The Galaxy May Have Billions of Habitable Planets

The Bad Astronomer writes "A recent astronomical report (abstract in Science) came out stating that as many as 1 in 4 sun-like stars have roughly earth-mass planets. But are they habitable? A simple bit of math based on some decent assumptions shows that there may be billions of potentially habitable worlds in the galaxy. '... astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. What they found is that about 1.5% of the stars have Jupiter-mass planets, 6% have Neptune-mass ones, and about 12% have planets from 3 – 10 times the Earth’s mass. This sample isn’t complete, and they cannot detect planets smaller than 3 times the Earth’s mass. But using some statistics, they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets orbiting them!' Getting to them, of course, is another problem altogether..."

Comments

Getting to them has always been the problem

[jpolonsk]

It's great that we could expand to many different planets. The leap between the Moon, Mars and an extra solar planet is so enormous though that the only thing this tells us is that we may be able to more closely identify where we should listen to for signals.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, maybe we should just stay here, you know, in case other life develops there? Try to control your greed and consumerist colonial tendencies for a second and reflect upon the fact that *we* wouldn't be here if some other species had been able to colonize Earth eons ago.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

We just need to dig up our stargate, if we haven't already. It's not like the government would tell us about it, you know.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[tom17]

So I suppose you haven't heard about the Golgafrinchans?

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe we're only here because some other species successfully colonized or visited Earth eons ago. We can't really know for sure.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[MyLongNickName]

If that were the case, then we'd have to bow to the creationists and how they mock our use of fossil records to show how we descended from other species over the past tens of millions of years.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[tmosley]

I think the scale is about the same as Kitty Hawk to Mars.

I think we can handle it. Especially if there are hot blue and/or green alien women there.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[ByOhTek]

Historical and modern genetic evidence suggests otherwise.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[Grishnakh]

We don't know that this planet wasn't "seeded" by genetic material from somewhere else, possibly an asteroid. There's no conclusive evidence that life developed on earth from non-life. Yes, there's tons of evidence that humans evolved from other lifeforms, but you're not going back far enough; there's more to "life" than humans.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[Kepesk]

And hey, there are at least five factors that this calculation doesn't consider:

The 2 factors that could suggest less planets are:
1) The galaxy's central bulge is probably uninhabitable due to radiation from the high density of stars there
2) Stars on the outer reaches of the galaxy are much more sparse than they are here.

The factor that could suggest more planets that are habitable to us is:
3) This doesn't consider the fact that Gliese 581g is on the lower limit of planets we can detect, and it's over *three times* Earth's size! There could easily be smaller planets much closer than 581g, which changes the math considerably.

Then the two factors that could suggest more planets that are habitable to *someone* are:
4) This doesn't take into account that there are at least a couple *moons* in our own outer solar system that are potentially habitable to life (though not habitable to us). If we factor that in alone, assuming we have Earth and 2 habitable moons and assuming the Gliese 581 system has no habitable moons, we come up with double the above number, or *5 BILLION* potentially inhabitable worlds.
5) This calculation is based on the assumption that life requires liquid water. If there are other forms of life out there that we can't imagine which aren't so reliant on water, well that also changes the math considerably. Can anyone else come up with other factors?

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[JeffSpudrinski]

This math is nothing new. Carl Sagan discussed this exact thing during his series called "Cosmos" made back in 1980. (If you haven't watched it, you should. I was an instant Carl Sagan fan when I saw this.)

-JJS

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[shutdown -p now]

Try to control your greed and consumerist colonial tendencies for a second and reflect upon the fact that *we* wouldn't be here if some other species had been able to colonize Earth eons ago.

For the same reason, you shouldn't use condoms. After all, a human being could develop otherwise, if you haven't prevented it.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[PopeRatzo]

It's great that we could expand to many different planets

Especially since we're so determined to make the current one uninhabitable.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[mcgrew]

Habitable != inhabited. Plus, just being roughly the same size, mass, and distance from the sun, and having a "meteor sweeper" like Jupiter doesn't make it habitable.

