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Billions of Habitable Planets?
cbv writes: "MSNBC has an interesting article about new calculations by Charly Lineweaver and Daniel Grether, both of the University of New South Wales in Australia, which provides an interesting answer to the question on how many potentially habitable planets exist in our galaxy."
Because by the time we can find another one that is, this one won't be.
--Blair
"Keeping up with the Gbrtlrxzes."
Billions and billions of Jupiters...
If only we could live on Jupiter
Wake me up when we find billions of Earths...
"For now, no one knows whether our solar system represents a common method of formation and evolution. In fact, discoveries over the past six years seem to indicate otherwise. Most of the roughly 80 planets discovered outside our solar system are much more massive than Jupiter. They also orbit perilously close to their host stars, locations that would likely prevent rocky planets from forming in so-called habitable orbits.
But experts attribute these findings to the limitations of technology. "
Hmm, WAG anyone? Wild assed guess for those that are AC (Acronmyn-Challenged).
I would bet a terabyte of New Zealand Sheep porn that tomorrow there will be 500 stories debunking this. More "proof by way of media" sounds like to me.
I loved this comment:
'?Our solar system is Jupiter and a bunch of junk,? as Lineweaver puts it.'
Yeah baby, I live on a hurling mass of yesterdays dinner and some junk mail....wohooo.....
Sent from your iPad.
Face it, most of astronomy is based wholey on WAGs. Even Hawking admits most of his stuff is WAG.
.
As I mentioned in a previous comment, I think a nice high resolution picture of a cloudswept blue and green plant around, relatively, nearby star would probably be enough -- I just hate that I probably won't be around to find out what it discovers.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Very high... 30 billion jupiters != 30 billion earths. Just because there is a jupiter sized world (even assuming similar orbit instead of an insanely close orbit to the star) doesn't mean anything else useful formed inside its orbit. However if even .01% of those have conditions even approaching those required for life (like Mars) then chances are good for there to be hundreds of even thousands of intelligent species out of maybe a few tens or hundreds of million worlds of most likely algae and microbes.
So in short, I think this guy is nuts to suggest billions of earths. Maybe millions (tens or hundreds) in the venus->mars range but not billions.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Maybe people like those Big Blue Rooms?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Another habitable planet might be a good idea but we (apparently) won't be needing it very soon (barring the actions of the Bush EPA).
Frankly, I've always wondered why the rush to find other civilizations. Unless we confidently expect to be able to do to them what Cortez did to the Aztecs, I think the best idea is to hope the Earth stays hidden from prying eyes. Afterall, we may be Aztecs to them! And since when has a lesser civilization benefitted from meeting a superior one?
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
The reasoning reminds me
How many people surf the web?
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Want to buy some stock?
Eventually, when we stop sending astronauts into orbit to monitor mice having sex, and put up some decent astonomical instruments, we will be able to image some Earth sized worlds, and then we will forget all about the statistics.
Perhaps they are waiting for us to grow out of our infancy. I mean, do you really think we're really to handle that sort of idea? Let's take a look a high level look at our planet:
It seems to me any highly evolved race would know well enough to keep their distance and wait to see if we destroy ourselves before initiating contact (especially if they knew, like a wise parent, that we have to figure these things out for ourselves).
Tides aren't a substantial argument. The sun's gravity produces tides on the Earth as well. The amplitude of solar tides is about half that of lunar tides, so even the complete absence of the moon doesn't imply there would be no tides. They'd just be somewhat smaller.
Beyond that, there's an increasing body of evidence that early life was highly extremophilic and more likely formed deep underground or near a deep-sea hydrothermal vent. I don't know of -any- hard evidence that tidal pools played a large role in biogenesis; it's all speculation as far as I know, though I'm admittedly only an astronomer, not an astrobiologist.
Isn't the basic problem that we are too far away from the next neighborhood to visit it so we can find out if anyone really lives there? The fact that we can't yet, get, or talk, to the next neighborhood has nothing to do with whether or not someone lives there. It just means we don't have the ability to determine that.
So, until Captain Cook managed to get to Australia, did it make sense for Europeans to assume that "there's no life down there"? Probably not, but the point is that whatever Europeans thought or knew had nothing at all to do with the reality of all those people walking around what Europeans decided to call Australia. p? If you support the uniqueness of Earth in the universe, it seems to me that the burden is on you to produce a cogent argument explaining why it is Just Us Humans.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
3. Such civilizations do not last a long time, and blow themselves up or otherwise fall apart pretty quickly
Or alternatively, civilizations progress at a geometric rate, transcending themselves in a few short generations, so that by the time intersteller travel becomes feasable they have lost interest and moved on to more compelling possibilities (perhaps departing this frame of reference entirely).
Once one hypothesizes a civilization significantly more advanced than our own it becomes difficult to even imagine the technologies they may have, much less what interests they would find compelling, or what goals they might set for themselves. For all we know they are all around us, unrecognized because they operate at levels as far beyond us as we are beyond the simple microbe.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy