A Third of Sun-Like Stars May Have Warm Earth Analogs 188
The Bad Astronomer writes "An astronomer studying data from the first 136 days of the Kepler observatory missions has calculated that as many as 34% of all Sun-like stars (abstract) may have Earth-sized planets orbiting in their habitable zones, where conditions are right for life as we know it. I have some reservations with his numbers, but they do match other studies. There may be 15 billion warm, Earth-sized worlds in our galaxy alone."
Relax. . . (Score:3)
A Third of Sun-Like Stars May Have Warm Earth Analogs
Don't worry; our knowledge of superior digital technology will save us.
Thanks -- try the veal! I'm here all week.
H'mm, pretty small crowd for a Thursday. . . .
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"There may be 15 billion warm, Earth-sized worlds in our galaxy alone."
This is provably wrong.
We're here, so clearly they are not alone.
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I'm hoping for something like Ursa Minor Beta ...
The rich and sunny planet Ursa Minor Beta has the quite peculiar property that most of its surface consists of subtropic coastline. Even more peculiar, on this world it's always Saturday afternoon, just right before the beach bars close. Light City, the only city on Ursa Minor Beta, which can only be reached by plane, is the very place where the editorial offices of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reside. A further anomaly in Light City is that the Lalamatine district, just behind the beach, is the only place on the planet not to enjoy a perpetual Saturday afternoon. Instead it is always early evening, with cooling breezes - this is where the nightclubs are located.
15 billion, but 0 within reach (Score:3, Informative)
15 billion, but 0 within reach... So much for that info.
Re:15 billion, but 0 within reach (Score:5, Insightful)
Natalie Portman might be out of reach too, but I still like to know whether she exists.
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Natalie Portman might be out of reach too, but I still like to know whether she exists.
Or where she lives... /dothecreep
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She's not out of reach. You are not confident enough.
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15 billion, but 0 within reach... So much for that info.
I donno, lets just start shooting neutrinos at them and maybe we're find one that likes a good war just like us!
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By your reasoning none of us should be interested in what you have to say.
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So far there's not been much reason to try reaching anything. If we can narrow down some of those 15 billion to be actually earth-like, where we really could colonize a whole planet I'd say you have reason.
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If you don't bother to look for something, you're not going to find it.
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Visionless defeatest quitter. Wimp.
Reaching them is merely an engineering problem.
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Surely you mean 3: the warm Earth-like world we're currently standing on (well, in my case, sitting), plus Mars, plus Venus. Both of which are pretty easy to get at using current technology. Some of the gas giant moons probably count too, but they're a special case as they're not in Sol's habitable zone.
Just because the planet's the right mass and about the right distance from its primary doesn't necessarily mean we'd find it habitable...
Analogs? (Score:2)
Not after the MPAA finds out
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And what proportion of stars are sun-like? (Score:2)
And how many stars are there?
Someone do my math for me, I'm busy working.
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And that's just in the Milky Way!
Well, still hoping to find signs of life outside of Earth during my lifetime then. In fact, lots of interesting instruments seem to be going up, so I'm definitely hopeful.
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Given a population of 200-400 billion stars in the Mikly Way, 7.6% are similar to ours for 15-30 billion stars...
And, keep in mind, a star doesn't have to be all that similar to ours to host life. A majority of the stars in our galaxy are much smaller than our sun, but most of them also have habitable zones plenty big enough to hold one or more planets (or moons) with earthlike surface conditions.
These smaller stars also have the advantage of longer lifespans. Red dwarf stars born a billion years before
Typo in summart (Score:2)
Analogs? So that 1/3 are rocking turntables while the other 2/3 are all about the CDs or mp3s?
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Analogue is the 'correct' spelling to describe something not digital for example.
Analog means "an object, concept or situation which in some way resembles a different situation".
What on earth are you talking about? I'm not British, but I'm pretty sure there's only one spelling, "analogue", and they mean the same thing. If something isn't digital, it's analog(ue), and that means "an object, concept or situation which in some way resembles a different situation". There's no difference. What did you think
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My understanding was it was the other way around. Analog was "not digital" and analogue was as in "analogous to".
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As far as I know we still have both words.
Warm Earth Analogs (Score:2)
Which proves the existance of FTL travel since without it, even those issues editted by the great John W Campbell won't have reached beyond the closest handful of stars...
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Ha! I don't know how many others will get it, but as someone who has been reading Analog since the Campbell days and was recently inducted into the MAFIA*, I appreciated it.