Also, our idea of a "habitable planet" may be flawed; I wrote a short science fiction story based on this premise.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[Nyder]

It's great that we could expand to many different planets. The leap between the Moon, Mars and an extra solar planet is so enormous though that the only thing this tells us is that we may be able to more closely identify where we should listen to for signals.

the way man has abused this planet, it's a good thing the others are too far away to ruin them also.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[MyLongNickName]

Hi grish,

yes, we could have been seeded by microbes from an asteroid, but you need to read the context of the thread, not just the post I replied to. The context was that we as humans should not go colonize other planets because we might interfere with other life spawning there on its own.

The response was then "how do you know this isn't how we got spawned". The implication is that some other intelligent species came here and we are their descendents. My response is that if that were the case, we'd have to throw away almost everyting we know about human evolution.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[Lanteran]

a theory that I rather like is that life originally developed on mars and was blasted to earth via asteroid impact throwing debris. Interesting stuff.

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[bzipitidoo]

There are wonderfully many unknowns and difficulties to think about in this problem.

Earth took billions of years to evolve to its present state. Effectively, Earth had to be terraformed. The planet started with very little free oxygen, and plenty of reducing minerals exposed to the atmosphere. Early life was primarily anaerobic, excreting oxygen as a waste product. Took at least 2 billion years of anaerobic living to rust the world and at last saturate the exposed minerals with oxygen, after which oxygen rapidly built up in the air and radically changed life. It's not just the oxygen itself, it's also the ozone layer, and its blocking of harmful UV radiation. And this was hardly the only profound change going on. Only recently are we appreciating anew the importance and impact of bioturbation. The thinking is that multicellular life could not get started until another billion years of soil creation, mixing, and enrichment. Higher life grew on billions of years of bacterial garbage accumulation, of one crash and disaster after another, paving the world over with the bodies of the latest victims of their own successes or the latest random bad luck. In addition to atmospheric change, Snowball Earth happened at least twice. Super volcanoes and massive meteor impacts are prime suspects in extinctions and all sorts of mayhem. Plate tectonics has bulldozed the lightest rocks into the big heaps of dirt we know today as continents, and has done so faster than erosion, including that directly caused by life, can level everything out, or the surface of the Earth might be entirely covered by ocean. The Earth has been cooling for billions of years. and radioactive material has been decaying away all this time. It cannot continue indefinitely, and when the Earth has cooled enough, plate tectonics will grind to a halt. Ocean levels have fluctuated. And ocean chemistry-- too much acid makes shells impossible. Hydrogen sulfide gas can accumulate and perhaps has reached tipping points, breaking loose and suffocating or poisoning life, just like carbonation escaping from drinks that are suddenly depressuried. We are accustomed to thinking of the Earth as pretty much static, and in the scale of our pitifully short history, it mostly is. The volcanic eruptions, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, meteor strikes, and other disasters we have experienced and recorded are comparatively minor. The Ice Age Earth of only 20000 years ago is an order of magnitude different than anything recorded in history, and that's only mildly different. Planets can be very dynamic. There's an awful lot going on. And now, we ourselves are playing a bigger role than we could wish, should Climate Change turn out as bad or worse than our worst imaginings.

Lot of SF stories imply one of those "frankenterraforming" technologies that can make a world habitable in mere days or even hours (complete with neat special effects of gigantic fungal like hairy fibers growing and twining together as they rapidly advance across the curve of a world, throwing out immense spiky spores, all at well over the speed of sound, the better to be visible from space). To me, that sort of thing shows that if the authors aren't ignorant, they at least don't care to give this problem much appreciation, and just want to handwave it away so they can get back to the space opera. And, I suppose, why not if you've already handwaved around the problem of interstellar travel with some sort of FTL propulsion system?

The talk of habitable exoplanets seems similarly naive and impatient. Maybe with an intelligence, such as ourselves, forcing things along, it might be possible to terraform a planet in mere centuries, or even faster. But maybe not. It's very much like another staple of SF, FTL travel. Admittedly, FTL travel is more fun than greatly lengthened life spans, or cold sleep ideas, or the mind twisty time dilation relativity imposes on near lightspeed travel, or, worst of all, time travel. But I feel such impatience with reality is too much a p

Re:Getting to them has always been the problem

[drinkypoo]

The problem with that idea is that there's ample evidence for life being able to start here, and you can find all the precursor stages on the planet someplace. Obviously that doesn't rule it out, and it is very cool, but there's no reason to need it for life to be here. At least, none we yet know...

