on. Then again ancient aliens is a pretty good show, makes you wonder if they really walked among us, why did they leave and never came back.
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Ehm... "again ancient aliens" and "good show" in the same sentence... Don't get me started on all the factual errors in that show.... But it's always fun to watch for a BIG laugh..
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They could always build a ringworld.
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Point 1 is that FTL is looking possible but hard. There are valid solutions to general relativity where Star-Trek like FTL happens.
Point 2 is that FTL is unnecessary for interstellar travel. Project Orion showed that interstellar travel might likely be possible without FTL. Even if biological beings can't live forever (which I think they can), robots can. If we advance, say 50-100 years from now, our economic productivity will be such that an individual, or small group of individuals, cou
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Unless our civilization crashes before that. Given the fact we're quickly running out of oil, that scenario seems more likely.
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Point 1 is that FTL is looking possible but hard. There are valid solutions to general relativity where Star-Trek like FTL happens.
The validity of these solutions is somewhat disputable; they all require the use of some as-yet-unknown material that has negative mass. As no such material is even theorized to exist, to suggest these solutions are valid seems to be jumping the gun somewhat. All we can say is that general relativity by itself doesn't rule out FTL travel.
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actually it needs basically dark energy. if you believe that dark energy is responsible for the acceleration of the cosmos, you are lead to believe that alcubierre solutions are viable. an enormous caveat is that you also have to believe that quantum gravitational effects won't destroy the system. you also have to believe that it's a *physical* solution; like pretty much every solution in relativity it assumes that it is the *entire* spacetime, past, present, future and all the way to spatial infinity. that
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Precious few stars in our vicinity are going to go supernova anyway. Arcturus probably will but i don't think any of the others are anything like big enough. Sirius is the only other possibility within I think 30 light years or so, and for some reason I'm getting the dim memory of being told (at uni) it's too small. Supernovae are really not that common.
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Any truly intelligent life would've detected us and fled
The tragic truth may take on a couple of possible forms:
- Intelligent life forms typically evolve to be just like us. The conditions favoring life and evolution in all likelihood culminates in intelligent primates. Out of the chaos of the second law of thermodynamics, societies of intelligentsia will wind up with all our shortcomings. We can't trust them, and they can't trust us. Hell, we can't trust us.
- When we finally get face time with alien intel
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I'm fairly certain we've turned our arm of the galaxy into the cosmic equivalent of a Florida trailer park.
Not yet, but we've only just started.
And that's the key point in the "OMG where are the intelligent aliens?" type of thinking. Earth has existed for about 4.5 billion years, and acquired some sort of life early in its existence. It's only in the last century that it has emitted anything which could be recognized from a distance as a sign of quasi-intelligent life (50/60Hz AC beacon, radio, TV, etc.). So there is a radius of about a hundred light years where our existence could be just barely detected; that'
Re:There's no intelligent life close by (Score:4, Interesting)
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Upon seeing your nickname, alienzed, I hope you can reveal this mystery to us.
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thats ok, its probably some green prince with $40,000,000 in a bank account he wants our help with. ;)
Only 50 billion? (Score:2)
Since there are between 200 and 400 billion stars [wikipedia.org] in the Milky Way that amounts to between 0.25 and 0.125 planets per star on average. Granted TFA states that there are at least this many, but I would have thought the number be much higher, considering the number of planets in our own solar system.
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Having planet formation at all is the statistically meaningful event. Getting one or nine as the terminal result is just a matter of the initial distribution of the cloud.
And 500 million in the habitable zone is only 5*10^8, which is a really small number to be plugging into a modified Drake equation unless the likelihood of life occurring and continuing to exist is overwhelmingly high and unless the probability of life developing intelligence is similarly high. If each term is 1% (by many estimates, an ext
Re:Only 50 billion? (Score:5, Informative)
My experience (Score:5, Funny)
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Based on my time in high school, I expect those 500 million habitable planets are all inviting each other to parties, picking each other for teams, and definitely getting laid. Earth is getting left out, and nobody has the heart to tell us.
I think we should pass on getting laid for the time being thanks.
Re:My experience (Score:5, Funny)
I think we should pass on getting laid for the time being thanks.
And with that immortal phrase, Slashdot was born.
78 million (Score:2)
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So where are the aliens? With this many planets available we should be able to hear or see a few alien civilisations by now. Something is wrong with the assumption that aliens will "grow up like us". I don't think it will happen as often as we assume.
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It's not that easy. Radio/TV transmissions leaking into space are very weak. There could be an alien civilization at 10 light years from us, and we could aim our arecibo dish straight at them, without picking up anything. Our only hope is that they'll point a very powerful transmitter straight in our direction, at exactly the same time as we point our most sensitive receiver in their direction. The chances of this happening are astronomically small.
And of course, most suitable alien planets are much further
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Perhaps the thing to look for is some kind of spectral data? That might at least tell us if there's life (similar to ours). I'm not sure what the tell-tale lines for civilization are though.
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It could be, but it would be weird if it were the case. Out of millions we are first? Ok someone has to be first but its still kind of improbable.
Of course our ability to spot the radio transmissions from other worlds is pretty thin still so we may well have missed some, infact it seems likely.
Where are the aliens? Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Lost in time. Lets say all those 500 million planets are earth like. That means they got a lifespan of a mere 10 billion years (earth is 4.5 billion old and got about 5 billion years left). On this planet (as far as we know) there has been one species influential enough to possibly be noticed in space or indeed notice space itself. For a grant total of just over a hundred years. In 10 billion. We have no way of knowing how long civilizations such as ours manage to survive. But even if you make it a thousand years, it still the shortest of blips on the time line of our planet.
Even if you account for that the fact that our planet wasn't always habitable during its life, it is still a VERY wide window in which to look. We could look at every single habitable planet and just never ever be looking at the right time to see life.
Every single planet could spawn life within its own lifespan and we still would never ever know about it. There are places in our own solar system that have possibly supported life and some still might, and we don't know for certain (yet) because we can't look for it yet.
I can not see a dinosaur, nor a dodo or an elephant bird or countless other forms of lifes which we know to have excisted, merely because time gets in the way. Space got far more time. We are not alone, just lost in a sea of time.
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Maybe many of those worls have simple forms of life, like this planet had handreds of million years ago, but haven't evolved into more complex forms yet. It took a long time for intelligent tool users to evolve here on earth, and we have only had radio transmissions for a bit more than a century. The aliens could have started to explore space, found it too expensive, and gave it up. Maybe they had a religious conversion, and gave up nearly all technology (except fireplaces)
Who knows
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Why should be able to see and hear them? Are we sure we would even identify them if we did? Will it only be clear in retrospect? We just ran into a tribe living in the Amazon that hadn't been contacted. They saw airplanes, regularly and just associated them with the environment. They had sightings of cruise ships and military ships but since there was no such thing as a boat that big .... they didn't make anything of it.
Re:78 million (Score:5, Insightful)
The two big problems are time and distance. For us to detect an alien civilization, they've had to have developed radio techology. They also need to have not progressed beyond radio. We're already moving to cabled systems instead of radio broadcasts. To an alien civilization trying to detect us, we'd be getting fainter and fainter. So there's a short window of time in which we could detect alien broadcasts.
In addition, space is big. (Insert Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy quote here.) If an alien civilization is 10,000 light years away from us and developed radio technology 5,000 years ago, we wouldn't detect their broadcasts for another 5,000 years. The radio waves would have a huge amount of space to cover before reaching us.
Finally, considering time on our side, we've only been listening for a short period of time. If that hypothetical alien civilization 10,000 light years away developed radio technology 12,000 years ago and moved past the technology 11,000 years ago, the last alien broadcasts would have moved past the Earth in the early 1900's. They would have swept right past us without us knowing at all.
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I hope we connect before intergalactic IPv6 runs out of addresses.
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Really good encryption is very similar to random noise. Civilizations could go silent by using wire or laser communications to avoid wasting power, ala. your comment, or by using highly efficient encodings, or probably by a dozen various other ways that are likely to get invented within a few hundred years of radio, without it having anything to do with extinction. It's intregueing that we can think of several things besides technological civilizations being inherently short lived that could explain a lack
For all it even matters . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
My mother was barely a high school girl when we landed on the moon and since the last time we stepped foot on something other than the earth, she had children who grew to be old enough to have children who were as old as she was, then. We keep cutting budgets, because "we don't need all that there space sci-fi mumbo-jumbo when they can't even fix the potholes in front of mah damn house durr durr durr!". We talk about grand attempts to Mars, which we then never fund or push forward after having fancy press conferences about it. Then we do the same with plans to . . . go back to the moon.
