Billions of Planets In Milky Way?

jeffsenter writes, "The Washington Post has the story: 'NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered what they believe are 16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy.' What sets these potential planets apart is they are in the central bulge of the Milky Way where most stars are located. More planets in the galaxy means more chances for life." The 16 are planet candidates at this point, until verified by spectroscopic measurement of their parent stars' wobbles, which probably can't be done until the James Webb Space Telescope files in 2013.

Comments

Good ol' hubble

[192939495969798999]

Once again, Hubble comes in handy when crawling the sky... it would be great if they could keep it running until the next one gets up there, but I guess we'll have to make do with cruddy ground scopes for a while.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[AsmCoder8088]

There are some advantages to ground-based scopes versus ones such as the Hubble. For instance, you can get a great deal more sensitivity on the ground than in space simply due to the fact that the aperture of the primary mirror can be made much larger for a ground scope than a space scope. The reason behind this is cost - it is far more expensive to put a large mirror in space than on the ground. However, since it is in space, the smaller mirror does have better resolution. So it is simply a trade-off between sensitivity and resolution. With greater sensitivity, you can pull in fainter objects, but with better resolution, you can differentiate more easily between distance objects.

This is a great example of a ground-based telescope that could easily rival any space telescope:

OWL Telescope

Re:Good ol' hubble

[erroneus]

I think that's because space manufacturing hasn't been made a reality yet. I think once mirrors or even optical lenses are made in zero-gravity in a place where size isn't nearly so important, space-borne telescopes could well out-perform the earth-based.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Ironsides]

Ah, but the most kick ass telescope would be one located on the far side of the moon. No earth light to interefere and, to quote a book "This place has no atmosphere". With the 1/6th gravity, the mirrors could be much larger as well.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[dgatwood]

IANAOE (I am not an optics engineer), but it seems to me that you could create a large mirror in space without actually fabricating it at all. Use a large sheet of thin, ferrous foil that can be rolled up. Throw in some directed magnetic fields to create the shape. That way, the entire thing can be compressed into a fairly small space for launch, then rolled out once it gets into space.

You could also, in theory, do a fairly portable lens by taking a liquid and misting the surface of this mirror. In theory, water will partially evaporate, but the rest will freeze instantly in the cold/vacuum of space. You'd just need careful motor control to make the spray even enough to create the shape you want. :-)

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Rei]

Foils crinkle. You need a near-perfect shape for your mirror. Also, instead of sending a large mirror, you want to send up some huge magnets? Seems kind of counterproductive.

It is interesting, though, to think of the fact that a parabola will naturally form if you take a circle of very light material and apply a uniform force to every square inch of cross-sectional area (not every square inch of surface area -- that's a catenary). Also, a spinning fluid in a container under the influence of a uniform force will also form a parabola. Not sure how well either of those would work in space, but I know that spinning mercury mirrors have been used in telescopes on Earth.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[geoffspear]

You really think a bit of light reflecting off the Earth is going to be more disruptive than 14 straight days of sunlight?

And then there's the inconveniently thick slab of radio-wave-blocking rock between the telescope and the scientists who want to use it to look at things. I suppose they could always put some communication satellites into lunasynchronized orbit.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Grishnakh]

Don't be silly. The scientists don't have to stay on earth; build a Moon base on the far side and put the astronomers there, with the telescope.

During the 14 days of sunlight, they can take a break.

It's an idea, anyway. It'd probably make more sense to put a remote-controlled telescope in its own Solar orbit, facing away from the sun.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Pooua]

Spinning liquids to form mirrors works on Earth because Earth's gravity acts perpendicular to the plane of spin. We would need some way of replicating those two forces in space. All the methods I know about would cost more than simply launching a solid mirror.

A method of putting cheap mirrors into space that I proposed to my physics mentor a few decades ago is to use inflatable mirrors. He brushed off the idea at the time. Now, though, NASA has research on the general concept:

NASA Tech: Parabolic Membrane-Thickness Variation for Inflatable Mirror

A Google search for inflatable mirrors turns up many more results.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[edwardpickman]

Actually the advantage is more in none visible bands. A number of bands don't fair well in atmosphere so the resolution is all but lost on distant objects. Ideally a large mirror scope should be placed at the edge of the Kuiper Belt to minimize interference from the sun and other planets. Might happen in my lifetime but hard to say due to expense. It's be far easier to have a large mirror in zero gee. Gravity can affect the shape of the mirror. If it was ever done we'd finally get images of earth sized planets in other solar systems. It's completely impossible with earth based telescopes. No way to confirm life second hand, we can't confirm it on Mars and we've been there several times, but we might get evidence of likely planets. Ironically we are likely to confirm intellegent life before life itself. A radio signal is really the only hope of confirming both life and intelelgent life. The catch 22 is let's say the signal comes from a million light years away, how do we know that the life there's isn't exinct now? It'd be really ironic to get a message saying we need help our sun goes nova in a thousand years. About a million years too late and you just reached a pack of evolved cavemen that have yet to journy further than their own moon. Sorry.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[dgatwood]

Who said anything about spinning? I'm imagining a mister that moves around above a surface that is extremely cold and adds layer upon layer of ice until it is the correct thickness.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[myth24601]

"During the 14 days of sunlight, they can take a break."

The scientists could spend this time to hang out with the pretty girls that live on the moon and are into...scientists!

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Anonymous Coward]

Cold!?! In Space?!? Shaaa... Good luck with that.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[arete]

I could be wrong, but my impression is that it doesn't work that way; the near-total lack of pressure overcomes the freezing cold.

More precisely: Even after your hypothetical water freezes, it will continue to "boil" (actually sublime) directly from solid to vapor without passing through liquid. It will do this until the vapor pressure around it gets to be a little higher - which will never be stable so basically your water will constantly evaporate. Of course, water is also heavy and heavy = precious in space. While certainly both are a pain, as a rule, size is not as big of a factor as weight.

You'd be much more likely to spray the space-equivalent of Great Stuff expanding foam sealant on the back of the mirror than liquid water; foams have a high rigidity to weight. That's polyurethane, although I saw some stuff about aluminum foams which might be ideal.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Nuffsaid]

This is a great example of a ground-based telescope that could easily rival any space telescope: OWL Telescope

Ha! Wait until I put huge rockets under that beast! Voila, instant huge space telescope with no rivals on ground!

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Ironsides]

You really think a bit of light reflecting off the Earth is going to be more disruptive than 14 straight days of sunlight?

I seem to recal that several ground based telescopes can work in daylight. Not as well, but they do. Eitherway, the 14 days of light would be worth it for the 14 days of near perfect darkness that would be experienced.

And then there's the inconveniently thick slab of radio-wave-blocking rock between the telescope and the scientists who want to use it to look at things.

Actually, that's a bonus for Radio Telescopes. Which one could also put there. Although, the best setup for a radio telescope would probably be a free floating one with so support structure, just wires with a very small amount of spin on them to keep them apart. Imagine a radiotelescope tens of kilometers in diameter.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Nanpa]

Ground telescopes aren't necesarily cruddy, they just have to deal with seeing (Part of which can be rectified). Although Hubble is pretty coal, it doesn't have the resolving power of most ground based telescopes.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[suman28]

I too work for the Space Shuttle program and I can also confirm that a repair team is set to be sent to fix the Hubble telescope. I have to post AC because I fear retribution from divulging such sensitive information. Thanks.
I send you this file for advice.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Rei]

Spinning liquids to form mirrors works on Earth because Earth's gravity acts perpendicular to the plane of spin.

Which is precisely why I stated that you would need a uniform force, and that I didn't know how one could do that in space effectively.

Re:Good ol' hubble

[John Hasler]

> You really think a bit of light reflecting off the Earth is going to be more
> disruptive than 14 straight days of sunlight?

In the absence of an atmosphere to scatter it that sunlight will not affect observations at all. Do you think that the Hubble only works when it is in the Earth's shadow?

Re:Good ol' hubble

[Anonymous Coward]

A number of bands don't fair well in atmosphere

"fare".

Prist. Fsot.

[falloutgib]

I, for one, welcome our billions of new planet overlords.

Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

Harbouring what form of life exactly.

Common sense suggests that there are billions of planets in the galaxy, and that millions of them could harbour life, and that thousands of them have significant evolved life and a few have intelligent (tool using or above) life. That's just playing with numbers and likelihoods and the belief that we're not a one off.

But this just shows that there are lots of large gas giants. Maybe there's life on their moons...

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[PhotoJim]

The Earth-sized planets are hard to see, but they are surely out there. It's quite interesting to me to think that are are on a tiny planet orbiting a nondescript, rather dim star (I don't know if the sun is average or not - it may even be above average, given how many brown dwarfs there must be that we can't see - but it certainly isn't very bright at any distance). There could be countless similar systems out there that we will never know about because they are too dim to find. It rather boggles my mind. We really just see the highlights of the universe. The meat and potatoes of it are dim yet everywhere. Many of the nearest stars were only recently discovered, and there are likely more nearby that we haven't found yet.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

Until a few years ago we weren't sure that there were any other planets at all. Once astronomers figured out how to find these large planets, hundreds were discovered in short order. The implication is that planets are common and while we still can't detect earth-like planets, but it's certainly much easier to believe that they exist.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets could harbor life?

How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets that harbor life have 'significant life'? (Whatever that is.)

How do you deduce, using common sense, that a few in a thousand planets with 'significant life' have 'intelligent' life?

