Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
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.
Find free books.
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
SETI's odds are very poor on this score.
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.
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?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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...