Our Solar System: Rare Species In Cosmic Zoo 197
astroengine writes "Pulling from 20 years of research since the first discoveries of planets beyond our solar system, scientists have concluded that Earth and its sibling worlds comprise what appears to be a relatively rare breed in a diverse cosmic zoo that includes a huge variety of planet sizes, orbits and parent stars. The most common systems contain one or more planets one to three times bigger than Earth, all orbiting much closer to their parent stars than Earth circles the sun, says astronomer Andrew Howard, with the University of Hawaii."
Limitation of detection methods (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because the current methods used to detect exoplanets are biased towards large close in planets. As technology progresses we will get more diversity.
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Unless you are claiming that better observational techniques will allow us to image a creator god floating around in the cosmos somewhere, then I don't get what you are saying. The second we developed technology capable of detecting exoplanets, we started finding them. We could only detect the ones we could detect. Now we can also detect the ones we can detect. In the future, we will be able to detect the ones we can detect, too. I don't really see what the controversy is.
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But what bothers me is that I have no idea what "one to three times bigger" means.
I understand "one to three times Earth's size", and I understand "two or three times as large" and "twice as big". But I don't understand "one to three times bigger".
I suppose logically, "one time bigger" would mean twice the size. But then "two times bigger" would mean three times the size, and so on. I get the feeling that's not what he meant.
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Diversity (Score:5, Funny)
I would posit that we'd have more diversity if scientists stopped being so conservative about what qualifies as a planet.
Take, for example, the plight of Ceres [wikipedia.org]. Residing somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, it's been called a dwarf planet for quite some time, just because of its immutable physical characteristics. Size discrimination is very real in the physics community, a practice which continues to this day.
Imagine how many more planets we'd be able to discover if we'd just liberalize the definition of a planet. I know it's served us well, but it is time to redefine the term planet to be more inclusive of our increasingly diverse universe. And how, exactly, would this hurt the status of existing planets? I know it wouldn't affect my planet.
And why, exactly isn't Ceres a planet? Because the IAU decided to redefine the term "planet" to exclude it! Such blatant bigotry has no place in a pluralistic universe. We should be ashamed.
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We live on planet #3 of 30,000 and i keep forgetting the names of the others.
We will see Ceres soon. Perhaps we won't think much of it after that... i would hardly think of Vesta as a planet.
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As long as we don't have to look at Uranu....... (oops)
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Did anyone hear a whoosh?
I'm pretty sure I just heard a softly whooshly sound.
Re:Limitation of detection methods (Score:4, Insightful)
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mod parent up even higher than 5.
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Indeed, similar to:
"Scientists combing streetsides for spare change in the middle of the night have found that most dropped change tends to be under street lights or other forms of illumination, causing them to speculate that the coins may be exhibiting a photophilic movement".
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statistical wild ass guesses
Fixed.
Trying to determine if there is other life in the Universe is the same as trying determine if there is a fly in a closed and darkened room in a house across town.
Could this maybe be because.... (Score:5, Insightful)
We're still really bad at detecting planets that are NOT bigger than Earth and orbiting much closer to their parent stars? Seriously, whether we use light occlusion or observing the star's wobble, this is the only type of planet we know how to detect.
Turns out if you're color blind, red and green are very rare and special colours.
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We are actually pretty bad at detecting small objects that are orbiting our own sun! I agree that our detection methods have a strong bias for larger planets in near orbits to their star. However, it is still interesting to read that Jupiters are less common than Neptune sized planets.
Still, it's a nice article. I didn't know the counter for exo-planets stood at 900 already. Awesome.
Observation Bias (Score:5, Informative)
I was under the impression that this was agreed to be due to observation bias. That is, it's a hell of a lot easier to find planets bigger than Earth orbiting at frequent, highly periodic intervals than to find anything else.
Re:Observation Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Observation Bias (Score:4, Informative)
For K averaged orbits the S/N ratio improves by sqrt(K) so detecting planets that cause just small variations drowned in a lot of noise becomes quickly impractical...