That's just playing with numbers and likelihoods

Oh, right. You just made up some random stuff and then claimed it was suggested by common sense.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Jupiter sized planets are what we can see- there may be smaller ones closer to the stars. But you're right on "life in what form"- in the denser galactic center, Asimov's Nightfall Planet would be common, planets that have no night or only very rare eclipse nightfalls. The life on such planets would evolve to be used to daytime only.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Squiffy]

Despite the fact that many people call the sun a "yellow dwarf" or an "average star", it's actually in the top 10%, by brightness. That also probably puts it in the top 10% by mass, radius, etc. Find the Gliese 3.0 catalog if you don't believe me.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite right... it's was also common sense that we "will be greeted as liberators"

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[gstoddart]

Despite the fact that many people call the sun a "yellow dwarf" or an "average star", it's actually in the top 10%, by brightness.

Of course it's brighter, it's closer to us.

(Note for the humour impaired, this is a joke)

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[dgatwood]

Assuming we don't kill ourselves before our sun fails catastrophically:

• The viable lifespan of our sun: 9.2 billion years (main sequence)
• The period during which Earth has had life: 3.8bn + 4.6bn = 8.4 billion years
• Period of human existence: 2 million + 4.6bn ~= 4.6 billion years
• Probability of intelligent life: ~50%

What remains to be determined are:

• Number of stars with rocky planets.
• Average number of rocky planets per star with rocky planets.
• Percentage of rocky planets within band where life is expected (currently speculated to be 0.958 AU +/- 0.023 AU out of about 40 AU to Pluto, so about 1/869.565217)
• Number of rocky planets in this band with the proper chemical makeup for life to begin (presumed to be nearly all of them, but...)

So from this, a good guess might be 1/1700 of the rocky planets out there are habitable. If our solar system is typical, we have 5 rocky planets, so there would be a (1 - (1699/1700)*(1699/1700)*(1699/1700)*(1699/1700)*(1 699/1700)) or chance of our solar system evolving any life at all, or about 0.29%. Multiply times the odds of a habitable planet having intelligent life at any given time (about 1/2), and we have about a 0.145% chance (only a little better than 1/1000) of finding intelligent life in a solar system with rocky planets.

Nowhere near the 1 in a million long shot speculated, but this assumes that Earth is typical, which is not necessarily a valid assumption.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Dasher42]

The wobble method that they are using to detect these gas giants rely on the gravitational pull of the planet to affect the star. This means that the most readily detected planets will be the ones that produce a lot of wobble - gas giants close to their star especially. The fact that we're detecting so many in the beginnings of this science poses this question: are hot jupiters the overwhelming majority of planets out there? There is no reason to say this. We should wait until our methods of detection improve to propose any verdict on how common terrestrial planets orbiting in their star's habitable zones are.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[WageDomain]

Where does "Probability of intelligent life: ~50%" come from? That seems like the kind of thing we really cannot claim to know until we have even a single piece of evidence for other intelligent life.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Sleepy]

>>Common sense suggests that there are billions of planets in the galaxy

>How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets could harbor life?

The grandparent poster meant to say HYPOTHESIS or THEORY (the latter being the strict definition, since you can't PROVE such extrapolation of planet types -- not the way you can prove say 2+2=4). Everyone knew the earth was round LONG before it could be PROVEN.

There are lots of planets and moons discovered that exhibit characteristics between the ranges of Venus and Mars and Europa. While these bodies have not been PROVEN to harbor life, and are at the fringes of what we consider life-supporting, they are still in the range of life-capable. We've discovered life at the bottom of the ocean, deep in the antarctic, and even in water so hot that we previously expected to kill life by causing the cells to explode.

Surely you can deduce that he was arguing this is the "most supportable theory given the current data".

How? Using COMMON SENSE. Of course, you could be the type that argues with laymen that there's no "motor" in a car. Semantics do not make you smarter - it only makes someone put a bananna in your tailpipe.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Your logic is a little flawed. Britney Spears appeared on earth after 4.6 billion years of evolution around a star with a lifetime of 9.2 billion years. Therefore, by your logic, 50% of rocky worlds have, or have had, Britney Spears evolve on them.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

We've discovered life at the bottom of the ocean, deep in the antarctic, and even in water so hot that we previously expected to kill life by causing the cells to explode.

So because earth lifeforms can survive at high temperatures, the existence of life on other planets is "most supportable theory given the current data". And I suppose that because someone has a Britney Spears CD that can srvive at a temperature of 110F, all planets with a temperature of 110F must be covered in Britney Spears CDs.

Did I miss some big event? Like some Fields medalist announcing that logical deduction is flawed and that henceforth we should all just make stuff up?

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Strolls]

Harbouring what form of life exactly.

They're called "Dwellers".

Stroller.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a mathematician currently studying probability. The argument you put forth does not make sense in the slightest. What you are attempting to calculate is the probability that intelligent life occurs given that life actually occurs. Unfortunately for your argument, you have made the (unjustified) assumption that the probability of life actually occurring is proportional to the amount of time a planet has been in existence. I can cite Mercury as a counter-example: assuming Mercury has never harboured life (its hard to imagine that it could throughout all of its history), the probability that intelligent life exists in the universe is 0. All guesses at the probability of the existence of life in the universe is pure speculation until such time as we have a statistically significant sample size; one case is simply not enough.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[ianmh]

I don't think it is so much as "Making stuff up" as having vision. If everyone failed to imagine what could be possible and through common sense should be possible from what we know, then we would have never got to where we are today. Look at how many things have come true from Science Fiction. I find it hard to believe that we are the only intellegent life in the entire Universe, but of course we use to think the Sun rotated around the Earth and that we were the centre of the Universe, some of us still do believe in the later, and yes it is possible that we are the only life in the Universe, but I find it easier to believe if life exists here it probably exist elsewhere.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[helioquake]

IIRC, Gliese catalog lists only those stars found within 70 light-year radius from the Sun.

In that very tiny sample, year, you are probably right.

But if you look at the whole Galaxy, you are not correct. The Sun is surely a tiny dwarf star.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[frank_adrian314159]

Harbouring what form of life exactly.

Probably the kind that would find us tastey...

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[mcvos]

But this just shows that there are lots of large gas giants. Maybe there's life on their moons...

If I'm not mistaken (TFA isn't very clear on this, and it's an awful website anyway), these new planets are all extremely hot Jupiters, so there won't even be life on their moons.

At least, that's what I wanted to reply. But a quick google showed that according to this, this and this, a hot Jupiter could actually mean that there are terrestrial planets in the same system.

Ofcourse that's still an untested theory. We have to actually find some terrestrial planets in such systems before we can be sure.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[NewKimAll]

I like to think of it this way. Imagine that each major galaxy in the universe had one and only one intelligent species capable of space travel. We'd be living in a universe with billions of intelligent beings, yet unless our galaxies collide, we will never be able to meet each other.

--
Space is a very cold and lonely place.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Weston O'Reilly]

And we were greeted as liberators. With flowers and everything - you know, that other thing people like you enjoy laughing about - many troops did in fact receive flowers on their entry to Iraq.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[dgatwood]

That was based on the assumption that we won't die out, and based on the calculation that if so, human life will have existed for roughly half the life of the star we orbit. This is only a guess based on the very limited data we have. It makes a lot of assumptions---specifically that the rest of the universe is similar to our own little microcosm--- that may be completely invalid. However, given the data we have so far, it's about as good a guess as any. At least it's a guess based on researched data and not pulling numbers out of thin air. :-)

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[mcvos]

• The period during which Earth has had life: 3.8bn + 4.6bn = 8.4 billion years
• Period of human existence: 2 million + 4.6bn ~= 4.6 billion years
• Probability of intelligent life: ~50%

No, that just means this planet will have intelligent life for 50% of its existence. That says nothing whatsoever about the likelihood that intelligent life will evolve on any other planet. Not does it even mean that life will appear there at all.

At the moment, we still have no clear idea of what causes life. Will it appear automatically when you have the right mix of chemicals? Can it appear, but is it extremely unlikely? Does it require divine intervention? We truly have no idea. Well, we have hundreds of ideas, but none has been proven or backed up by any meaningful amount of evidence.

We also don't know how likely the evolution of intelligent life is. It's certainly not a given. A brain is an expensive organ, and there really has to be a pressing need for it. In evolutionary terms, what a brain basically does is allow us to adapt to many different environments. Most animals don't need to; as long as your environment stays the same, built-in instincts are good enough. If the environment changes slowly, there's plenty of time to evolve new instincts. I wouldn't be surprised if our oversized moon, earthquakes, volcanos, regular meteor strikes, etc, are all vital for the development of intelligent life. And even then it could still have been an unlikely accident that evolution took this path and not some other.

Also, our solar system has only 4 rocky planets, not 5. We do have a lot of rocky moons and dwarf planets, though.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

common sense also indicates that gas giants would be far easier to pick up at an exceedinly long distance than smaller planets. Further, the fact that gas giants exist orbiting other stars lends itself to the idea that, around the same stars, there are also non-gas giant planet floating about, which have been to small for current technology to detect... and who the hell is to say life can't develop on a gas giant, anyway?

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[dgatwood]

Of course it's a guess. However, your counterexample is useless. I already took into account the major fundamental differences between Mercury and Earth in the math, using the habitable distance range proportional to the approximate radius of the solar system. I actually used a very low-ball probability for the habitable distance from a star; I've heard other figures as high as 1 AU +/- 0.2 AU, which would make the probability much higher.

FWIW, The habitable distance is roughly defined as the distance at which you would neither get runaway greenhouse effect nor insufficient greenhouse effect to avoid the planet being a ball of ice. Either way, Mercury is so far out of that band that the atmosphere boils off entirely. In fact, Venus and Mars are outside the range, too, with Mars at 1.5 AU and Venus at 0.723 AU.