NASA

[ChrisBader]

Yet another reason not to cut NASA's budget

Re:NASA

[zero.kalvin]

That what bothers me the most. The trend around the world is to cut money where there is no immediate return, everyone wants a quick buck. A nation's future is in the investment they put in research and science. But who am i to be listened to, when big corps have a hold on all the elected officials ?

Re:NASA

[AaronLS]

Indeed, because "'I don't want to live on this planet anymore'": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35TbGjt-weA

Re:NASA

[Darkness404]

Private spaceflight is a lot more promising than NASA is. Especially if the goal is to find new habitable planets. With private spaceflight, every dollar is a dollar towards a goal. With NASA its a nickel towards a goal and 95 cents spent on pointless bureaucracies.

Cut funding to NASA, allow private space companies to use the R&D, blueprints and the like and watch us achieve heights that NASA never dreamed of.

Re:NASA

[m2shariy]

NASA budget is irrelevant, rocket propulsion which it uses can barely get a probe to the Mars.

Re:NASA

[Darth Snowshoe]

Private spaceflight has a lot of inducement to figure out how to get stuff into earth orbit, and not very much at all to go anywhere beyond that. Trust me, I know NASA people, scientists and non-scientists. They are not pointless bureaucrats. They really want to go to the stars.

Re:NASA

[Stregano]

I have a sneaky feeling you just want your own starship. It's cool, I want one too

Re:NASA

[BenLeeImp]

Someone is too young to remember the Voyager spacecraft ...

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

Re:NASA

[MyLongNickName]

Never heard of the voyager probes?

Re:NASA

[Darkness404]

They may "really want to go to the stars" but it isn't going to happen with a government program. Government programs are /always/ plagued by waste and inefficiencies. The only reason why they can sometimes get things done is because they have infinite money from stealing from taxpayers. I guarantee you if you gave private spaceflight the information and the like that NASA has and a budget that they could get stuff done faster and more efficiently than NASA could. The only reasons why we don't have private spaceflight to the moon is because A) The taxpayer-funded R&D from various missions is not available to them B) Lack of initial capital C) Government restrictions.

Re:NASA

[tmosley]

Privatize NASA. Take 100% of the funding that is going to NASA right now, and create a huge series of X-Prizes, and we'll have the rest of the system colonized within a few decades, and we'll likely have our first probes headed toward the nearest star with potentially habitable planets on the same time scale.

Once we confirm "M-class" planets, we'll be ready to send manned probes.

Re:NASA

[Americano]

The beauty of the system is, you could always go build one of the "big corps" and get listened to, or spend all your money on pursuing space travel, rather than grouse about how other people won't fund your science fiction fantasies.

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

I do believe you forgot "extremely long time to profitability". One of the main problems of having private enterprise do things like spaceflight is that investors need to see ROI in 5 years. If the ROI numbers show 20 years out or more they don't invest in it. You definitely can't count the "space tourism" crowd that pays a million dollars for a seat as anything you can count on for long term profit.

Re:NASA

[hedwards]

The main reason is that NASA is the primary agency studying climate change, or at least it was until the Republicans in congress started cutting funding for the necessary satellites and research because they were concerned that they might prove global warming was real sufficiently that their constituents would start getting concerned. Or really continue failing to disprove global warming.

It's what happens whenever you let Sophists have access to the controls over research.

Re:NASA

[jokermatt999]

Do you have any numbers to support this? Although government programs generally are horribly inefficient, do you have any actual data indicating that NASA is just as bad? You seem to be relying on the assumption that government programs are always wasteful inefficient messes to the nth degree. Private spaceflight seems like an interesting idea, and I know there are several companies already working towards it, but reaching another star is a long, long, long term investment. It seems to me that government funding is actually useful in cases where there is no immediate return for the investors. Otherwise, you're essentially relying on philanthropy, no?

Re:NASA

[ByOhTek]

Wow... I wish I could be indoctrinated so to have that kind of confidence.

Governments DO NOT have infinite money. They have a lot, but it is certianly not infinite.

And, while the government is usually inefficient, it is not always so. Likewise, businesses can be inefficient and still stay in business, depending on the competitive situation.