I suppose an optimistic way to look at it is that while we may see no advances in exploration in the near future, we do continue to increase technology which will in turn make future exploration even more successful. Sort of the way you could set a computer to cracking an encryption today that could do it in a few hours, while if you had started cracking that encryption in 1980 and let that computer keep running, it still wouldn't have completed the calculations, today. Still, that doesn't put one at ease over the general lack of ambition. Not to mention the amount that the last major space effort contributed to the technological advances that we have today and are now counting on continuing to advance at a rate so as to re-jumpstart the space exploration.
I think it's safe to resign ourselves to little more happening in our lives. Our best hope is that while the likes of Carmack are building low orbit space planes and the likes of Richard Branson are building low orbit space hotels (which, let's recognize, are going to be nothing more than crammed little pods for decades to come), they somehow stumble into a viable commercial reason to explore some space out there. Otherwise, we're generations away from much more than sending RC cars to the surface of Mars, again.
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You need not worry about our temporary stall in space exploration. Once Starbuck's, McDonald's, AT&T and Comcast figure out how to make money from it, we'll have manned stations on every rock between here and the edge of the universe.
I think you're confusing Starbucks/McDonald's/AT&T/Comcast with the Hudson Bay Company. Very different business models. HBC, "Here Before Christ" :)
The year of X (Score:3)
I think the era of humans living in space (exploring space is a mere idle pastime if all you're going to do is to snap blurred photos or vicariously poke some pebble in some distant landscape) will turn out pretty much like the fabled Year of Linux on the Desktop. There won't be a year of Linux on the desktop. We're just going to find out one day we are using Linux on the desktop. Or we won't (because by that time we'll all be using wallpaper or holographically projected computers).
Right now all we have is
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Not trying to be too ideological here, but what you might hope for is that these early space tourism efforts become profitable. What we saw with Apollo and the cold war was the government putting a whole load of money into sending Air Force pilots to the moon, and it worked, and it was a great achievement. But once the political goals were reached, the program somewhat stalled. If we had a profitable and lively space tourism economy, perhaps the private sector would get the snowball rolling, and we'd be tal
Only a step on the evolutionary ladder (Score:3)
Humans are not designed for space travel. We don't live long enough. We're too fragile, need too much energy just to stay alive and can't eat electricity. Whether we overcome those design "mistakes" in biological or mechanical solutions will be an interesting
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From 1930 to the present has been a golden age for astronomy / cosmology. We've discovered a lot since the 1970s. It turns out that manned flight is not a particularly useful way to learn about space. We don't have the technology to do anything useful with men in space yet. Wishing doesn't make it so. One of the things we've learned is how hostile and dangerous space is, its a tougher environment to survive in than we ever imagined.
Now you want to do a good warmup, long term bases under the ocean which
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I think the fear is that we will descend into a dark age (or even be obliterated entirely) before we can put that knowledge to use.
By way of explanation... with folks living in viable, self-contained colonies on the Moon, Mars, or in Bernal/O'Neill stations, we can at least have the ultimate backup for human knowledge (and humanity itself). This way, if things go to shit here on Earth, at least some people will still be pushing the boundaries of knowledge (or in some scenarios, still be alive in a not-as-ho
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The conservatives are just going to wait for the rapture.
Just think how disappointed they're going to be if the Rapture does actually come, and they find out Jesus actually _meant_ all that shit about peace and love thy neighbor, etc., and they don't qualify because they were so busy hating on everyone.
I'm not sure which I would wish for if the day comes - wanting to see them go so the rest of us can get on with things, or them NOT going, and then getting to see the looks on their faces.
A difficult choice...
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The whole idea of the rapture was invented by the fundamentalists. Other Christian sects had different end times philosophies.
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Aliens are statistically likely to exist (Score:2)
In a universe with as many stars and planets as ours, Earth couldn't possibly be the only planet whose orbit just happened to be in the right place to sustain life.
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In practical terms that's not really meaningful. Considering the timescale involved, you're probably dealing with a margin of error of +/- 1 billion years. Then consider that the speed of evolution, in all its forms (i.e. planetary, geological, biological, societal, and technological), is influenced by an incalculable number of interrelated factors. So, in reality, being "one of the first" could mean that we're several billion years behind some and ahead of others.
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In a universe with as many stars and planets as ours, Earth couldn't possibly be the only planet whose orbit just happened to be in the right place to sustain life.