You're right that it is a guess. We have no idea what the probability of life actually beginning on a world where conditions are favorable. My speculation is that the odds are high, but that part is just a guess.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Pooua]

What you call vision actually is wishful thinking. Your statement of what you find hard to believe is really an Argument from Incredulity. As for reality springing from science fiction, you should carefully consider that virtually everything that became real after science fiction speculated on it were put in the fiction by the author who researched what scientists found promising. Even at that, most of the ideas in science fiction are nonsense, when taken at face value. But, because of wishful thinking and romantic detachment from reality, some people like to think that science fiction is a modern day prophet of what will be. Even some of the science fiction authors don't like that perspective; they are writing to illustrate a point, not to predict the future.

Noteably, every extra-solar planet discovered so far is so inhospitable to life that it would be difficult for anything to survive on them even briefly. Pure chance suggests that if billions of planets do orbit sun-like stars, at least one of them might have a climate suitable for life. That does not mean it would have life, though. A point of fact, we do not know of any mechanism that would allow life to arise spontaneously. We are only guessing that life on Earth arose spontaneously, simply because we have no other physically likely explanation for our existance. So, any talk of the probability of non-Earth life is foolishness; every bit of evidence of any type that we have found so far suggests that the probability is zero. It isn't even close.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[johansalk]

It sounds extremely unlikely to me that we are such the only and ultimate instance of intelligent life in existence. There has to be others, some more intelligent than us.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[dR.fuZZo]

100% of the planets I've been to so far harbor intelligent life.
There are billions of planets in the galaxy.
Ergo, there are billions of planets in the galaxy that harbor intelligent life.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I like to imagine ethereal pink fairies made of non-interacting shadow matter at the end of my yard. But no matter how hard I imagine, it has no bearing on reality.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[bigpat]

How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets could harbor life?

1 in 8 planets harbor life, unless we have missed something. 2 in 8 if those microbes in the martian meteorite are to be believed. Thanks to the IAU that is a fact now, not just an extrapolation, since planets only exist in our solar system.

Seriously though, if we do extrapolate from current observations then we should estimate the number of rocky planets in the galaxy and then estimate how many are around stars like our own and start with that number Based upon how many are in a zone that can support liquid water. But whatever number we come up with is going to be highly speculative until we can either directly or indirectly observe smaller planets outside our solar system. Sure we can model the evolution of the galaxy to some extent and take a few educated guesses, but the more guesses, the more this is just a math exercise rather than based upon solid scientific oservation.

We need bigger telescopes or someone needs to figure out a new way to travel.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I find it hard to believe that we are the only intellegent life in the entire Universe

I think you're missing an important point in logic. To not believe that X is true does not imply that you believe X is false. It might mean you don't know whether or not X is true. I can quite happily not believe that X is true at the same time as not believing that X is false. Allowing inability to believe something to lead you to believe the converse is the way of madness.

So to put this into practice: I, like you, find it hard to believe that we are the only intellegent life in the entire Universe. But that doesn't mean I believe that we are not the only intelligent life in the universe.

On the other hand, I do think intelligent life is at best fairly rare simply due to the Fermi 'paradox'.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

We need bigger telescopes

Like this. Not only would we be able to see earthlike planets - we'd be able to use spectrography to determine the composition of their atmospheres.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[ianmh]

That's basically what I said. I believe there is mostly likely life outside of this tiny spec called earth. I do not by any means rule out that we may be the only form of life.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not right. That's not even wrong. This is completely inappropriate probability model for the task at hand! Go take statistics or at least figure out how to interpret probability models!

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[R3d M3rcury]

The meat and potatoes of it are dim yet everywhere.

IT'S A COOKBOOK!

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[ianmh]

Okay, but to take it a step further you are assuming life will be earth like and carbon based. Who's to even say we would be able to identify life if it is different from our pre-concieved notions. Maybe there is life that can live in these harsh climates. If life is so extremely rare and unique then there's a good chance that it will be entirely different on another world. And you are right much of todays science fiction is heavily researched, but this is not always the case, especially in the past, and if the universe is infinite or there are multiple universes, then there is an infinite chance of life existing, and I guess vice versa, and just because we can't duplicate life means absolutely nothing. There was a time when we could not create fire either.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[constantnormal]

It appears to me that all of your quite precise estimates are made on the basis of a single data point: our solar system.

So the confidence factor of these estimates is pretty low, with a sample size of one out of a population of planets (or stars with planets) in this galaxy that is a pretty large number (perhaps billions, but that's a guess).

Also, given that we know exactly zero about the processes that operated to produce (or will hopefully produce within another Darwinian cycle or two) intelligent life on this planet, it is a remarkable leap to assume that half of the habitable planets harbor intelligent life.

Just for the sake of irrational, Slashdot-style argument, let's suppose that the following mechanisms are responsible for human evolution to the top of the food chain here on the third rock from the Sun:
    1) A world that is mostly water
    2) A large moon that causes significant tides
    3) A paleoclimate pattern of greenhouse and ice ages, without slipping over into either runaway greenhouse effect or having the ice ages crank up the albedo so as to remain permanent (a neat trick, for which we have no explanation)
    4) A molten core that lasts just the right amount of time, which presumes either (or both) the tidal effects of a large moon or a specific percentage of radioactive elements sufficient to keep the home fires burning

I could go on, but you get the idea. We know zilch about what causes intelligent life to arise, whether it is the normal course or an isolated instance, and exactly what teatures of our world have contributed to this. Certainly a regular series of mass extinctions would seem to be a prerequisite for life to advance to more versatile forms. And of course, there need to be stable intervals in between the periods of catastrophe for newbie life forms to develop before the dice get rolled again (and again and again). We certainly had a number of mass extinctions before humans (or the critters that eventually became humans) arrived on the scene.

So exactly what percentage of worlds fit this description, and what is your sample size? The above notions are all simply speculations, but they're a lot more sophisticated speculations than "1 non-gas-giant planet of 5 supports life, therefore 20% of the non-gas giant planets support life", or intelligent life has appeared on this world after it is half its projected existence, therefore half of all worlds supporting life have intelligent life".

Hopefully, this next Darwinian scythe from the icehouse-to-greenhouse-to-icehouse cycle we are currently on will result in smarter humans, and if not, then smarter bears or cockroaches. But not birds. I can't stand birds, as they crap all over my car.

These arguments PROVE (OK, strongly hint at) that there's no intelligent life on this world.
When there is insufficient information to state anything about a solution set, intelligent beings do not extrapolate an answer to nine decimal places.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but it's the best unbaised sample we have.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[helioquake]

Ugh, no. I'm not a catalog person, but I'm sure that Naval Observatory or other institutions have more extensive star catalogues. Gliese may be the easily accessible catalogue, however.

The stars in the solar neighborhood is not necessarily a good representation of stellar population in this galaxy. That's basically what I am trying to say.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Tim C]

human life will have existed for roughly half the life of the star we orbit

All that gives you is a naive estimate for the probability that at any randomly-picked instant in the planet's life, you'll pick a time that humans existed. It says nothing about the probability that we evolved, and nothing about the probability of similar life (or any other form) evolving anywhere.

Nice try though :)

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Skevin]

> We'd be living in a universe with billions of intelligent beings

We do indeed live in a universe with billions of intelligent beings... they all just happen to be on Earth.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Frogbert]

Okay here's what I don't get, and correct me if I'm wrong but how can you have 10% of infinity?

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[smash]

I haven't seen any truly intelligent life on this planet. Perhaps you mean sentient?

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget the galaxy, we still haven't found intelligent life on Earth!

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

If people don't believe you they should look straight at it!

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, our solar system has only 4 rocky planets, not 5. We do have a lot of rocky moons and dwarf planets, though.

As far as geology and 'looking for life' goes moons are valid planets. Titan sure has the look and feel of a 'planet'. Luna and IO are the only 'rocky' moons I can think of, most of the others seem to be made of some rocks and lots of frozen gases and water. They would mostly vaporize if brought in close (earth like orbit) and be too small to hold onto that vapor. Rock is ok but I think to have rock, water and atmosphere would improve lifes chances, water being the only one actually required.

Now when will be the day we can detect large water oceans around some of these distant planets, that's the ticket! Just having that implies the other two (rocks and gas).

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[pi_neutrino]

Much has already been researched on this topic: The Drake equation. Judging by the replies I've read to this post so far, it's probably a good idea to build on this , rather than reinvent the wheel.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[syousef]

There are not an infinite number of stars, planets or even atoms in the Universe. It's a finite very very very large number.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[noigmn]

Well on Earth life has 100% chance of occurring for a start. Which suggests that life occurs, and can sensibly be extended to life occurs elsewhere just by assuming homogeneity (as they do with everything else). It's also good to note we know shit all about anything beyond Earth, as much as we'd like to pretend we do. Common sense says there are about 80 naturally occurring elements. Of these elements, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc. are quite low on the periodic table and quite common (or at least in our solar system). I'm guessing the possible combinations of these elements that can form planets would not be extremely large. There are also basic chemical processes that occur when these elements are put together and a set amount of structures that can be supported. Looking at what we know (ie. earth) one of them that seems to occur is proteins and life.

Life also seems to evolve in the direction of more strong or more intelligent because life with weak traits dies off or gets killed. Why these processes would magically occur differently elsewhere is beyond me.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Nanpa]

A) It's not infinite; There's a finite amount of matter/energy in the universe B) 0.1 x Infinity approximates infinity.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Eivind Eklund]

0.1 x infinity IS infinity. It's a smaller infinity, and still it's infinity. Weird stuff to work with, infinities.

Eivind.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Eivind Eklund]

I personally would guess the chance of life evolving to be very close to 1, given how quickly life evolved on earth. However, I have large problems with your estimate of how likely *intelligent* life is. Using the anthrophic principle, it seems like the chance of intelligent life could be reasonable put at a much, much higher value, given that it took 4.6 billion years to develop it here.

Eivind.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> This is only a guess based on the very limited data we have.