Good! Rare is many according to the law of big N (Score:3)
Good! Rare is many according to the law of big N
Rare?! If only one in a million fits, that would be an enormous amount of habitable planets!
They had examined 900 in detail and and already concluded that a few might fit. Well, it sounds more like one in a hundred, which then would be even more GREAT!
So instead of billions, just millions... (Score:2)
And yet... (Score:3)
If we stay on this rare planet, we are certainly doomed. It's the nicest place we know of but if we don't get off this rock, we'll probably get killed off by collision with a smaller rock. Or a super volcano... Or Mannian hot air... Or the next ice age... Or our own greed and stupidity.
My money is on the Bransons and Rutans of this world figuring out how to get us into space and someday stay for good. Once someone figures out how to survive in space, there will be thousands hot on their heels. We don't need another Earth. If we can survive long enough to get there, the only reason we'll stay is for variety, not neccessity.
There are more raw resources between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter than exist on Earth. We just need to get there.
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Once someone figures out how to survive in space, there will be thousands hot on their heels.
Why? I really don't see that there are going to be "space miners" hacking out asteroids with picks and shovels. Surely it would be easier (and cheaper) to get robots to do it all?
And apart from harvesting raw materials, who the fuck else would want to live in space for more than a few months until the novelty value wore off?
To paraphrase Samuel Johnson on being in the Navy: no man will live in space who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a spaceship is being in a jail, with the chance of being asphyxiated, dying of radiation poisoning or irreversibly altering your muscles and organs. A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.
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You're going to die of old age, QA. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Actually there is, though I hesitate to recommend it.
Limitations of Kepler (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't that there are no planets in more distant orbits; it's that the Kepler Space Telescope is designed to detect occultations, when a planet passes between the star and us. I am frankly ASTONISHED that Kepler has discovered SO MANY planets in so close to the parent star, but a civilization in the Tau Ceti or even Alpha Centauri system would never be able to detect the Earth - because none of our planets ever occult the Sun from their viewpoint.
Look up in the night sky, and imagine those distant (and very hypothetical!) civilizations orbiting those many, many stars and trying to find US.. Using a Kepler-type telescope, ONLY civilizations that are pretty darn close to the ecliptic would be able to detect OUR solar system.
For Kepler to have discovered so many planets, there must be planetary systems around virtually every star out there. There may be a trillion stars in the Milky Way. If only one in a million planets host anything even remotely resembling "life", there must be a million planets with some form of life.
Re:Limitations of Kepler (Score:4, Informative)
Precisely. Kepler's been up and observing for 4 years now. Since it hunts for occultations, the scientists can only be certain that observed planets are alone out to a 4 year orbit, which excludes anything outside of Mars in our system. And that is if the system is aligned so that the orbital plane is correctly positioned for Sol-visible occultations.
For a star where Kepler has observed something, they can only say there's no planets inside 4 year orbits, everything else is speculation. For a star where nothing has been observed yet, they can't say anything with certainty.
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And that is if the system is aligned so that the orbital plane is correctly positioned for Sol-visible occultations.
You can extrapolate from that since 1 in a 100 or 1000 is aligned and multiply the discovery by 1000 to find how many there really are. If this covers a good fraction of the (lets say K) population within a 100 ly, it might not leave much for other types of solar systems.
I don't think we have enough statistical certainty to reach a conclusion yet because the back of my envelope is full.
WYSIATI (Score:3)
The (Nobel price winning) psychologist Kahnemann calls this phenomenon "What You See Is All There Is" - and he detected in the "experts", not in space.
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Winner of the Nobel Price is Right?
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I also forgot an ENTIRE WORD ("it"). I'm glad some people are able to concentrate on what's important.
Detection bias? (Score:2)
Most exoplanets are much bigger and closer to the sun than Earth is... incidentally, these are the kind of planets that are most easily detected.
'nuff said.
Detection bias? -Absolutely! (Score:2)
Obviously it's not "most planets are bigger than Earth", it's very exactly "our present detection method being a measure of star movements due to the planet presence, we only see enormous jupiter-like things for now".