Given that we only know of one planet that contains life, you can't possibly draw the conclusion (that aliens are statistically likely to exist). You're assuming the only requirement is that a planet be in a star's habitable zone - but you have nothing to base that assumption on.
You can't extrapolate a line from one point.
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You can't extrapolate a line from one point.
Well, that's not true. And best of all you can chose which direction to extrapolate it! Obviously, this extrapolation then says more about the extrapolator than the data, but it can still be an interesting experiment.
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Given that we only know of one planet that contains life, you can't possibly draw the conclusion (that aliens are statistically likely to exist). You're assuming the only requirement is that a planet be in a star's habitable zone - but you have nothing to base that assumption on.
You can't extrapolate a line from one point.
From what we know, liquid water is required to sustain life. For observational purposes we have a sample size of (1) planet which resides in the habitable zone for life to exist, and that one planet contains life. The sample size is small, but it is at least as good a bet that life exists on one of the millions of other planets in the same situation as ours that exist in our galaxy as it is to bet against it.
The oldest undisputed evidence for bacterial life on Earth is 3 billion years ago, but other ev
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But if we find life on mars we got two points!
And if Mars is the Daily Double, we're golden!
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Not really. We don't know if there is life in the clouds of Venus. We have no idea about Europa. We never considered anything like Titan until recently with liquid methane playing the role that water does on Earth. Heck even on Earth we keep discovering new places that life exists, that our shocking.
The reality is we still don't know very much.
Mmmm... Milky way... (Score:2)
That candy bar must have a lot of calories...
Keep looking. (Score:2)
We're gonna need more than that.. population growth. If when we die, we get our own planet, we're gonna run out!
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This got me thinking that perhaps we should aim a few containers with microbial life at some nearby "Earth-candidates". That way we can at least ensure that something from here lives on, somewhere. (Hope there isn't already something there, that could mess up their ecosystem, hehe)
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We cannot really send containers anywhere useful except Mars, Venus, and Europa. Neither of those are particularly good hopes for sustaining intelligent life one day. Except Venus perhaps, but that is going to take more than some microbes.
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I don't see why not? Surely we could develop a delivery method that can take its time to get to nearby star systems?
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In theory we can develop anything. In practice, we are far off from being able to send anything to even the nearest stars with a travel time shorter than thousands of years. It is unlikely that we can make anything which can last thousands of years and still be functional enough to find a planet and brake to a reasonable speed before landing.
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Time to pack, then? (Score:2)
I'm dusting off my suitcases right now.
NOT.
I really didn't need to know this. It's way too big an always-out-of-reach carrot for a guy who's always thought the pasture he couldn't see must surely be greener.
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I really didn't need to know this. It's way too big an always-out-of-reach carrot for a guy who's always thought the pasture he couldn't see must surely be greener.
Be careful - that pasture may BE greener, but that green might also be a toxic slime mold.
Cratonism proof. (Score:2)
Its a nice round number. See? God did that.
uh? (Score:2)
Yes, because as a Scientist I always trust an extrapolation that goes from 1000 to 500 million. On our Earth I believe these people normally peddle Homeopathy.
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Maybe not exactly "stuffed"... (Score:2)
Big whoop. (Score:2)
Sorry... but this is not impressive to me.
Half a billion other planets that could potentially be habitable means approximately zilch to me because it would take so long to travel there that the spaceship that takes off would have to be capable of supporting multiple generations of humans, and there's a not altogether insignificant chance that the generations that arrive will not remember or care why they are even on that ship. What happens if a whole generation of people don't even want to be on that mi
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I would think they wouldn't have much of a choice. They'd be beyond the point of returning to Earth. Their only other option would be to alter course such that they wouldn't have a firm destination at all.
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however, the number of known civilizations (planet wise) is still 1, out of the 1,235. This makes a rather large dent in the computational threshold potential for Drake's famous equasion.
While there might be lots of dirtballs, and even more planets in need of a collossally sized gas-x pill, the number of potentially habitable is small, and of those the number that would be reasonably extrapolated to contain life would be even smaller, and the number with active civilizations even smaller still.
The measure of a fool (Score:2, Insightful)
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And dumb? They cannot speak!
I hate when folks use dumb for stupid
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That's pronounced: du-moss
Re:5 x 10^19 (Score:4, Insightful)
I must have missed when they probed those 1,235 planets for evidence of civilization and declared that they were able to rule it out.