To brutally point out exactly how limited our data is, all data shows that, for rocky planets in a rougly Earth-like orbit (liquid water), fully 100% will develop not just life, but intelligent life.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Asimov's Nightfall Planet

Quite frankly, I'd rather visit one of Heinlein's planets. If I'm going to go to a world engaged in a planetary riot, I'd rather it be an anonymous, mask-wearing, Satyrnaliac sex riot.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Squiffy]

You'll have to give some actual proof if you want to say with certainty that I'm wrong.

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[John Hasler]

The subject is _intelligent_ life. Where did Britney Spears come in?

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[angel'o'sphere]

How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets could harbor life?

By knowing that the milkywa y(our galaxy) has 100 billion stars: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/MarissaWager.s html

And the one wekn ow most about it has 3 planets and at least one moon with the chance of life (albeit we know meanwhile that Venus is to hot and likely has none, but only a small change during planet forming might have made Venus a paradise as well)


How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets that harbor life have 'significant life'? (Whatever that is.)

With 100 billion suns, you can choose any small number you like, liek e.g.: 0.000000000001 - 0.000000000001 (the last number we know for sure) to estimate the number of planets with life.


How do you deduce, using common sense, that a few in a thousand planets with 'significant life' have 'intelligent' life?

E.g. because most life is intelligent? Apes and dolphines, horses, elephants, dogs .... plenty of those animals are intelligent, even if they are not outragous smart. Or you simply use the same numerical approach like above: we know that 1 out of 100 billion suns harbours intelligent life ... common sense says: its far to unlikely to believe its the only one.

angel'o'sphere

ISR

[Daemonstar]

In Soviet Russia, space telescope looks at YOU!

Re:ISR

[Eudial]

In Soviet Russia, space telescope looks at YOU!

Right, in this part of the world we've got surveillance cameras to do that.

Re:ISR

[xate]

AND in our current United Soviet States.

Blue is the new red!

Re:ISR

[Anonymous Coward]

"United Soviet States"

Well it's obvious you never lived in the USSR. The US is far, FAR from that, no matter how you try to spin it.

Re:ISR

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, the US is much worse!

Re:ISR

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey pass some of that kool-aid you got there, you must be on cloud nine with that good shit!

well if they won't do it...

[Wizzerd911]

I think the best way to contact aliens and let them know we are here is to build a giant billboard about 10x bigger than the sun that says "Hey aliens, people live here" and park it right outside out solar system. That way when they're looking at us with their giant telescopes, they'd see it and know. I'm sure we could get pepsi to sponsor that billboard, they sponsor anything. As for us seeing other intelligent life, just watch for planets to spontaniously blow themselves up. I'm sure we'll almost do that a few times in the future looking at the past so logically some aliens have to do it.

Re:well if they won't do it...

[blueZhift]

As for us seeing other intelligent life, just watch for planets to spontaniously blow themselves up.

Sadly, that may not be a bad idea. So assuming that we do not ourselves generate this kind of signature, we may be able to see something in a decade or two. Looking for extraterrestrial nuclear detonations would probably make a fine grad school project!

Re:well if they won't do it...

[Wizzerd911]

speaking of projects, we could create a bunch of giant explosions that spell out something. That would definitely get aliens' attention. Kinda makes you wonder why we haven't spotted any supernovas all going off at once in the shape of an alien smiley face, lol.

Re:well if they won't do it...

[Guysmiley777]

Looking for extraterrestrial nuclear detonations would probably make a fine grad school project!

Wouldn't that be kind of like listening for an ant fart 100 miles away when you're at a heavy metal concert?

Lots of noise

Or were you being sarcastic?

Re:well if they won't do it...

[Mindwarp]

Looking for extraterrestrial nuclear detonations would probably make a fine grad school project!

GRB's (Gamma Ray Bursts) were first detected when U.S. satellites put into space to monitor the U.S.S.R. for nuclear detonations were pointed away from the Earth (they were testing the satellites detectors for false positives, and instead found gigantic gamma ray events coming from the edge of the observable universe.)

Re:well if they won't do it...

[Ruie]

That way when they're looking at us with their giant telescopes, they'd see it and know. I'm sure we could get pepsi to sponsor that billboard, they sponsor anything.

With that attitude, don't go asking why Earth is listed "see Pepsi" in next edition of Hitchhikers guide.

Re:well if they won't do it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, nuclear weapons are powerful on a human scale, but less so on an astronomical scale. Consider the scale of nuclear weapons just in relation to the Earth. The Earth receives an amount of energy from sunlight totalling approximately 43 megatons (TNT equivelent) *per second*. It's not even worth comparing that to the energy output of the Sun (which is many times more energy than the sum total of all nuclear arsenals in the world, per nanosecond).

Re:well if they won't do it...

[blueZhift]

Detecting nuclear explosions on an extrasolar planet would certainly be challenging, but I suspect that it is possible with the proper spectral analysis. Given the talk of doing spectral analysis of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, picking up the spikes created by nuclear detonations may not be so far fetched. The real trick would probably be to be actually observing when they occured. Though I imagine that if a spectral analysis of the atmosphere is possibly, the elements left behind by a global nuclear exchange could probably be detected.

Mendelbrot set model of the universe

[LiquidCoooled]

An infinite number of linked entities.
I doubt anything will sway this conception in my mind.

Re:Mendelbrot set model of the universe

[charlesbakerharris]

An infinite number of linked entities.

I doubt anything will sway this conception in my mind.

You sure that's not the shrooms talking?

Re:Mendelbrot set model of the universe

[LiquidCoooled]

Nope, just seen plenty of natural fractals.
Its not accidental that there is order within the chaos.

Working on it!

[ThankfulJosh]

I work for the Shuttle program. The current plan is to send up a Hubble repair mission. Can't say when, but it's definitely planned.

Re:Working on it!

[OakDragon]

I work for the Shuttle program.

Hey, can you snag me some of those NASA ash trays? Sweet!

Re:Working on it!

[jimstapleton]

I work for the Shuttle program

The -2 from OT mods will be worth it for saying this: YOU ROCK.

Re:Working on it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for keeping the dream alive. :)

Re:Working on it!

[bhima]

Well, What the fuck is the story with the hubble origins probe?

Re:Working on it!

[LordVader717]

Well, that isn't exactly top-secret information is it?

I was wodering though, considering how much technology has advanced in recent years, would we be able to launch a much better telescope, and would we have more bang for the buck?

Re:Working on it!

[Anonymous Coward]

. . .but then there would be no need for a manned space program.

Circular logic at it's best.

Re:Working on it!

[OrangeTide]

I would hope that repairing the existing telescope would be cheaper than putting up a new one. And ideally I think we all would like multiple Hubble-class telescopes going at once. I wish there was some way to save the Hubble, maybe put it in a museum or something. So little space history has been preserved because it is not economical to do so.

If we save the hubble, maybe 100 years from now they will have coated it with diamond-polymer and put it on the playground at the city museum for the kids to climb on.

Re:Working on it!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I would hope that repairing the existing telescope would be cheaper than putting up a new one"

the estimate for a Hubble repair mission is $1.7 billion-$2.4 billion:

http://www.space.com/news/ft_hubble_cost_041207.ht ml

"For about the same amount of money, the report said, two new instruments that the robot would install on Hubble could instead be flown on a brand new telescope."

Re:Working on it!

[Anonymous Coward]

I do you one better. I've worked directly with the guys designing the hardware for such a mission (and who designed the Hubble repair mission), and they're currently at the stage of hoping someone funds it. They're selling it as an orbital sattelite repair/refueling/orbit changing tug (that just happens to be perfect for getting the hubble to an orbiting shuttle) currently. It's already been rejected as a "let's spend a couple billion for a new Smithsonian exhibit" mission.

Re:Working on it!

[OrangeTide]

but we would have a coverage gap if we wait for a new telescope?

I was sort of hoping we could run both telescopes, really.

Re:Working on it!

[bartron]

I work for the shuttle progeam. Aliens are real. Seriously...anyone can say they work for the shuttle program...doesn't mean what you say is true.

Re:Working on it!

[chris_mahan]

At least he's consistent: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177960&cid=147 61524

Re:Working on it!

[LordVader717]

That was an estimate for a robotic repair mission, which would have required alot of new development, and initially be more expensive than sending the shuttle (although probably not by much)

Since then the idea of the robotic mission has been rejected. Personally, I'd have liked to have seen it happen despite the costs, because the amount that would have been learnt would be a huge gain for future missions of that kind, and they would be much cheaper. It just seems a waste to send astronauts up for something that could be don by a machine.

Re:Working on it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah? Well I've actually had sex, with another, living, female, human.

16 -- billions

[GungaDan]

Fuck my accountant. I'm getting an astronomer.

Re:16 -- billions

[xate]

Astronomers can be creative, accountants can't.

Re:16 -- billions

[ecklesweb]

Astronomers can be creative, accountants can't.

Ever hear of Enron?

Re:16 -- billions

[Hinhule]

Apparently you have not seen The Producers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_accounting

Re:16 -- billions

[lhbtubajon]

Are you kidding? It's almost exactly the opposite!

You've never heard of "creative accounting", I take it. It was in all the papers a few years back.

Re:16 -- billions

[iamlucky13]

Nice. But getting past the joke for anyone who may be confused:

If you observe a field of 100 stars and find that 16 of them have planets, then it is not unreasonable to speculate on the extension that 16% or so of all stars have planets. Thus from a galaxy with 200 billion stars, billions of them may have planets.

Furthermore, none of this precludes the possibility that more stars may have planets than don't.

Unfortunately, however, Worldcom didn't really have more cash than their independent auditors found, but that's another story.

Re:16 -- billions

[myth24601]

Astronomers can be creative, accountants can't.