(* Members Appear Frequently In Analog, or Makes Appearances Frequently etc, depending on who you ask.)
Cheers
Cue "skeptics" (Score:2)
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If there is a Mod listening, please flag this as off-topic, even if it is a joke.
fermi paradox? (Score:2)
So if there are that many earth-like worlds... Well, you know the question.
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Some have life. Some have, will have, or have had, intelligent life. On some of those worlds they haven't invented radio yet. On some they abandoned radio a long time ago. On some they will never make it that far. Some have died out long ago, leaving only their remains. Some have yet to evolve. Some are there, right now, but are too far away to be detected. At the scales we're talking about we may never meet anyone else before we go extinct.
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"they abandoned radio a long time ago" is interesting. I wonder if that was considered when Fermi first made the observation in 1950 -- that a civilization might only radiate detectable emissions during a small period of its existence. Not because it destroyed itself, but because it's a natural progression for a civilization to switch to lower power and ground based conduits shortly after they discover wireless communication.
"May" (Score:2)
Problematic word, that.
Drake Equation (Score:2)
I hope... (Score:2)
I hope they have better luck with intelligent life than we've had.
Damn'it Another lie... (Score:2)
Who said they don't make land any more?
mmmm aliens (Score:2)
I wonder what they taste like. I bet they are yummy. I wish I could live long enough to find out.
Re:Liquid Water (Score:4, Informative)
That's the whole "as we know it" part.
It's not that anyone thinks its impossible for life to from under other conditions, but that we do know of one set of conditions that worked. Plus, I always thought habitable meant habitable for humans.
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You're too short-sighted. It's not about merely killing natives; we want oil, and you need carbon-based lifeforms for oil to form.
Re:Liquid Water (Score:4, Insightful)
Liquid water is the foundation of a lot of interesting chemistry, and also a good temperature regulator. Life getting by without it would likely have to endure much more significant temperature swings.
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Someone asks this damned question EVERY time this topic comes up ... the answer is always the same: We don't know how to look for life that we can't say anything about it's chemical composition.
By looking for liquid water, we limit the search to places where something like us could exist.
How do you propose we look for a life form which
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Sure, it seems reasonable ... but the universe is big and vast and complex and sneaky.
Essentially, we can only restrict ourselves to what we know. We can't rule out the possibility of some of this stuff, but we can't seriously consider it because it's basically science fiction since we have nothing to suggest it. So, from a science perspective, the answer is to ignore it.
If you can have a cloud of alcohol [universetoday.com] in space, and all of the other wacky stuff we see ... I'd be reluctant to be the one to say "you simp
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Water or not, I believe that life will still require a liquid of some sort to form in.
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Water or not, I believe that life will still require a liquid of some sort to form in.
That's not true even for Earth. Think small.
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I'm thinking small. The smallest know organisms live in a mine in Northern California. I don't think they can survive without water any more then any other life on earth.
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You look in the wrong spot - there are cryophiles that live at temperatures far below that of liquid water.
When there aren't any liquids, make your own!
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Did they originate in ice? I find it hard to believe. Just because there is not liquid water now, I'm sure there had to have been at some point in their existence.
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Thinking real small here, what is inside cells? Liquid.
Ok smaller, I guess would be viruses, but are they technically life?
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Thinking real small here, what is inside cells? Liquid.
That doesn't imply that they need a liquid to form in as per the GP. There are bacteria that combine hard ice with other materials to produce an antifreeze solution for their internal needs.
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Yes, but do you really believe that those bacteria were formed with that ability or developed that ability over the years?
I say that liquid is necessary because otherwise it is really hard to move around resources internally. Although I guess it could occur within a gas also, but a solid is very unlikely.
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Huh? There are no living things on Earth that we are aware of that can exist in a living state without water. I'm not sure what you mean by 'think small', as even virii (who's life status is arguable) are inert bits of junk without water.
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Who said the life couldn't form? It's just heaps easier to start with what we know.
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Why do we still put a mandate of "liquid water" in the hospitable zone requirement?
It's not a "mandate", but it's a way of identifying the first and most likely places to look, for two reasons:
1) Water is necessary for "life as we know it", and we have a good idea of some indicators of life-as-we-know-it that we could observe at a great distance. We have no clue how to recognise life-as-we-DON'T-know-it from a great distance, we just don't know what to look for.
2) There is actually good reason to think that there is a high probability that alien life might be based on the same chemistry
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By "hospitable zone requirement" do they mean hospitable for life in general, or hospitable for humans? If life in general then that's ridiculous, of course life can form without water. If hospitable for humans, then I'd think water would be a pretty important thing to have.
