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."

Comments

Did they remember to subtract 1?

[blair1q]

Because by the time we can find another one that is, this one won't be.

--Blair
"Keeping up with the Gbrtlrxzes."

this is a WAG, nothing more, nothing less.

[Em Emalb]

"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.....

Re:before you go bonkers about this

[_prime]

>If there are aliens, where are they?

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:

• Over 30,000 humans (mostly children) die each day of hunger when there is plenty of food for everyone.
• We poison our environment (or world) and somehow expect this to not affect us. Clean alternatives are available but they aren't used.
• We haven't learned to stop killing each other. The fact that we all really want the same basic things seems to escape us, as well as the fact that those things (happiness, peace, etc) require nothing except for our willingness to give up our deadly attachments to those things which really aren't doing us any good but that we think will make us happy (money, glamor, power over, etc).
• 
  
  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).

Re:What about the Moon?

[mperrin]

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.

Short lived civilizations could be good, not bad

[FreeUser]

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.