As far as A goes - it wouldn't stop corporate America or any other first world countries corporations, they could do the research on their own. Or are you suggesting there is something useful that the US government/NASA did, that corporate America can't? Maybe you are a fan of corporate welfare - lots of giving to those poor starving CEOs who can't afford to have caviar for more than two meals and a snack a day?

For B... Capital is NOT a problem with corporate America, demonstration of profit is. They won't get that demonstration unless things here on the earth are seriously in the shitter (and it is too late), or the government finds the evidence first. Once something has a reasonable chance of profit, it will get investments.

For C... That's actually a good point. Corporate America is superb at getting past inconvenient government restrictions... However it would be hard to hide anything space related, I suspect.

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fuck you with your bullshit! EVERY dollar spent for private space "exploration" is to have a ROI within 5-years, at the max! Why the hell do you think that nuclear power companies need loan guarantees from the government? Because no investor gives a crap about investing in a 50 year project! Private spaceflight has nothing to do with exploration of space, but to have a ROI in 5-years. Venture capitalists go for 10-years and that is long-term!

Retards like yourself that believe capitalism does no wrong is exactly what is wrong with the US today. Even now the BP oil spill is blamed by people like you on "regulation" and "government".

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

That may be true if you consider that NASA's "been there and done that" for over 50 years. They've done all the hard work and now the private sector can refine and take over on orbital spaceflight. But what that means is now NASA needs to keep going doing the R&D and "hard work" for the next steps.

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that's bullshit. Private companies don't do anything without a near term profit. Without NASA we would not be in space today. Period. Why? No perceived profit in the short term. Some projects requre the resources of a government to achieve. Private companies will contine to advance space flight now that NASA started it in the first place BUT it will be to put hotels in space, more TV channels in orbit and billboards on the moon, not to do research or advance knowledge in any way. Private companies have a role to play but breaking new (and not immediately profitable) ground will always be done by publicly funded research. That may be NASA or it may be some other as yet unformed agency but without that type of funded research we face a future of rich people in orbiting hotels and McDonnald's flashing from the surface of the moon.

Re:NASA

[Unordained]

Government programs are /always/ plagued by waste and inefficiencies.

a) Private, commercial ventures are also always plagued by waste and inefficiencies. Humans are involved. You get what you get.
b) Just because there's waste doesn't mean it's 95% waste. That's like saying that because lightbulbs emit both heat and light, they're incapable of ever illuminating anything.
c) Grandiose statements like this one, common on the right, are faith-based attacks. It's common sense. Everyone knows governments waste. Everyone knows governments are nothing but wasteful bureaucracies. It's obvious. Duh. The only good government is a tiny one. But not nonexistent, as that might be seen as disparaging the founding fathers.

The underlying assumption is that you can only trust someone who wants to take your money for his own profit, because anything else is too good to be true. But not too much profit. So you can only trust someone who wants to take your money for his own profit in a suitably competitive market. You only trust greedy people. And then ...

The only reason why they can sometimes get things done is because they have infinite money from stealing from taxpayers.

d) No. They're not stealing. We're pooling our moneys to achieve a common goal, as we've agreed to do, through the system of laws we've previously agreed to. If you don't like it, go live in France. (I can say this because I got tired of being told to live in France when I bitched about our new motherland security overlords after 9/11.)

Government restrictions.

e) That's what it *does*. That is the function of government. All freedoms not taken away, we keep. You're complaining that they're doing their job? If not, we need to know the specific restrictions you disagree with; honestly, I trust them to have a better idea of what restrictions we need than I trust you. They have thousands of people looking at what can go wrong when some private individual decides it's perfectly safe to shoot a rocket off from his back yard to go colonize Mars. And those thousands of people? They're just private citizens, like you and me, raised in the same country, under the same flag, learning the same constitution, going to the same backyard BBQ's. They love freedom too. Freedom not to be blown up because of their neighbor's stupid belief that freedom only means something when they can be perfectly reckless.

Re:NASA

[m2shariy]

Voyager Speed is 17 km/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1). So if we take pretty much the nearest star at 4 LY = 4*10^16 m = 4*10^13 km, it would take 0.25*10^13 sec for the Voyager to reach. One year is roughly 0.3*10^8 sec. So Voyager could reach the nearest star in about 10^5 years, that is one hundred thousand years. If you call that interstellar travel, smoke signals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_signal) should work just fine for you as a way of communication.