How to say it politely?
"I hope the OP summary is, er, too concise, otherwise this just means Hawaii climate turns the scientists silly..."
In other news (Score:2)
...scientists take a measurement that's known to be valid in only a microscopic fraction of observables (ie, systems that happen to have their ecliptic in line with ours, and have an orbital period so far of 1 year) and base broad, sweeping conclusions about the entire universe on them.
These guys are almost as bad as anthropologists, who'll build an entire career 'interpreting' facets of a who civilization extrapolated from a half-dozen potsherds.
Free ArXiv version (Score:3, Informative)
The actual article is much better than the one linked in the story. A version very close to the one published in Science can be found here [arxiv.org], at the public preprint archive (arXiv). The article should be relatively easy to read even for non-scientists. Note that our knowledge of the distribution of planets is marred by the biased sample we have access to: It is much easier to observe planets if they are close to their parent star, and heavy. Most of the statistics provided in the article attempts to correct for this bias, so we can say pretty confidently that small planets are much more common than large ones*. But the other claim in the summary, that most planetary systems are much more compact than the solar system, doesn't seem to be supported in the article itself. But perhaps I missed something.
Anyway, the Science article is readable, and if nothing else the figures are quite interesting.
Call me silly (Score:2)
Isn't there something to be said for sample size here? We've had the ability to "easily" see large planets. We've discovered that there is a strange(to us) phenomena known as "Hot Jupiter". But other than that, we have found only relatively large planets up to this point. Each of those systems with large planets may also contain smaller planets as well.
You can't prove a negative, but that appears to be what they are doing. Since we don't have the tech to discover systems like our own, we MUST be rar
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You and a whole horde of other slashdotters have had the idea of ease-of-measurement bias - a large fraction of the posts on this article mention it. Thankfully, the researchers who study these planets have also thought of it. They have even measured how large it is, and corrected for it. One result of this is that even though we see a large number of hot jupiters, we know know that planets get more common the smaller they are. That is actually one of the main points of the article. I guess this goes to sho
all the technquies biased toward close-in planets (Score:2)
Observation (Score:4, Insightful)
Well until we actually observe other alien life the scientific assumption should be that most life is like ours, that ours is the path of least resistance, the optimal path that all life takes. I think we should be open to it being radically different, however until we observe anything to the contrary, it is all just so much speculation. It could be that some life is so radically different that we may have a hard time recognizing to even observe it. It could be that we are the life oddballs, and most take another path. Who knows. However at this time the most rational response would be to surmise that at least at this time, life is likely similar to ourselves.
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The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star. There would be countless other lifeforms out in space on countless planets. I wonder if it is possible that a rogue planet could harbour life. Say if it was thrown out of a solar system but volcanism was keeping it warm enough for life to survive. How long would that last? As that was a plot point in Star Trek Enterprise.
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I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.
But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts. Look at the variations of life on Earth. From whales to worms.
It's not just whether there are other civilizations out there. It's also whether either of us would d
Re:God made it. (Score:5, Funny)
I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.
But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts. Look at the variations of life on Earth. From whales to worms.
Are you telling me that the galaxy isn't full of people who grow lumps of rubber on their heads?
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Who happen to breath the same combination of gases and who are comfortable in the same temperature range and gravity range.
Not to mention the inter-breeding. So much inter-breeding.
But that's what happens when you have writers who know more about getting a job writing for a show than they know about science.
Re:God made it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Two fun facts:
1. In TOS, it was somewhat legitimate science fiction [memory-alpha.org] to suppose that alien worlds could be identical to Earth. It was theorized that we might be the "optimal" path for evolution to take, and hence things might develop along extremely similar lines. This is why there is literally an episode [memory-alpha.org] where they find a planet that has gone through World War III, which ends with Shatner moralizing about the virtues of the US Constitution. This was much-loved because it meant they could re-use props from other productions. Other exciting examples of this kind of imaginary thriftiness include the modern Roman empire [memory-alpha.org], although many were softened: the 20s gangster planet [memory-alpha.org] was created by accidentally leaving a history book behind, and the Nazi episode (TM) [memory-alpha.org] was deliberate meddling by "a Federation historian" (whom I guess we'd call a neo-Nazi today.)