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When did they show that there was intelligent life here on Earth? I'll point to Reality TV as an opposing opinion.
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Natch! Good point!
Re:2001 (Score:5, Interesting)
I watched 2001 again recently and noticed something new (for me). In the first scene which shows the space pod in the room at the end you see an internal display which alternates between "LIF" and something like "NONEXIST". We think we see this from Bowman's POV, but it seems the pod doesn't think Bowman is alive at all.
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Even if there was only one species like us reaching maturity every million years and there had been 1000 of them over one billion years, we should have seen some sign of them. We should see the odd bit of hardware on the moon, or specular reflections from old bits of gear as they float by. The lunar surface is so clean yet its been acting as a filter for passing meteorites for the last four billion years. I take your point about us being more careful about power emission, but at the same time we still broad
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Why?
You seem to be confusing time and space. If there were 1000 of them over one billion years then the probability of their light cone intersecting ours is tiny. Unless you assume that on reaching maturity they somehow become a galactic civilisation with a presence in every star system. Even big noises like broadcast TV and nuke tests only propagate at the speed of light. If each civilisation manages to make a big noise for 1000 years after inventing radio then you still need to be in the right point in sp
What is the human race? (Score:2)
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Actually, the earth will simply get too hot to support life in about another 40 million years. Given the amount of water vapor that the evaporating oceans would create and the fact that the Earth won't have run down its internal magnetic field, as happened to Mars(magnetic field collapsed - atmosphere got blown away), we're looking at another Venus type scenario. In fact, Venus probably had life itself several billion years ago(since it's about the same size and composition originally as the Earth, there
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The sun is getting about 10% more luminous this billion years. Your timeline is off. Think of it this way. 2 billion years ago solar radiation was only 6% less than it is today.
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Actually, the earth will simply get too hot to support life in about another 40 million years. ... In fact, the Sun will make life nearly unbearable in as few as 5 million years.
Says who?
40 million years is a very short period in the history of life, not to mention 5 million years. Popular science should be full of this stuff if it was an accepted fact, or even just a theory. Or are you saying there there is a Big Conspiracy to hide the Truth from the people?
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The Sun won't extinguish life on Earth for billions of years. 6 million years ago we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. If you think the dominant life form on Earth in 2 billion years will be "human", you are mistaken.
One unfortunately-timed solar eruption of a large enough magnitude could wipe out Earth any second. That's even aside from the threat of asteroid strikes, etc. There are no guarantees.
Re:eh?.. This is like deja vous without the punchl (Score:4, Insightful)
It is my understanding that the drake equation wasn't meant to be a predictive tool for calculating the exact or even closely approximate amount of planets that harbor intelligent life. Rather, it was simply supposed to be a means to illuminate the incredibly likely event that intelligent life could possibly exist, given a big enough universe, under incredibly conservative and unstable estimates.
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Planets orbiting in regions which we identify as a star's "habitable" zone are potential locations to establish colonies.
Beyond that, if we go there and find intelligent life, then it'll be much easier to establish a relationship with a species that breathes our air, has an overlapping thermal range of comfort, and lives under gravity and pressure conditions comparable to our own. Once we've made successful first contact a few times, and gotten the hang of intergalactic diplomacy, then we can worry about ma
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I imagine it would be much easier to just build a Bernal sphere or O'Neill cylinder than to physically go to another world. For discovery purposes, nothing beats exoplanets, but for colonization, space stations are cheaper.
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Interesting)
Beyond that, if we go there and find intelligent life, then it'll be much easier to establish a relationship with a species that breathes our air, has an overlapping thermal range of comfort, and lives under gravity and pressure conditions comparable to our own.
I don't know about that. We don't seem to be able to establish much of a relationship even with dolphins or whales, reasonably intelligent species on our own planet. Indeed, they apparently have no interest at all in establishing a relationship with us. In fact, besides humans, I can think of very few species which fraternize outside with other species, unless they've been bred for it by humans. We may be the exceptional case rather than the typical one.
Establishing relationships might turn out to be a tricky affair, even with life which has evolved under similar conditions.
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That may be a technological challenge. We still haven't really figured out how their language works yet. Once we know how to speak dolphin we can see how things turn out. As for fraternizing outside the species.... you see it a lot with herbivores.
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Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention this whole "habitable zone" thing is a load of crap IMHO. I mean what are the odds that some alien race is gonna come out just like us and therefor need the exact same conditions as us?
Habitable zone === possibility of liquid water on open surface. This is much broader than the exact same conditions we require, and as we've had theorists thinking for a long time about possible life chemistries that are different from our own, and most still think that water-based life is the most likely to occur, it seems a reasonable starting point.
We have already detected the possibility of liquid water on Europa IIRC, and that is pretty damned far from the "habitable zone" so who is to say there aren't plenty of creatures living on worlds farther out?
Europa is a pretty unusual situation. It also has a few serious disadvantages that may make it less likely that life would occur on it than a typical "habitable zone" rocky planet, some of which are likely to happen anywhere a similar feature occurs. The biggest is that it's quite small, which reduces the likelihood of a life-starting reaction occuring there. It's energy-starved in comparison to a planet with a warm surface, which also makes the likelihood of a life-starting reaction lower. Both of these issues are likely to apply to Europa-like moons in other star systems.
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It's not an error, it states 50 billion likely worlds in total based on current sample statistics. 500 million of those 50 billion are probable to be within what we currently consider to be potentially habitable orbits.
the numbers are referring to two different concepts. in other words, they're positing that 49.5 billion of those expected worlds aren't likely to be within a potentially habitable orbit and that just considers distance from their suns, who knows about all the other possible variables that may
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who knows about all the other possible variables that may be required for life as we know it at least.
One of the silly things is that we keep having to redefine our ideas of what is required for life to exist.
See: Extremophiles [wikipedia.org]
For instance: Take the ecosystem under the glacier that's responsible for the "Blood Falls". [wikipedia.org]
Chemical and microbial analyses both indicate that a rare subglacial ecosystem of autotrophic bacteria developed that metabolizes sulfate and ferric ions. According to geomicrobiologist Jill Mikucki at Dartmouth College, water samples from Blood Falls contained at least 17 different types of microbes, and almost no oxygen. An explanation may be that the microbes use sulfate as a catalyst to respire with ferric ions and metabolize the trace levels of organic matter trapped with them. Such a metabolic process had never before been observed in nature.
A puzzling observation is the coexistence of Fe2+ and SO42– ions under anoxic conditions. No sulfide anions (HS–) are found in the system. This suggests an intricate and poorly-understood interaction between the sulfur and the iron biochemical cycles.
The other silly thing is that whole "life as we know it" thing. I'm not so sure that other intelligent life-forms must resemble "life as we know it". Finding exoplanets is neat, but we really don't even know where to begin when setting the parameters for the equation to compute existenc
Re:Error: 50 billion, but not in Milky Way (Score:5, Funny)
I started to read your comment, but then gave up when I realized you're really just meat that talks. Disgusting.
Points taken (Score:2)
Points taken.
My error in expecting 'worlds' to be 'inhabitable'.
Re:Bad news for humanity (Score:5, Insightful)
A) So advanced in technology that we simply do not possess the means to recognize them as being a civilization.
B) So far away that their communication signals have simply become too weak and/or distorted to be recognized by the time they reach us.
C) So far removed in time (evolved to spacefaring, lasted for thousands of years, and still died off before we stopped throwing rocks at each other) that we simply missed the evidence that they existed.
D) Or, finally, so far ahead of us in terms of cultural maturity that they have, thus far, decided to hide themselves from our view until a later time when we can accept them as a civilization?
There are 1,001 reasons that there could be advanced, sustaining, prolonged civilizations which exist in our galaxy, but which are still undetectable by our current means. When it comes right down to it, the only way we are really going to determine if there are advanced spacefaring species in our galaxy is by becoming one ourselves, and going out and looking with the level of technology required to become a spacefaring species. So don't give up hope and go slit your wrists just yet. There is absolutely no reason to assume that we will fail in our endeavors in space. Thus far, humanity has a great track record at achieving that which was once thought impossible, even if those journeys all had their minor setbacks.
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C) So far removed in time (evolved to spacefaring, lasted for thousands of years, and still died off before we stopped throwing rocks at each other) that we simply missed the evidence that they existed.
Your other arguments have merit, but this one I really don't believe is possible. The more a species spreads out, the greater its chance of survival is. For the most part, any civilization that has developed the ability to move off world in large numbers has freed itself from all known forms of extinction. Any other "what if" scenarios you throw at the equation are likely to be countered by advancements in technology, distance, or rapidly-growing numbers. As I like to say, "humans are just as resistant cock