Re:NASA

[lul_wat]

A) The taxpayer-funded R&D from various missions is not available to them

Why should taxpayer-funded R&D be given to a private company?

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

By nature they are wasteful and inefficient but even if you assume efficiency and benevolent decision making you still have mis-allocation of resources - meaning it is as near to certain as you can get that those resources aren't being applied where they would provide the most value (to society). Bastiat's broken window parable has gotten a lot of play recently - to summarize that point, you can see benefit from these sorts of programs (a moon landing or a bridge, for example) but it's much more difficult to see everything you're giving up for them because they are dispersed (for example, 5000 small business employing 50K people across the country). As for mis-allocation, study the 'calculation debate' which was concluded a good 50 or 60 years ago, at least by everyone who has the 'intelligence gene' :)

Re:NASA

[0xdeadbeef]

Cut funding to NASA, allow private space companies to use the R&D, blueprints and the like and watch us achieve heights that NASA never dreamed of.

"Us"? For some reason I doubt you are participating in space development in any capacity.

Re:NASA

[Grishnakh]

No investors are going to invest in a company that promises a big return in 200 years (or really, anything more than 5 years max). Investors want short-term profit, and no space exploration outside of LEO will achieve that. That is why private space companies will never work, and in fact why they never worked before. The only reason they're profitable now is because they're building on decades of experience by NASA and other governmental space agencies, and using some of what was learned to launch satellites into LEO. Clue: NASA has been launching *people* (not just unmanned satellites) into LEO since 1961.

Re:NASA

[Darth Snowshoe]

I'm pretty sure the federal government is not restricting you from interstellar spaceflight. Please, be my guest.

Re:NASA

[phorm]

Private spaceflight is a dollar towards a goal that will make two dollars. Exempting a few instance of megacorp labs such as Xerox Parc, etc, dollars spent on pure research without a focus on a given monentary goal are somewhat more rare. Often such research produces knowledge which then leads to a greater understanding of our universe or planet, and is used by other companies to make some rather stunning technologies.

Any goals beyond a companies budget period aren't likely to go over so well, particularly lofty goals that may outlive the company itself, or the directors, etc.

Re:NASA

[Grishnakh]

A nation's future is in the investment they put in research and science.

What makes you think this nation has any future?

Re:NASA

[dachshund]

With NASA its a nickel towards a goal and 95 cents spent on pointless bureaucracies.

Sometimes bureaucracies really are pointless. Other times they're the only way you can manage something as vast and multi-generational as interplanetary/interstellar spaceflight. I fear that the pro-privatization Slashdot crowd will learn this to their chagrin in a decade or two.

Right now there are functioning NASA probes at the edge of our solar system that are nearly as old as I am (a gracefully aging 34, thank you). Many of the original team members have probably left the organization, and yet scientific teams at NASA continue to diagnose problems and keep the things online. I'd love to see private space enterprise operate an unprofitable space probe for 33 years. Hell, I'd be shocked if a for-profit organization kept a legacy space probe operating for 10 years, absent massive government subsidies.

Re:NASA

[ChronoFish]

"...and no space exploration outside of LEO will achieve that...."

Isn't getting off the Earth the biggest / most expensive hurdle? Seems to me that it would be "easier" to design space craft to fly through the solar system than it would be to design launch and recover systems.

Because of NASA we know how to do it, and we know that it can be done. With a Cruise ship waiting for passengers there would be a reason to get people off the Earth in a repeatable/ safe(ish) / cost effective way. (As opposed to "failure is not an option in our quest for pure research" that NASA embodies)

Seems to me that once the taxi (cruise ship) of the solar system exists, there will be a number of groups investing in ways to get people there.

Build the infrastructure... they will come...

-CF

Re:NASA

[darien.train]

Government programs are /always/ plagued by waste and inefficiencies.

Whereas corporate bureaucracies are models of efficiency, see the big picture, and never waste a thing.

I guarantee you if you gave private spaceflight the information and the like that NASA has and a budget that they could get stuff done faster and more efficiently than NASA could.

I'd like my guarantee written in blood please. You can fax it over.

Re:NASA

[Nyder]

That what bothers me the most. The trend around the world is to cut money where there is no immediate return, everyone wants a quick buck.
A nation's future is in the investment they put in research and science.
But who am i to be listened to, when big corps have a hold on all the elected officials ?

It's time for a change of government then.

Re:NASA

[Grishnakh]

You're forgetting about all the hurdles in getting humans out of orbit: radiation, lack of gravity, fuel, etc. All we've done so far is send humans to the Moon and back for a few days, and the Moon is really very close by. We've never sent anyone as far as Mars, because that would take 6 months and we still aren't sure about the effects of travel of that duration on a human body, plus the amount of fuel and supplies needed will be pretty high (you could trade fuel for travel time, by taking a slower trajectory, but that increases the human problems even more). Sending humans any place far away will require a pretty large
craft (your "Cruise ship"), probably one assembled in orbit. We're still very primitive and inexperienced in our orbital construction capabilities.

So no, we really don't know how to do it. We know how to transport some stuff into orbit, and recover people from orbit, and that's about it. And we can take a very quick trip to the moon, as long as no humans stay out there more than a few days. That's a very, very long way from building a large spacecraft in orbit which can protect humans during a long voyage, and keep their muscles and bones from degrading to uselessness, and send them on a 6-12 month trip to another planet, and then do something useful there (besides walk around and take pictures). Picture the "Discovery" ship in 2001, with the rotating crew cabin (but larger, because that one was so small it'll create vertigo problems); *that's* the size of the ship that will be required just to go to Mars, which is the closest planet (except perhaps for Venus, which humans can't land on).

Re:NASA

[bhagwad]

This is one of the reasons why I'm donating all my money after I die to create a fund that will help get us off this planet.

Re:NASA

[Grishnakh]

Aside from what I said earlier, building a large ship in orbit will be enormously expensive, because of launch costs, which are currently something like $20k per pound. It'll take many launches to get all the parts and fuel into orbit, along with workers to put it together. Then, once you actually have a working interplanetary ship, you have to transport people (tourists) up there to actually make money. Those people need to pay ticket prices to pay for their own launch costs (millions of dollars), plus pay for the "cruise ship" which cost hundreds of billions to build. How many people are going to have $100 million to pay for a ticket to go visit Mars for a year? Not enough to make this project feasible.

The only way this thing would be feasible at all is to build a space elevator before trying to build any large interplanetary ships. Launch costs are just too high, and even if private companies could bring them down to 10-50% as much through increased volume and efficiencies of scale, it's not enough.

Finally, I don't think space tourism will make enough money to get infrastructure built; the investment will probably come through space (asteroid) mining instead. Tourism will come later. Tourism has never been a giant money-maker, but resources extraction has historically been a big spur for investment.

Re:NASA

[Darkness404]

Governments DO NOT have infinite money. They have a lot, but it is certianly not infinite.

Tell me this then, what is the US dollar backed up by? Gold? Nope. Silver? Nope. Copper? Nope. Hell, our coins have been simple tokens for almost the past 50 years. The US dollar is backed up by nothing. Yes, they don't have "infinite" money because every time they create money they lose some of the purchasing power. But for all practical intents and purposes they have infinite money on whatever they need to spend it on.

And, while the government is usually inefficient, it is not always so.

[citation needed]

Likewise, businesses can be inefficient and still stay in business, depending on the competitive situation.

To a point, but its future ultimately depends on efficiency at some point. If Microsoft doesn't make another version of Windows for 20 years and fails to maintain Windows 7, do you think they will stay in business? When a company doesn't innovate or has wasteful bureaucracy it dies and a company that does the same task better rises up. It has happened all through history.

As far as A goes - it wouldn't stop corporate America or any other first world countries corporations, they could do the research on their own. Or are you suggesting there is something useful that the US government/NASA did, that corporate America can't? Maybe you are a fan of corporate welfare - lots of giving to those poor starving CEOs who can't afford to have caviar for more than two meals and a snack a day?

So you see nothing wrong in not giving people what they fucking paid for? Its our tax dollars that went into that R&D, as such it should be available for all taxpayers. We didn't get the choice not to pay for it so at the very least the thieves in Washington could do would be let the people use the stuff they paid for.

Of course corporations can do the same R&D, and can do it for less money and better results in most cases, but the fact is, they paid for NASA to do that, the very least they could do is let them have what they paid for.