2. By TNG, the technobabble problem was so bad that the actors sometimes rehearsed with scripts where the technobabble hadn't even been filled in yet [memory-alpha.org]. The writers wanted to write a human drama, and science was just a prop thrown in, to support that. To their credit, it at least created a popular show, something which other science fiction programmes had a lot more trouble doing.
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Perhaps it was just that they had all these unused costumes and sets around so it was cheap to do.... just saying...
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Re:God made it. (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, TNG did explain why (most) aliens were humanoid in the episode The Chase.
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When I watched Prometheus, this episode came to mind. =)
Re:God made it. (Score:5, Funny)
Not to mention the inter-breeding. So much inter-breeding.
Who'd want to be the captain of a starship, if not for all the opportunites for inter-breeding?
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By the 1701-D's time, that job was relegated to the First Officer's beard.
Re: God made it. (Score:2)
*golf clap*
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Who'd want to be the captain of a starship, if not for all the opportunites for inter-breeding?
Just ask Zap Brannigan:
Captain Zapp Brannigan: As my protégé you should know that the only way to deal with a female adversary is to seduce her. [Kif groans]
Captain Zapp Brannigan: This time we are sure she's a woman, right?
Kif Kroker: *Yes*.
or:
Captain Zapp Brannigan: We have failed to uphold Brannigan's Law. However I did make it with a hot alien babe. And in the end, is that not what man has dreamt of since first he looked up at the stars?
[pause]
Captain Zapp Brannigan: Kif, I'm asking
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...who speak standard US English better than many Earth-natives.
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Also would have accepted "Babel Fish."
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And even if the UT did work, it didn't always make sense. Darmok was one of the best episodes imo.
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I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.
But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts. Look at the variations of life on Earth. From whales to worms.
Are you telling me that the galaxy isn't full of people who grow lumps of rubber on their heads?
And speak English with an American accent?
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It's full of... (Score:2)
The galaxy is full of people who grew up in low-gravity environments, because they are more comfortable living in space and thus travel is easier for them both energetically to get there and biologically to live there.
The galaxy is also full of people who grow lumps of rubber on their heads, but that's just because it is the latest rage in all the Alpha
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It's not just whether there are other civilizations out there. It's also whether either of us would develop technology that the other would be able to understand or recognize as signals AND broadcast them during the time when they could be received AND with sufficient power to be received.
Actually I don't see it as being about that at all. The debate here is about other species existing, us knowing about them specifically is merely a question of our own knowledge about reality and has no bearing on reality outside of our heads. It is very anthropocentric to base theoretical assumptions about extraterrestrial life on our own ability to perceive that life.
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I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.
But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts.
Yep. All intelligent life just happens to be bipeds with the brain in a head at the top with a face that has eyes above the nose and the mouth just underneath it.
I'm still wondering how Spock can be the offspring of a human and a Vulcan - complete with two hearts and green blood!
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Damn, I wish I had mod points. That may be the best explanation I ever heard.
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But 2010 was 3 years ago. Surely we can land there now.
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It's not just whether there are other civilizations out there. It's also whether either of us would develop technology that the other would be able to understand or recognize as signals AND broadcast them during the time when they could be received AND with sufficient power to be received.
Contrary to popular belief, we ( collectively ) have come to the point where we'll be pretty good at spotting intelligence. Or perhaps we should call it "purposeful manipulation of energy", as that's really what we're tal
Re:God made it. (Score:4, Informative)
The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star.
Unfortunately it quite possibly can. Since we have only one instance of life on record, in the absence of further evidence all we have is conjecture. We might very well be alone in here.