Ever hear of Enron?

Those were Tax attorneys.

Re:16 -- billions

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck my accountant.

Is she hot? maybe I will...

Damn you astronomers

[Anonymous Coward]

Now IPv6 sounds a little tight.

Re:Damn you astronomers

[drinkypoo]

It won't matter until we invent tachyon communications (or functional linked particles) and can communicate across interstellar distances anyway. 2^128 addresses ought to do at least until then. Then again, that's what they said about IPv4, I'm sure :)

Re:Damn you astronomers

[Anonymous Coward]

/me nitpicks...

* (expt 2 64)

18,446,744,073,709,551,616

from right to left: hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions.

18 quintillion, 446 quadrillion, 744 trillion, 73 billion, 709 million, 551 thousand, six hundred and 16 IP addresses.

That's quite a lot.

Re:Damn you astronomers

[tsalaroth]

actually, they've recently teleported light using entanglement. light can be used for communication.

ansibles!

okie dokie

[j00r0m4nc3r]

16 down, 92,349,177,382 to go....

Ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

In a galaxy with 100s of billions of stars? Who'd have thought?

duh!

[jbeaupre]

Let's see ... 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy. Gee, you'd only need 1 in 200 stars to have a planet for there to be billions of planets. That doesn't seem like a stretch considering how many binary stars there are (5-10%) that there might be other chunks of stuff floating around stars.

Re:duh!

[mooingyak]

Even lower -- 1 in 200 if every star has only one planet. If we go with an average of 5, then it's just 1 in 1000.

Re:duh!

[John Hasler]

Except that it is beginning to look like most stars have planets. If so the total is more like a trillion planets.

Billions of peanuts in Milky Way??

[davidwr]

Oh wait, that's the 1-AU-wide super-sized Snickers bar.

Re:Billions of peanuts in Milky Way??

[blake3737]

Hey now, we've had these in the US for a while, I beleive they're called "Fun Size" snickers...

They're telling us this now?

[Rhyth]

16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy

Could this not have been inferred by the fact there are seven others in plain sight?

Re:They're telling us this now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not with the sort of statistical assurances that you'd like; without study there can be no assurances that Sol is typical of most stars, or that its planets are characteristic of stars of its type.

Re:They're telling us this now?

[failure-man]

Yes, it can be inferred from that, but it cannot be proven the way scientists like to.

Re:They're telling us this now?

[maxwell demon]

Well, given that we just lost one planet by redefinition, probably they feared the others might sooner or later lose their planet status as well, e.g. Jupiter and Saturn could be considered too big for a planet, Mercury does not even have an independend rotation and thus might just be considered a moon of the sun, also maybe one day having a moon will be mandatory to be considered a planet ...

Re:They're telling us this now?

[Rhyth]

I thought they decided that a moon was a body in hydrostatic equilibrium whose barycenter around any planet was within the given planet. I doubt Jupiter and Saturn could ever be considered 'too big', considering the next step up is a body that can maintain hydrogen fusion I believe.

Re:They're telling us this now?

[kfg]

Could this not have been inferred by the fact there are seven others in plain sight?

Yes, yes it could. The inference even makes a perfectly dandy working hypothesis for testing.

But test it; it might be wrong. I'd be surprised if it were, but the surprises are where the real science happens. Where you encounter things you did not expect and are forced to upgrade your models to account for them.

It can even be infered that because one of the seven planets that is in plain sight has life that out of billions of other planets one in seven of them will have life, but I wouldn't go around doing anything so rash as to believe that one in seven planets has life.

In fact, in this specific instance, there are good reasons for infering that planets in the galactic bulge are not suitable for sustaining life. Radiation and the general chaos of the local enviroment would tend to rip combining molecules apart faster than they could recombine into stable, self-reproductive units.

But test, because it might be:

Life, Jim! But not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.

In fact, I've always thought the assumption of "Earth like" planets being necessary to support life was a pretty stupid one. If nothing else oxygen is pretty nasty stuff, and I infer that life based on it is comparitively rare.

KFG

Re:They're telling us this now?

[inviolet]

Mercury does not even have an independend rotation and thus might just be considered a moon of the sun . . .

That's no moon.

Re:They're telling us this now?

[Noxx]

That's no moon. ...it's a space station.

It's too big to be a space station.

I'm sensing the presence of a Starbucks. Turn the ship around.

Yeah...I think you may be right...

Re:They're telling us this now?

[Chosen Reject]

There's klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow.

Everyone join in!

Only going forward 'cause we can't find reverse!

Re:They're telling us this now?

[kfg]

Watch it, Boy-o, or I might come in peace.

KFG

Billions?

[rlp]

I'd like to know how they extrapolated the existence of billions of planets based on possibly detecting sixteen. Seems like a bit of a leap. Of course, I hope they're right, as the fraction of stars with planets would increase and this is one of the parameters in the Drake equation.

Re:Billions?

[cowscows]

This is one of those things where just about anyone even mildly educated about how we think our solar systems formed would say, "Well, duh, planet formation seems pretty standard, so with hundreds of millions of stars out there, there should be billions of planets."

As long as you assume that the circumstances that lead to the creation of our solar system were not particularly unusual or unique (arguably a reasonable assumption), then basic common sense points towards similar things happening for many of the other stars out there.

So keeping that in mind, the next question is, how does the number of planets in our solar system compare to the average. It's just starting to become possible for us to detect and hopefully count planets around other stars, so hopefully that number will become less hazy.

Like I said, a little knowledge of the science we have so far plus some common sense would generally lead a person to expect planets around many stars out there. Nature, however, has surprised us before. So any time we find planets somewhere besides here, it just reaffirms our confidence in our theories.

Re:Billions?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was some doubt about how common planets might be in the CENTRAL part of the galaxy, where most of the stars are. They found these planets in that area. This increases the probability of a very large number of planets, not just a bunch in the Milky Way's outer reaches (where we are).

BILLIONS and billions

[Gothmolly]

Thank you, Carl.

"Cosmos" was a kickass show.

Re:BILLIONS and billions

[Mr. Slippery]

"Cosmos" was a kickass show.

...during which, Carl Sagan never said "billions and billions". That was actually a Johnny Carson spoof. (For you kids out there, Carson was Leno's predecessor.)

Re:BILLIONS and billions

[Gothmolly]

Any geek worth his decoder ring knows this.

files?

[thelost]

files for what, divorce, tax credits?

Re:files?

[Intron]

Read the whole sentence. It won't be around until 2013, so clearly it filed for an extension!

Oooh. That reminds me. Oct 15th is coming up.

Why the assumption?

[CODiNE]

It seems like they're waiting for lots of proof before we assume there are many other planets out there. Why not start with the assumption that our solar system is nothing special and that most stars have planets around them? I mean if you have to start with one assumption or the other why not assume this is common instead of assuming it's rare? Any scientific reason behind this sort of thinking? I can see the difference between PROVING there are many planets and predicting, but from what I've read before on this it seems many didn't expect to find planets everywhere.

Re:Why the assumption?

[paladinwannabe2]

It's because you can't draw conclusions from a sample size of 1. Suppose that you've spent your whole life in a blue room. You know there are other rooms out there- but can you assume that they are all blue? Can you assume that most of them are blue? Even if there are other blue rooms, would they be the same shade (Cerulean, let's say) as yours?

Even assuming that we are not unique, there is a big difference between thousands of stars with planets and billions of stars with planets.

Re:Why the assumption?

[smash]

I see what you're getting at, but on the other hand, why should you presume that you live in the only *blue* room in existance, if you know for a fact that there are more than thousands of trillions of other rooms out there?

Re:Why the assumption?

[paladinwannabe2]

You're missing my point entirely. My point is that making assumptions about things you know nothing about it stupid. It's just as stupid to assume that no other rooms are blue as it is to assume that all rooms are blue. When you are clueless, it's better to just admit it and try to find some evidence for something than pretend you know the answer without any data to support you.

Re:Why the assumption?

[noigmn]

Religion.

billions

[Randle_Revar]

N = N* fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x fL

/darn slashdot's lack of <sub> and (some?/most?) html entities

Eeek!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Harbouring what form of life exactly.

Hydrogues! :-o

Re:Eeek!

[Neurowiz]

Off topic comment - that is one great series! The only problem is that all of KA's books, he just goes on FOREVER!

Re:Eeek!

[Quiet_Desperation]

They're quick reads, though, unlike, say, a Wheel Of Time book. And the plot actually advances with each book.

life??

[bcrowell]

The slant on the slashdot summary is kind of goofy. Actually, the central bulge of the galaxy is a lousy place to look for life. There's a good book about this: Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by Ward and Brownlee. It looks to me like the author of TFA went out of his way to highlight the life angle, which wasn't that significant, and then the slashdot submitter highlighted it even more, as if it was the main point.

Re:life??

[jeffsenter]

Yeah I used the life angle to get it posted, but there is a little bit of substance to this increased chance of life thinking. Even though the central bulge is not the best place to find life, finding plenty of planets in the central bulge, where large scale planet formation was somewhat in question, suggests that planets are formed around stars everywhere, not just in our galactic neighborhood. If planets are formed everywhere as opposed to just in select parts of the galaxy there are more planets generally and planets present in parts of the galaxy that are more hospitable to the formation of life.

It is not just the area of the galaxy around earth that has planets. Planets are probably helpful for the formation of life. More planets more chances for life.

Re:life??

[meringuoid]

Actually, the central bulge of the galaxy is a lousy place to look for life.

True: it's full of lethal radiation. But keep it quiet. Imagine what would happen if the puppeteers got wind of this!

One less

[PPH]

There's one less planet now. We demoted Pluto.

... spread out over Billions of Years!