For B... Capital is NOT a problem with corporate America, demonstration of profit is. They won't get that demonstration unless things here on the earth are seriously in the shitter (and it is too late), or the government finds the evidence first. Once something has a reasonable chance of profit, it will get investments.

Yes it is a problem because you need a lot of capital to even go to the moon, let alone beyond it. It doesn't matter if people think you are going to make a profit, most people don't sink a ton of capital into projects that would be sufficient to launch something (manned) beyond the moon.

For C... That's actually a good point. Corporate America is superb at getting past inconvenient government restrictions... However it would be hard to hide anything space related, I suspect.

The problem isn't them getting around it, it is the fact that the restrictions exist in the first place. Government restrictions other than preventing force (for example, preventing murder, theft, etc.) and fraud (such as portraying something as edible when it would make you sick), always serve to hinder progress.

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

You've just moved the goal post. First you claimed NASA can't get propulsion probes to Mars. When confronted with the fact that they got them out of the solar system they're now going too slow for you.

Re:NASA

[Darkness404]

a) Private, commercial ventures are also always plagued by waste and inefficiencies. Humans are involved. You get what you get.

The difference is, they aren't wasting my money. I don't really care what Coca Cola does with my $.50 for a can of Coke. For all I care the CEO can bathe in that money. I bought Coca Cola because I wanted a drink. If I really was opposed to what Coke did with my money, I could buy Pepsi or any number of colas. On the other hand, if Coke stole $.50 out of my paycheck, I'd care what they did with that money and I wouldn't want them stealing from me.

That is the difference between government and private enterprise. When a government does something, the money comes from the taxpayers, willing or not. When private enterprise does something it is a voluntary exchange.

b) Just because there's waste doesn't mean it's 95% waste. That's like saying that because lightbulbs emit both heat and light, they're incapable of ever illuminating anything.

Sure, it was an exaggeration. But the point still remains, if you are going to take money from me for a certain purpose I want to be damn sure they aren't wasting a cent of it.

The underlying assumption is that you can only trust someone who wants to take your money for his own profit, because anything else is too good to be true. But not too much profit. So you can only trust someone who wants to take your money for his own profit in a suitably competitive market. You only trust greedy people. And then ...

But I don't effectively 'donate' money to a company. I buy products. I have competition. I buy products which I think have a low price and high quality. I'm not putting my trust in anything and that is the beauty of corporate R&D. I don't have to have faith in a CEO to buy a product. I buy the product because I trust the -product-. I don't trust Steve Ballmer, but I did buy a copy of Windows 7 to dual-boot in a new desktop I built. Why? Because I trusted that Windows 7 would run a few PC games that I play that didn't run correctly in WINE. I bought Windows 7 for a specific goal and I knew that it would achieve it, that is why I bought it.

d) No. They're not stealing. We're pooling our moneys to achieve a common goal, as we've agreed to do, through the system of laws we've previously agreed to. If you don't like it, go live in France. (I can say this because I got tired of being told to live in France when I bitched about our new motherland security overlords after 9/11.)

When did I agree to these goals? Not through any of the candidates I ever voted for. Certainly not through direct consent. The only argument you can make that these goals were consented upon is the argument that an armed robber was given money as a gift.

The only way that taxation is free of theft is taxation for what you, personally use with an agreement that for things other than defense, you can choose to use a different service provider.

And as for moving to a different country, I can't really find another country quite yet with sane taxation and the like. Europe is mostly socialist as is Australia, Asia is either ruled through dictatorships (China, Korea) or through the same lack of limited government that the US has (Japan), South America is either ruled through dictatorships or through socialism. Etc.

e) That's what it *does*. That is the function of government. All freedoms not taken away, we keep. You're complaining that they're doing their job? If not, we need to know the specific restrictions you disagree with; honestly, I trust them to have a better idea of what restrictions we need than I trust you. They have thousands of people looking at what can go wrong when some private individual decides it's perfectly safe to shoot a rocket off from his back yard to go colonize Mars. And those thousands of people? They're just private citi

Re:NASA

[gangien]

You don't think big companies have bureaucracies in place? They do, and while they always get out of hand, they at the lest, have a limit to their pointlessness. Government programs know of no such limits.

You realize that privatization doesn't mean strictly for-profit? You can have charities and associations and such. Plus the fact you would have more money since we wouldn't be wasting our taxes on huge government bureaucracies.