The right conditions? (Score:4, Informative)
The book Rare Earth dwells into the possibility we're in fact quite exceptional. I've seen plenty of debate regarding some of the statements and conclusions drawn by the authors but nonetheless, "intelligent" life seems a lot less common than expected. That being said, we're improving our "life detection" skills and it might be possible, in a few years, to actually "scan" a planet from earth and detect elements, through spectrum analysis [labspaces.net], which point to evidence of life.
Re:The right conditions? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Rare Earth
I assume you're speaking of the book by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee? I'll have to look at that one. As I've posted here previously in other threads, I recently finished Alone In The Universe by John Gribbin, which reaches the same conclusion. I don't know about Rare Earth, but Gribbin's book is based on tons of new computer simulations.
Gribbin points out that *simple* single-celled life may indeed be common within the Galactical Habitable Zone. That's an extremely important distinction. Making intelligent life is the trick. A number of very unlikely things have to work out for that.
This flies in the face of intuition. (And besides, Geeks have gotten so used to seeing Klingons and Drazi and Wookies in movies and on TV, it's just taken for granted now.) We just *assume* that the natural end course of evolution is some form of intelligence: give evolution a good, robust single cell to work with and a few billion years of time, and you will inevitably end up with some form of intelligence. But that's not necessarily so.
As someone else points out here, those who actually study this stuff are reaching a consensus that intelligent life (again, don't miss that!) may indeed be extremely rare in our universe. Yes, even though the universe is huge and large and unfathomable.
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I think it would be more accurate to talk of technological life rather then intelligent life. Even currently on Earth there are various intelligent species. Dolphins, octopus, ravens are some examples that come to mind as quite intelligent yet no hope of ever being technological.
For humans, not only are we intelligent but we're social and have thumbs and are also very general purpose, eg we live over most of the Earth without many problems.
Super intelligent species without thumbs probably never get technolo
Re:God made it. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star.
There is a huge fallacy here.
The reason that we are on this planet is of course the fact that life IS possible here. However, the chances of life occurring somewhere might be 1 in a gazillion.
It might even be that life exists only in a small part of the multiverse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse) Let us assume that at the sub-atomic scale, decisions are not taken at random, but that at every (let's say binary) decision the universe splits in two halves (one half taking one outcome of the decision and the other half the other). Then if --in this big tree of universes-- life exists somewhere, then it may appear in one universe as if either there was a God that created this life, or, to the more scientifically oriented life-forms, it may seem that life may occur elsewhere in the same universe. But the reality is that the formation of life may be much less likely than we think, and other life may exist only in parallel universes.
Yes, we have created small DNA-like structures in reaction chambers. However, life on Earth will not function with only some random string of DNA. Complicated machinery (ribosomes etc) is needed to actually make life work. And we know absolutely nothing about the probability of this machinery to come into existence from scratch.
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.
You mean there might be a world without spelling mistakes? No Dan Quayle, I realize, but still that would be kind of awesome.
You would automatically be banished from such a world at the first typoo
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It's funny that the answer to the question, "Is there a God?" and "Is there life on other planets?" is interchangeable: "We can't know because there is no proof."
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They are only interchangeable so long as the answers to either are inconclusive, or if you assume the answer to both is no.
If the answer is yes to either of those questions, then the ramifications might be rather large, and potentially very different from eachother, unless you assume that "God" is necessarily equivalent to "alien".
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It's funny that the answer to the question, "Is there a God?" and "Is there life on other planets?" is interchangeable: "We can't know because there is no proof."
Which is why I always found it hard to trust any teacher who would demerit me for using the excuse, "My dog ate my homework." They're basing actions on unprovable hypotheses!
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but that at every (let's say binary) decision the universe splits in two halves (one half taking one outcome of the decision and the other half the other).
Whoah, buddy. Stop. Right. There. Are you implying that a near infinite amount of "intelligent" life exists in the past and future of this time line? Because, I have vast amounts of observational evidence to prove you wrong about the former, and one hell of an extrapolation to disprove the latter.