[redelm]

The problem with multi-species science fiction is that it assumes contemporaneous (nearly synchronous!) technological development. Yet development is entirely an artifact without obvious time-based causes. And seems to proceed very swiftly on the geologic time scale.

SETI's odds are very poor on this score.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never paid attention to Star Trek. The unequal developemental status of different planets is one of the primary reasons behind the Prime Directive. The more advanced civilizations typically don't even make contact with a planet until it has reached an appropriately high level of technology (such as when the Vulcans made contact with Earth once Cochran suceeded in faster than light travel in First Contact).

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a theory that no lifeform will evolve to become significantly more intelligent or technologically advanced than humans, because at the level of intelligence we've reached an increase doesn't offer us an evolutionary advantage. We're already able to survive and breed, and indeed dominate the planet. And as a society gets more advanced in terms of technology, its members require less and less intelligence to survive and breed. This will eventually lead to a slow decay in intelligence which slows or stops the technological advance as well. The species will ultimately end up in some kind of a permanent, static equilibrium state if it survives long enough. We may be just a couple of centuries away from this ourselves.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[jbourj]

Think about the fraction of time during which Earth has had life, compared to the length of time during which that life has had technology capable of 'space science:' it's about 10^(-7) (you can gain a few factors of 10 if you think that our civilization will outlast the next dinosaur-wiping-out-sized mass extinction).

So, crudely, even if there were billions of planets with life on them in our galaxy, only a few tens or hundreds would have 'intellegent ENOUGH' life today.

(All sorts of caveats and assumptions made in the estimate, but it is not a bad back-of-the-envelope number).

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Grishnakh]

I don't know about this. Certain lifeforms might want to engineer themselves to be more intelligent than nature made them, and have innate qualities that make them continually strive to improve, rather than become lazy and decay like humans. Look at the Asgard in SG-1.

Just because humans are lazy doesn't mean everyone else will be the same way. But I think you're right about humans: we're headed for stagnation, or even worse, another Dark Ages.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[caudron]

SETI's odds are very poor on this score.

Without commenting on SETI's chances of success (because that's just idle speculation for both of us) it's worth noting that your claim implicitly assumes a natural denoument in technologically advanced species. You seem to be advocating that there is naturally both a start and a stop to advanced species.

Not to sound too "Law and Order" about it, but I object. Facts not in evidence. We have no idea what happens when a species advances beyond the point at which we are currently advances, let alone do we know what happens statistically to those civilizations over the course of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of iteratons of the pattern.

That a civilization started millenia before us in no way indicates that they aren't still around to interact with.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you can't know that you're right.

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[owlnation]

The problem with multi-species science fiction is that it assumes contemporaneous (nearly synchronous!) technological development.

Most yes, but not all. Babylon 5 for one had its whole plot revolve around the fact that the species were NOT on the same technological level.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this what basically Nietzsche and Hitler said needed to happen?

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Grishnakh]

Um, no, I don't think so. Nietzsche rambled something about a "superman", who IIRC was just someone who ignored the rest of society and did as he pleased. Hitler wanted selective breeding (eugenics). Selective breeding takes forever to achieve any significant result, and requires that you make better choices than just looking at people's skin and hair colors as Hitler would have done.

I guess you're not a Stargate viewer, but I believe in one of the episodes with the Asgard (a short alien race that looks exactly like the "greys" many abductees claim to have been abducted by), "Thor" tells the SG-1 team that the Asgard had genetically engineered themselves to be the way they are now, and also had changed themselves so much that they didn't reproduce normally, but instead created clones and then transferred their consciousness to the clone when one's body was near the end of its useful life.

It seems to me that if someone wanted to significantly "improve" the human race, like greatly increasing intelligence, or eliminating mental deficiencies that cause people to want to harm each other, the best way to do so would be through genetic engineering (although we don't currently have the ability to do this type of engineering at the present time). Of course, any such activity is fraught with all kinds of problems and concerns, as many sci-fi stories have pointed out and warned us about.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a glaring flaw in this theory that's obvious to even me: It doesn't include intraspecies conflict. Subgroups within humanity are going to continue to compete with each other; it's called "war," along with less drastic forms of competition. As long as even a single individual has the ability to dominate another individual, there will be a reason to continue to develop technology, if only to provide more effective means to destroy each other. Just look around you today if you think there's no reason to continue improving our technology...

The question then becomes more a matter of whether or not we develop mechanisms so powerful, that the destruction of the species is inevitable or not. For example, if energy becomes so plentiful, a single individual can destroy the entire planet, before we've managed to move beyond it. Since single individuals are not necessarily rational, such a capability is inevitably abused.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nietzsche rambled something about a "superman", who IIRC was just someone who ignored the rest of society and did as he pleased

Few mere mortals correctly ever interpret philosophy. This is certianly not what he said. I could try to explain it, but I fear my effort (many pages of typing) would be wasted. Keep digging or find someone with the time and wisdom to help you out.

Selective breeding takes forever to achieve any significant result, and requires that you make better choices than just looking at people's skin and hair colors as Hitler would have done.

Wrong. Greece, (ancient) Rome, and ancient Pagan societies practiced eugenics. Character and physical traits were selected for certian purposes, such as warriors, and these people were encouraged to breed with the healthiest and best women. Even ancient India did this - their caste system forbid intermarraige between castes. The priests did not breed with sudras and rarely would someone from a lower caste exhibit the spiritual, emotional, or character traits of someone form a higher caste.

Eugenics does not take a long time to pan out - if you select the most intelligent people or the most strong people and breed these kind of people together, you will start having generations that continue to reflect these traits. Genetics 101.

Hitler wished to select people of certian skin and hair colors becuase these were the people who represented the bulk of the Germanic stock. Negro people were not part of German culture, neither were Asiatics or anyone else. Why would have Hitler wanted to integrate genetic and cultural heritage from people foreign to Germany? Regardless of what you think of what he did, Hitler wanted to preserve German culture and heritage.

Race and Evolution is one of the most ignored concepts there are in science. Races evolved divergently from other races. Racial purity represents the evolutionary refinement that your people have over the course of many thousands of years because of the adaptaory pressures of the surrounding environment. Mixing traits that would have never developed together would reduce the frequency of the traits that developed out of that evolutionary process - until you get a grey goo of humans who look amorphus and have inferior traits.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Anonymous Coward]

That totally ignores what he said.

He did not say we have reached that zenith yet ("We may be just a couple of centuries away from this ourselves").

Yes, we are still affected by the occasional flu or the occasional bear attack in our quiet and comfortable suburban communities, but do you think any of that is going to seriously threaten human population? The normal environmental pressures of adaptory evolution have largely stopped and the selection of people with intelligence or strength (for example) have largely stopped also because technology enables people who would normally be weak or less capable to become unnaturaly able.

What is happening is that people with genetic defects, people with low intelligences and mental defects (I'm not talking about Down Syndrome, I'm just referring to the normal distribution of psychological traits within the population) can successfully breed in large numbers. Nature is no longer eliminating the weak or less capable; those people can now survive and propogate themselves.

We're already seeing this happen, the question is, how far will it go and what are the consquences? High intelligence will appear as a trait less and less often.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[5c11]

The problem with multi-species science fiction is that it assumes contemporaneous (nearly synchronous!) technological development.

There's a novel by Stanislaw Lem (http://lem.pl/) called Fiasco that involves humanity's attempt to contact the one species in the universe that's both close enough to travel to and has a relatively similar level of intelligence and technological development. In other words, our one chance to ever contact another intelligent species, for the reasons you mention. Although, in case you couldn't guess by the title, things don't go incredibly well.

It's a fantastic book though, and I'd highly recommend it. (Or anything else by Lem, for that matter.)

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, it seems you completly missed the parents point, he isn't talking about other species, he is talking about competition within our own species. The stupid will be dominated by the intelligent, it holds more true now then in the past. So most likely selection on intelligence is actually increasing.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is assuming that other technologically-advanced lifeforms follow this pattern. It's a bit egoistic to say that aliens are just as (or more) flawed that we are. Interestingly, even though the humans appear to come out on top at the end of most Star Trek episodes, maybe a different species would reach an alternate conclusion.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[GWBasic]

What if all of the species have a common ancestor? Ever consider the evolutionary implications of the human race populating distant solar systems over the next millenia? We'll become different species, and eventually some will forget that we evolved from a common ancestor on earth... This could be accellerated if colonies use genetic engineering to adapt to other planets.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[John Hasler]

> You seem to be advocating that there is naturally both a start and a stop to
> advanced species.

To become invisible to SETI a species need not stop existing. It need only stop using narrowband radio. Perhaps 100 years from now we will still be here but will be using only UWB (or perhaps we will have given up radio entirely in favor of something much better).

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[John Hasler]

> ...or even worse, another Dark Ages.

You mean a period of social stagnation affecting only part of one continent for a few centuries? That's not so terrible.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Eivind]

You miss the point.

In Star-Trek the "technologicaly immature" species are like a.d. 1500 on earth, or at worst like the stone-age some 10.000 years ago. 10000 years is a blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Grishnakh]

Dude, you're an idiot. Do you have a swastika tattooed on your shaved head?

The priests did not breed with sudras [sic] and rarely would someone from a lower caste exhibit the spiritual, emotional, or character traits of someone form a higher caste.

This is just stupid. If you actually knew any Sutras, you'd know there's no real difference between them and Brahmans, except the idiotic caste status.

Eugenics does not take a long time to pan out - if you select the most intelligent people or the most strong people and breed these kind of people together, you will start having generations that continue to reflect these traits. Genetics 101.

Any real scientist will tell you that intelligence is far more influenced by upbringing than by heredity. Only real problems (like Down's Syndrome) are caused by genetics.