No, they mean 'hospitable' for carbon based life-as-we-know-it. It doesn't have to have air conditioning or WIFI and thus may not be habitable for humans.
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Well, we have to send someone to go look for those warm-earth analogs. Eh... why not? Sure.
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This is actually on-topic, because Mormon theology requires there to be all sorts of habitable Earth-like worlds out there for good Latter Day Saints to become Gods for when they die.
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Nothing can save America anymore. May Cthulhu eat us first.
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How about electing someone who's actually a Christian, and believes the stuff like "love thy neighbor", "do unto others", etc. The people calling themselves Christian now haven't bothered reading anything that Christ taught.
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How about electing someone who actually believes a fairy tale instead of claiming to believe it to get votes
As much as I admire honesty...no.
As an atheist who has read the bible, I am honestly fucking scared of being governed by someone who is familiar with it and literally believes the whole thing.
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I think that's part of the problem with Christianity: the Bible, and many Christians who believe the whole thing. Jesus never said the Bible was inerrant or true, in fact it didn't exist until long after he died (though the OT parts did).
Here's my suggestion: ignore the Old Testament for the most part, as that's all Jewish stuff. Just read the stuff Jesus himself said and did, and don't worry too much about the rest. I don't even think he's the same as the OT god; he just didn't want to upset people too
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Language changes, even reading a couple of hundred year old English work can lead to misunderstanding. For example if someone wrote that Jesus was a nice person, what did they mean?
Today it would be a complement, some time ago it may have been an insult or complement and further back it definitely would have been an insult as nice has evolved from meaning silly to fussy to dainty to precise to kind. I'd guess that Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew have had similar changes with the added bonus with Hebrew that they
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I am scared by people who think people who do believe in god are irrational
And I am honestly scared of being governed by anybody who is familiar with it and still does not get it enough to care.
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> When was the last time you sat down, weighed the factual evidence (not scripture), critically evaluated your beliefs and adjusted them to reflect your perceived probability of your prior beliefs being correct?
Quite often I think.
You will find, that dealing with scripture in the way religious people do, is not always real. Dealing with scripture generally is not something, my kind is very good at. I am a skeptic. But knowledge about that too slowly accumulates, along with myriads of sideknowledge.
So whi
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It's easier to disprove, however. I.e. there's more archaeological evidence clearly showing it to be false. Christians dodge the bullet wrt Great Flood etc by claiming that it's all allegorical, but, last I checked, it's not an option for Mormons, at least not for those parts of their scripture that are directly affected. So their only choice is to dismiss the science that proves them wrong as invalid.
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Not necessarily even allegorical. For a civilization whose idea of the "whole world" is probably a few thousand miles wide, the notion of the "whole world" being flooded is actually pretty plausible.
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A literal reading of the Bible is very clear that world is the entirety of creation, and Noah and whoever was on the Ark were the only survivors. Anything beyond that is creative reinterpretation of the text.
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A literal reading of the English translation by a modern westerner is not the same as a literal reading of the ancient Hebrew by an ancient Jew. Hell, there are idioms in the Torah that we still don't know the meaning of.
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About 12K years ago, the last ice age ended and sea levels rose, filling a bunch of previously-habitable land up with water. Some of that is believed to have happened very quickly, as ice dams broke in the vicinity of Gibraltar and/or the Bosporus (incidentally, near the areas where the ancestors of the Hebrews lived). You don't think it's reasonable for a group of people living in, say, what is now the middle of the Adriatic Sea to think their entirety of creation (i.e., the few tens of miles or so in any
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You don't think it's reasonable for a group of people living in, say, what is now the middle of the Adriatic Sea to think their entirety of creation (i.e., the few tens of miles or so in any direction that they might have been expected to have explored on foot) was flooded?
It's not. The problem is that Bible has God directly address Noah, and claim that he's going to wipe humanity out entirely. If you treat Bible as the literal word of God, there's no way about it. If you treat it as a collection of garbled ancient stories mixed up with myths and legends of ancient Jews, then sure, it makes sense - but not so much as a holy book.
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"But, I don't WANT water! Can't you make something with alcohol in it ?!?"
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...razing the dead...
Now there's an interesting mental image of the savior.
It's well known that the Lord was a 80th level Paladin, and did triple damage against the undead.
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RTFM (Score:3)
if you listen to the Mormons, they say that the developers talk to us all the time.