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The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star
Amazing logic there. Most people who have given it serious consideration think it is perfectly possible that Earth has the only life in the universe.
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Now if you will excuse me, I have some epicycles to calculate.
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Earlier (modern) thinking on the existence of intelligent life in the universe tended towards fairly high estimates of the potential number of advanced civilizations in the universe. The Drake equation has been used to estimate the probability of civilizations in our galaxy that could be detected using a radio telescope. The Drake equation starts with the number of new star
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The universe is big but as far as we know it isn't infinite. Multiplying the probablilities of lots of unlikely events quickly gets makes things very very unlikely.
Francis Crick once wrote 'The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle so many are the conditions require to get it going'.
Paul Davies who I believe heads up SETI has written
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Yep. Some posit the probability of intelligible life as essentially zero -- meaning that Earth is a fluke. Still, such guesses are just that -- guesses -- and though educated, that term is relative, as there is at present no way to know all the factors. Even Drake admits he was only spitballing.
The probability of intelligible (sic) life is NOT "essentially zero". However infinitesimally small the probability, it's not zero, since we know there's life on at least one planet.
However, as someone says above, the problem is that because the probability is so very, very low that any other intelligent life is simply too far away for us to ever contact. If we have to look to another galaxy to find our neighbours, well...short of a stargate-type piece of magic we may never meet them. We might trade mi
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Just because the universe is much older than Earth doesn't mean that life must have developed elsewhere first.
Unfortunately, this means we may never meet any intelligent alien life, escept in some unimaginably distant future (hundreds of millions of years from now) if we even still exist then.
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Re: God made it. (Score:2)
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The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star.
That is emotionally compelling but logically invalid.
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The likelihood of producing a universe that gives birth to life exactly ONE time, is, in fact, infinitesimal. By definition, actually. Either there is lots of life all over the place, or there is none. Saying exactly one is like saying there are exactly five. Or exactly 563.
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Infinite diversity does not rule out the existence of singularities. The properties of 0, for instance, are unique in the Real Numbers (an uncountably large infinite set), and yet the properties of something unique as zero still exist exactly once in that domain. In fact, one can even show that in order for the system to be coherent, that 0 *MUST* exist (and must be unique).
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Suppose that the odds of a technical civilization developing in the Universe is 1%. We could be extremely lucky, and there's a very small chance some other species did. There are multiple-Universe theories and hypotheses, and if there's a few hundred Universes or more some of them are likely to have people like us. In any case, nobody would ever really see the Universes without intelligent life, and so we can disregard them.
To put it another way, back in the 70s a statistician became concerned at the
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I once read an estimate of a million years for Earths oceans to freeze basically solid (exceptions of thermal vents) if cast out of the solar system.
Re:God made it. (Score:5, Insightful)
See? We are the only place in the universe that can sustain life.
Great. Now that we've got that established, we can argue over which god made it.
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Anthony Hopkins, of course!
Re: God made it. (Score:2)
George Burns!
Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Who knows what they meant, but taken literally "one to three times bigger" means
x+x ... x+3x
"one to three times as big" would be
1*x ... 3*x
Being somewhat of the anal retentive disposition, it annoys the hell out of me when someone says "200% increase" when they mean "doubled", which is merely a 100% increase.
(And since this is *very* common, I stay annoyed the hell out of most of the time.)
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Most people get % increases wrong; this is why I usually ask people to give it in "x's". Another that's irritating is "twice as cold."
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Maybe because people who say "twice as cold" do not use the Kelvin scale, they use Fahrenheit (typically). So if it's 40 degrees F outside, and someone says 'it'll be twice as cold overnight", they might mean 20 degrees F (278K), but almost certainly do not mean 139 degrees K ( which == -210F).
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Being somewhat of the anal retentive disposition, it annoys the hell out of me when someone says "200% increase" when they mean "doubled", which is merely a 100% increase.
That's nothing, in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution#WUXGA [wikipedia.org] table, there used to have 150% decrease in pixels. And it wasn't even an imaginary square screen.
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