Why would have Hitler wanted to integrate genetic and cultural heritage from people foreign to Germany? Regardless of what you think of what he did, Hitler wanted to preserve German culture and heritage.

By torturing and gassing everyone that didn't fit? Yeah, that's just great. If you want to keep "outsiders" out of your country, that's one thing (assuming you were there first). Executing them all is quite another.

Mixing traits that would have never developed together would reduce the frequency of the traits that developed out of that evolutionary process - until you get a grey goo of humans who look amorphus and have inferior traits.

Any real geneticist would tell you the best traits come from breeding with large gene pools. What you're advocating is called "inbreeding". It's fine if you want a funny-looking dog for some reason, and are willing to live with high chances of genetic disease and generally decreased lifespan, but everyone knows that mutt dogs are almost always healthier and live longer than purebreds. The same applies to humans; just ask the European royal families about Hemophilia.

BTW, you might want to consider seeking phsychological help.

Re:... spread out over Billions of Years!

[Grishnakh]

That's not what a modern Dark Ages would look like. 1500 years ago, that's what happened because communications technology was nonexistent (other than carrying letters by horse, or maybe by carrier pigeon for some people) and economies were not interconnected very much.

Today, economies are highly connected and dependent upon each other. A big collapse in one place affects many other places. For instance, a sudden collapse in the American economy, even though we don't actually make anything anymore and just spend all our time litigating each other and marketing to each other, would cause big problems in China, since we're their biggest marketplace for their cheap goods. Also, people are far more mobile than they used to be thanks to improved transportation, so desperate people would probably be trying to emigrate to better places.

Overall, it'd be a big mess I think.

O2 based life

[boristdog]

Isaac Asimov has a good essay on why life on earth is the way it is. I believe it is in the book "Only A Trillion" but I may be wrong since I've read a lot of his books.

He basically explains how our oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere was formed, and why it was easy for it to form.

Then he explains why life developed to use oxygen, because it was the easiest and most efficient way for it to develop, based on energy usage and complexity.

A really good book, written in the 1950's, I think. It answered a lot of my questions about why we use the super-flame-o gas oxygen to live.

Re:O2 based life

[kfg]

Isaac Asimov has a good essay. . .

He always does.

He basically explains how our oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere was formed. . .

With anaerobic life as a precursor? Leading to life that didn't take its oxygen in free gaseous form?

Then he explains why life developed to use oxygen. . .

I would be loath to predict the abscence of oxygen based life in the universe.

KFG

star gate

[Joe The Dragon]

how meny of them have stargates on them?

Re:star gate

[Anonymous Coward]

meny, meny.

In fact, probably ell of them, however meny that is.

but...

[joe 155]

How come we'll believe someone when they say that there are billions of planets in the galaxy, but when we're told that paint is wet we have to touch it - just to make sure

Re:but...

[Woldry]

Well, I'm inclined to touch the planets too - just to make sure. But alas, my arms aren't that long. :-)

Re:but...

[Skreems]

I don't have to touch it... maybe this is just your own personal problem?

Re:but...

[Plutonite]

Uh, I'm not really sure about this, but it's probably because the science agencies who spent billions of dollars and years of research on space technology are less likely to bullsh*t you about the nature of the universe than, say, the guys at McDonalds.

But yes of course, you have a valid point - Which is why I still believe the earth is flat, we're at the centre of the universe, and those bastards at NASA scammed us with that so called moon landing.

No hard feelings :)

on the topic of distant planets and possible life.

[jimstapleton]

The latter having been mentioned in a few responses. Tieing it in to other slashdot topics of interest - if we recieved signals from alien planets, that were copywrited tv broadcasts (or their equivalent), what would be the legal stance on recordings and selling?

Would DRM be an issue?

Drake Equation Parameters

[Ranger]

I'm curious how this will help nail down some of the parameters for the famous Drake Equation N = R* * Fp * Ne * Fl * Fi * Fc * L.This new guestimate will help narrow down f sub p, the fraction of stars that have planets, and go some distance to narrowing down n sub e, the number of planets that can support life per star. As our resolution power increases the better able we will be able to come up with better guestimates.

The answer might be zero anyway. After proposing the equation Fermi pointed out if intelligent life is so common, where are they? A space faring civilization travelling at 1% the speed of light would cross the galaxy in ten million years. Relative to the age of the Milky Way Galaxy, ten million years is a very short period of time. This is called the Fermi Paradox. Where are they?

I think we just don't know enough yet and we haven't been looking for very long. I think our technology will help us give a more accurate answer to the Drake equation within the next 100 years. We may even find evidence of life on other worlds when we can detect free oxygen on worlds in habitable zones light years away. And that could happen within the next decade or two.

For those people who say the aliens are already here, I would ask would an intelligent space faring civilization travel hundreds of light years just to kidnap some redneck farmer and give him an anal probe and then make crop circles in his fields? I suppose if it was some alien fratboy hazing ritual they would.

Re:Drake Equation Parameters

[Mr. Slippery]

After proposing the equation Fermi pointed out if intelligent life is so common, where are they? A space faring civilization travelling at 1% the speed of light would cross the galaxy in ten million years. Relative to the age of the Milky Way Galaxy, ten million years is a very short period of time. This is called the Fermi Paradox. Where are they?

The so-called "Fermi Paradox" seems a weak argument against the existance of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

First: life, intelligent life, spacefaring civilization, and interstellar-faring civilizations are quite different things. The last may never be practical, not just for technical but for biological and sociological reasons. The universe could be filled with civilizations that fill their own star systems, but aside from an occasional uncrewed probe, never leave.

Second: how would we know the signs of interstellar civilization? Our models are founded on the assumption that what we see is natural. Maybe gamma-ray bursts are wormhole construction blasts. Maybe the "missing mass" is billions of stars each contained in some Dyson-sphere like container, doing something unimaginable to the energy they collect so that there's no radiation visible to us. I'm not seriously proposing these, just pointing out that if there were a galactic civilization out there doing some stellar hyper-engineering, we'd assume it's traces were results of natural processes.

Third: any civilization that survives long enough to become interstellar, is going to have to develop an ecological ethic, else they'd have choked on their own shit before they got off-planet. If they learned to leave few footprints on their own planet, maybe they carry that into space. (Yes, this is the opposite of my second option above. For more speculation along these lines' David Brin's Uplift series is a fun read.)

Re:Drake Equation Parameters

[ucblockhead]

I think I can say that N must be greater than zero given the mere fact that I think.

It could, of course, be negligibly small...but if it was zero, there'd have been no one around to write the equation it in the first place.

Re:Drake Equation Parameters

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you go out of your way to prove your existance to a cockroach? Same thing for more intelligent ETs.

Re:Drake Equation Parameters

[Randseed]

Or they could have some kind of "prime directive." Or they could consider us too primitive to bother with, the same way we might not bother with a colony of ants. Or they might have been here a long time ago, done whatever research they wanted, considered the planet uninteresting, and taken it off their list of tourist destinations. Or their thought processes might be so completely different from ours that they don't even recognize us as alive, or us recognize them as alive. Or they might not feel compelled to explore as humans do, and therefore simply expand out from their homeworld in a sphere; depending on how far away that homeworld is, they might not be here yet even if they've been doing it for millions of years. Or they might do some combination of the above, but also have decided not to reproduce uncontrolled like humans do.

Re:Drake Equation Parameters

[Five Bucks!]

I hate the Drake

Why James Webb ST?

[helioquake]

The 16 are planet candidates at this point, until verified by spectroscopic measurement of their parent stars' wobbles, which probably can't be done until the James Webb Space Telescope files in 2013.

A detection of Doppler motion due to planetary perturbation is miniscule. It could take an accuracy of less than one km/s, or more likely a few dozen meter per second. It is extremely hard to make a high resolution spectroscopic instrument for a space satellite to meet that criterion. Calibrating out all the uncertainties in the motion of the satellite would become an issue as well. That said, I don't think the James Webb ST would do much in this topic.

Besides, the designers for JWST don't strongly desire to have a spectrographic instrument on board the JWST. It may end up as a purely imaging mission, which is extremely boring for physicists.

The verification is better done with adaptive optics + Echelle grating at V, R or IR band from ground.

Re:Why James Webb ST?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that that was the *first* method of finding extrasolar planets, right? It turns out that a massive planet in a close orbit inflicts a lot of motion to the parent star. If you can get a clean enough spectrum, measuring the wobble of the absorption lines is almost trivial (they have 1m/s resolution now!). The only thing that makes this tricky when it comes to these particular stars is that they're so far away and in such a densely packed neighborhood that it's very hard to get clean spectral data.

Re:Why James Webb ST?

[helioquake]

The velocity resolution down to 1 m/s is not technologically demonstrated in space, AFAIK. I don't want to think about the size of a grazing element to put on board and then launch it into space in order to achieve such a goal...

I don't know if you ever worked on a satellite (I do), but absolute determination of the position and velocity vector of a satellite in space is not trivial. If they are to use the JWST to detect a Doppler shift associated to a planetary motion at a few m/s, then we may need to know the motion of the satellite at or better than 1 m/s or so. I don't think that's part of the criteria for the JWST mission (but then the defense technology is heavily involved with the construction of its main body, so you might know something that I don't??). ....

Someone like Geoff Marcy has done these 1 m/s detection (not trivial, but quite plausible) with Keck, etc. So it happens we do understand the motion of the Earth around the center of the Solar system and some minute vibration triggered by Earth. Terra firma makes it less difficult, IMHO.

7 day orbits?

[iamlucky13]

The article said these findings were based on 7 days of observations, using the transit method. In this method, the planet passes in front of the star, causing a very small, but sudden and periodic drop in the brightness of the star. Presumably, they don't claim to have a candidate unless they see multiple dimming events. If so, the longest possible orbit they could have observed is 7 days, meaning the planets are extremely close to their stars. Even their moons would be inhospitable.

