Slashdot Mirror
'Hundreds of Worlds' in Milky Way
Raphael Emportu writes "BBC news is reporting
that rocky planets, possibly with conditions suitable for life, may be more common than previously thought in our galaxy, a study has found.
New evidence suggests more than half the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way could have similar planetary systems.
There may also be hundreds of undiscovered worlds in outer parts of our Solar System, astronomers believe.
Future studies of such worlds will radically alter our understanding of how planets are formed, they say."
Not every day or time, it all comes down to in which environment it has to survive. And we have examples of tool-compatible appendages in aquatic life here on earth: the octopus that can open plastic bottles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfRqYjv9QgA. And then there are other aqautic life that seems to do very well without fins such as crustaceans.
That the chance of a star to have planets is one in a million. Doesn't seem impossible, does it? The survey of the closest stars around our solar system seem to contradict this. I don't have exact numbers, but too many planets were discovered within a 50 light-years radius to conclude that only one star in a million has a planet.
Of course the Earth could be located in a statistical anomaly within the Milky Way, but if you posit a uniform repartition of planets, there has to be more.
I am just nit-picking however. I fully agree with the rest of your post.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The explanation for the "write" vs. "write to" distinction, at least, is pretty simple. The nouns taking the verb "write" are dative case. That's not obvious in English, but it's there, and it underlies the apparent form.
German is useful here because 1) it's the root language for English and 2) its sentence structures can be perfectly analogous. Take the German sentence Schreib deiner Mutter einen Brief which is translated word-for-word as Write your mother a letter. In German, the deiner is a clear marker that Mutter is dative. The exact same thing is happening in English, but since we don't decline our articles or possessive adjectives and rely instead on word order, it's not obvious to the typical native speaker.
So you can laugh all you want to...