What the developers have to say is all there in the manual [biblegateway.com]. Or at least it's supposed to be. Mormons think there are a bunch of other manuals, and Catholics add a few chapters, but other followers of Christ are under the impression that those manuals are uninspired and misleading.
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Any civilization smart enough and advanced enough to travel to far-away star systems probably comes to the conclusion that interfering with a non-spacefaring species' development is a bad idea, and develops a Prime Directive forbidding it, and only allowing observation.
It's also possible that one or a group of civilizations this wise have also decided to intercede in case a civilization that's not as wise develops interstellar travel technology and tries to break the Directive.
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Like any civilization smart enough and advanced enough to travel to lands half a world away probably comes to the conclusion that interfering with more primitive civilizations' development is a bad idea?
Oh, wait...
Your hypothesis is lacking example.
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Building a wooden boat and crossing an ocean isn't much of a feat technologically. And I don't see how the Europeans interfering with the pre-Columbian civilizations helped out those civilizations any. It was good for the Europeans, but the natives got screwed.
As for examples, that would be pretty hard considering we don't know any advanced civilizations to ask about the subject (and no, we aren't advanced, we're primitive and barbaric).
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Not by today's standards, sure.... by standards back then? And considering the number of people that died trying? *HUGE*.
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Compared to visiting other star systems, it's nothing.
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Unless hyperlight travel is actually possible, maybe they don't travel because nobody wants to be away from their home system for decades (or centuries) on a very expensive trip to visit some primitives.
If you have simulation technology that's sophisticated enough, you don't have to physically visit another world in order to experience it. Maybe you send probes, model the world, and then visit it whenever you want from the comfort of your own living room. So, maybe advanced civilizations are visiting us -
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Maybe we're first.
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Even if there are no higher physics that can shortcut light speed, they should be here by now.
Why? Even at a significant fraction of the speed of light it's going to take a long, long time to colonize the galaxy. Perhaps less than a million years if you are actively trying to colonize the galaxy as fast as possible. If you're doing it on an as-needed basis, it's going to take a lot longer.
There are hundreds of billions of stars. Even visiting them all in some capacity (e.g. Von Neumann probes) would take a
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Actually, communism has succeeded on all of them. That's why they are all silent - they have nothing to discuss with bourgeois imperialistic likes of us. ~
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That makes sense, after all hasn't communism always been "good idea, wrong species"?
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I know we look at planets like ours- becuase we know how to look for life similar to ours as oppossed to other theoretical life forms. BUT- odds are- there are probably a thousand life forms that don't appear anything like earth-forms for every one that does.
There could be life on the sun. The atmopsheric storms of Jupiter might form intelligent life. It's all neat SF, but completely useless to talk about in science. It's not that planetary scientists don't get this, it just that it adds nothing to the conversation to say "life mght be everywhere". Fine, sure, but then what? Beyond SETI, there's no way to detect life-not-as-we-know-it, so it doesn't matter in any practical way.
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1) We will have the technology to inhabit "unihabital planets" long before we have the technology to REACH goldilock planets.
Yes, but who really wants to live in a giant artificial dome? It'd be nice to find someplace that's like our own planet naturally.
Anyway, yes, the plan is to find life, and hopefully intelligent life. You're not going to find that on Jupiter or Venus, or at least it's highly unlikely because those planets won't support carbon-and-water-based life like us. To find life that resemble
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Do we have an agreed-upon definition of "intelligent"?
We can't dismiss existence based on our own species.
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If there are aliens, how would we know? It's not like we've put much effort into going out and looking for them. All we've done is sit around with some radio telescopes and listen for them, as if they would use something as quaint as radio waves to communicate, and as if the ones about as advanced as us are spending all their energy beaming radio signals into space hoping for someone to answer.
Basically, the idea that "there are no aliens" assumes that we're sooooo special that obviously the aliens would
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From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
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That's the whole problem with this. The Drake Equation is really nothing more than conjecture, and most of the terms are unknown and probably just plain unknowable (unless you're Q). We might be able to get some values for these terms that are somewhat plausible, but only if we actually start exploring other star systems, so that we could start applying some statistics (e.g., "out of 10 star systems we've explored, all 10 had planets, 8 had planets that could potentially support life, 7 have developed lif
Re:All these outlandish claims of habitable planet (Score:4)
The Drake Equation isn't "conjecture" - it's just a way to formulate the question. The numbers you plug into it are largely conjecture at the moment, although we're about to have pretty specific values for many of the elements. This puts some bounds on the final number. The more certain you are regarding each element of the equation, the more tightly bound the final number becomes.
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but are they the "flying" ones...?