However, as another poster pointed out, these systems may also harbor smaller planets in more favorable orbits. In fact, some researchers believe that smaller rocky worlds can only form with the assistance of disturbances created by the gas giants.

In contrast, other researchers are skeptical that planets can form at all in the inner regions of the galaxy because of the high star density. Even if they did, they might not be able to harbor life because of all the radiation from said stars.

As another poster pointed out, however, we don't necessarily know the limits of conditions that life may form. This is getting a rather fanciful, but perhaps high-temperature silicon-based rock monsters are real, like Season 4, episode 7 where Kirk fought the lava man with the Abe Lincoln avatar (just kidding, I made that up...or did I?).

Re:7 day orbits?

[jthayden]

Or a different planet passed by within the 7 day timeframe.

Anyone feel like calculating how often a planet passes another one in our solar system?

Re:7 day orbits?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is getting a rather fanciful, but perhaps high-temperature silicon-based rock monsters are real, like Season 4, episode 7 where Kirk fought the lava man with the Abe Lincoln avatar (just kidding, I made that up...or did I?).

It couldn't have been season 4, since the original Star Trek had only three seasons. I don't think Kirk actually fought the lava monsters... it was more that they had someone snooped through the Enterprise computers and were intrigued by the concepts of 'good' and 'evil'. And so decided to trick Kirk and Spock into participating in a good vs. evil all-star contest on the planetary surface. (iirc)

Teasers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Teasers are rich kids with nothing to do. They look for planets that no-one's made interstellar contact with yet and buzz them."

"Buzz them?"

"Yeah, buzz them. They land next to some unsuspecting soul whom no-one's ever going to believe and strut up and down in front of them wearing silly antennae on their heads and making 'beep beep' noises. Rather childish, really."

-Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Re:on the topic of distant planets and possible li

[Anonymous Coward]

Well as long at the origin of tyhe signals is more that 99 Light years away, the copyright will have run out and it will be public domain...no problem :P

Billions of planets

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though there is now proof there are billions of planets, the X-ians are going to call it fake and state that the Sun revolves around the Earth which just so happens to be the center of the Universe and no life on other planets because that's what some document written by a human tells them.

Re:Billions of planets

[Grishnakh]

Actually, they'll say that all this "proof" of billions of planets were just photons that were put in place by god to look like they had been traveling for thousands or millions of years, even though the universe is only 6000 years old, in order to test our faith.

So if you believe all this scientific evidence, and not the writing in the Bible that says that everything is only 6000 years old, then you don't have any faith and you're going to Hell.

Re:Billions of planets

[TranscendentalAnarch]

Yes, and those meteors falling down from the sky? That's just god kicking sand in our faces.

Re:Billions of planets

[Xybot]

That god(s) is certainly a tricky fellow. Imagine being able to conjure up all this extraordinary evidence, for the sole purpose of casting doubt on your own existence! I mean, you either accept that or the unlikely conclusion that some group of barbarians several millenia ago may have made some stuff up after eating unusually coloured mushrooms!

Re:Billions of planets

[Grishnakh]

You better watch out... your lack of faith has the devil preparing a place in hell just for you! Of course, that's only if christianity is the correct religion. My religion, Grishnakhism, says that if you're not a devout believer in Grishnakhism, you're going to hell (which consists for many people of sitting at a Windows computer for eternity and suffering through unending BSODs). In order to be a believer in my religion, you have to believe that everything was created 50 years ago by an Orc, and any evidence to the contrary was planted to test your faith. So far, no one's made it to heaven yet.

Common Sense.

[Eric Damron]

The parent post has serious logic flaws however; unless you believe that the characteristics of our solar system are very rare, common sense would tell you that just the quantity of solar systems out there make it improbable that we are alone.

We don't really have any data one way or the other that would conclusively tell us if the characteristics of our solar system are common, average or rare. But given the number of total solar systems even if they are rare we probably aren't the only intelligent life.

The parent post kind of reminded me of that movie that Jody Foster stared in. "Contact" I believe was the name. I don't remember the numbers but she stated that there are so many stars and if only some small percentage had planets and if only a small percentage of those could support life and if only a small percentage of those supported intelligent life then there were millions of planets with intelligent life. Maybe someone else remembers the exact quote.

Although not scientific, the Jody Foster line seems to be common sense. Common sense isn't always right but...

Only 8 planets...

[masnare]

Sorry guys, no matter what these people saw, there are only 8 planets -- not 16 -- and certainly not billions. From the IAU site:

RESOLUTION 5A The IAU therefore resolves that "planets" and other bodies in our Solar System, except satellites, be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:

(1) A "planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

(3) All other objects except satellites orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar-System Bodies".

(emphasis mine)

The page goes on to list the eight planets:

The eight "planets" are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

I can't help but think it's a pretty stupid requirement, but it is what it is...

Re:Only 8 planets...

[Anonymous Coward]

The IAU therefore resolves that "planets" and other bodies in our Solar System, except satellites, be defined into three distinct categories in the following way

Emphasis mine. This definition doesn't apply to exoplanets.

Re:on the topic of distant planets and possible li

[Grishnakh]

if we recieved signals from alien planets, that were copywrited tv broadcasts (or their equivalent), what would be the legal stance on recordings and selling?

Laws are only applicable if they can be enforced, so this all depends on how fast these aliens can send some Battlecruisers and Star Destroyers over here.

MOAR

[ajpr]

There's probably trillions of planets given that there are ~3x10^11 stars in the Galaxy.

Just a publicity stunt

[nroose]

This stuff is really so far from real science that it seem to me to be simply a publicity stunt. Life probably can't exist in the inner region of the galaxy anyway, due to high cosmic radiation. Does anyone find it a bit convenient that the estimated life left of the Sun is the same as the estimated age of the Sun? The truth is that we really don't know how long the Sun will last, we really don't know how many alien civilizations there are out there, and we really have no chance any time soon of finding these things out. Yes, it would be nice to have Hubble forever.

Re:Just a publicity stunt

[webheaded]

Who's to say that life can't exist in that radiation? Like you said, we know a whole lot of nothing, so there's quite a few things that are possible considering how little we actually know at this point.

the galactic core

[Phoenix666]

i am not an astronomer. never taken an astronomy class. rank amateur here.

but i do know that we're far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the milkyway galaxy. there are a lot of stars in the sky, but they're really just pretty pinpricks that you can play connect-the-dots with. sure, they provide a little light, but not much.

so i wonder what it would be like on one of those planets orbiting suns in the galactic core. would the relative proximity of so many more stars raise the ambient radiation level appreciably? would it be as bright at night as moonlight here, even without a moon? would the metabolism and life cycle of the flora and fauna there be accelerated relative to us because there's more energy being put into their systems?

Re:the galactic core

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

would the metabolism and life cycle of the flora and fauna there be accelerated relative to us...?

What does that mean? Is a shrew accelerated relative to a human? Is a penguin accelerated relative to a sloth?

If the universe is infinite....

[Anonymous Coward]

Then there is no intelligent life at all.

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole universe is also zero.

Thus, any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

Re:If the universe is infinite....

[Anonymous Coward]

The density is non zero. As a matter of semantics I bet (organisms) per Yotta AU^3 is quite a large number in fact.

Life More Common on Moons

[mbrod]

I think finding life on moons of large planets (like Jupiter) is going to be more likely than finding life on planets. Already we can see in our own solar system a number of moons that it looks like have ice on the outside and many more that have ice and likely water on the inside from geothermic processes warming the ice into water.

The most common form of life in the universe will likely end up being one that survives well under water near thermal vents. These are much more shielded to the many harsh problems surface dwelling life is.

In Soviet Russia

[Matt Perry]

How about we retire this old joke. It's fairly worn out at this point.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[smash]

Yeah, bring back the petrification, nakedness, hot grits and natalie portman stuff :D

Proof of Intelligent Life far superior than us

[Seiruu]

They haven't contacted us.

Im Sorry Dave, I can't count that high...

[blake3737]

Oh my god.. it's full of stars!

Which Standard?

[BigAssRat]

Are they using the new or old standard for planets while defining these 16?

may i be the first to say "well duh!"

[smash]

Why is it that those in the scientific community have been presuming for the past few decades that our solar system is so unbelievably special becaue it has planets?

We don't even really have a confirmed number of planets for our own solar system yet (we know of what, 9 or 10), and they presume on the basis of "we can't see them" that most of the rest of the galaxy's systems have no planets?

Yes, I know they have methods of detecting certain planets on remote systems, but I doubt that they're even somewhat accurate...

IMHO, by extension, if planets are common, life (in some form or another, not necessarily sentient) should be reasonably common as well...

NSA haxx0red NASA?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really wouldn't be shocked...

Who else read that as:

'...NSA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope...'

Time to remember Giordano Bruno

[GuerreroDelInterfaz]

Who was burned at the stake for saying precisely this by the creationists of his days. That was persecution, not the phantom "book banning" that today's creationists crybabies complain about. Nowadays, hopefully they have lost their power; do not let them conquer it again...

One

[Steeltoe]

It is all just One. Within time, creating both the casual observer, and her false illusion to be one of many.

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Albert Einstein

Just happy to share the Art of Living :-)

Re:One

[foobsr]

...
I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

Tao Te Ching, 67

Slightly different turn :)

CC.

Re:In Soviet Russia (Ob)

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, joke retires YOU!

Re:on the topic of distant planets and possible li

[jimstapleton]

Ahh, so, it depends on how quickly they can make a "This is a cease and desist order: cease and desist or the number of asteroid belts in this system will be incremented by 1, and the number of planets will be decrimented by 1" call?

Two words for you, buddy:

[Anonymous Coward]

THANK YOU!!