Re:NASA

[cforciea]

I guarantee you if you gave private spaceflight the information and the like that NASA has and a budget that they could get stuff done faster and more efficiently than NASA could. The only reasons why we don't have private spaceflight to the moon is because A) The taxpayer-funded R&D from various missions is not available to them B) Lack of initial capital C) Government restrictions.

That's ridiculous. Private companies don't have the money you are complaining about because there is no private demand for the research. In order to get a private company the same initial capital, R&D investment, and the general budget that NASA has, it would have to be paid for by the government. There already is an organization with exactly those features. It is called NASA. People like you get away with complaining about the inefficiencies of government programs because there is no bottom line to compare it to. You pretend that if NASA had been chartered a little differently and was a government contractor (which is what they would be if the government paid for their otherwise unfunded trips beyond earth orbit) rather than a government department that somehow things would be different, and none of us can give you hard numbers to prove you wrong because your pretend organization doesn't exist. Only this time, I know your pretend organization isn't any more efficient because it has the exact forces pulling on it to produce results as the government entity, and will therefore behave in the exact same way.

Re:NASA

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Voyager Speed is 17 km/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1). So if we take pretty much the nearest star at 4 LY = 4*10^16 m = 4*10^13 km, it would take 0.25*10^13 sec for the Voyager to reach. One year is roughly 0.3*10^8 sec. So Voyager could reach the nearest star in about 10^5 years, that is one hundred thousand years. If you call that interstellar travel, smoke signals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_signal) should work just fine for you as a way of communication.

So we would be better off with private space flight? How much time to the next star with "haven't even reached orbit yet" speed?

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

If we let NASA concentrate on doing real science instead of limitlessly parading Clowns in Space, we won't prevent the resumption of a manned space program in future and will maximize the probability of discoveries like this one, which might give us something definite to shoot for.

But in the right-wing future of America, starting next week, governments will be too small and weak to have any function but police, military, and concentration camp.

Re:NASA

[ColdWetDog]

Privatize NASA. Take 100% of the funding that is going to NASA right now, and create a huge series of X-Prizes, and we'll have the rest of the system colonized within a few decades, and we'll likely have our first probes headed toward the nearest star with potentially habitable planets on the same time scale.

No it won't. The current (or any conceivable NASA budget) is way too small to do anything much beyond getting into LEO. You have way too much faith in the ability of commercial ventures to punch through the physics and engineering of real space flight.

Although Elon Musk and friends are doing some impressive things on their own, they're basically repeating stuff NASA did in the 60's. They are definitely not treading new ground and have neither the expertise nor funding to do so.

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Government programs are /always/ plagued by waste and inefficiencies.

And of course, private industry isn't, and never will be. Nor does it cause harm to anybody else, or end up with any messes to clean up.

Wait, no, none of that is true.

Besides, you want to guess how much Private Industry is screwing up space flight?

Yeah, Capricorn One, ain't so unbelievable as you might think.

Re:NASA

[0xdeadbeef]

The resources of this planet are the birthright of every human being. The only reason you own anything is because other people consent to it.

The first starships will consume a significant fraction of the economically accessible resources of the entire *solar system*. This is the most absurd context imaginable for you to apply your libertarian delusions.

Re:NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the difference between government and private enterprise. When a government does something, the money comes from the taxpayers, willing or not. When private enterprise does something it is a voluntary exchange.

I don't know about you, but I feel just as upset when I get a terrible burger, a lemon of an automobile, or otherwise find myself dissatisfied with private service as I do with a public one.

And you know the terrible thing? I know I can't do a damn thing about it either way. At most I can move on to another, but there's no way to make it better in the future.

Sure, it was an exaggeration. But the point still remains, if you are going to take money from me for a certain purpose I want to be damn sure they aren't wasting a cent of it.

Said certainty requiring that same bureaucracy being complained about earlier.

Yes, the cure for one disease has caused another.

Go figure. You can spend dollars to save nickels if you like, but sometimes that isn't the best way.

When did I agree to these goals? Not through any of the candidates I ever voted for. Certainly not through direct consent. The only argument you can make that these goals were consented upon is the argument that an armed robber was given money as a gift.

You choose to live in this country, you choose to abide by the terms of the government in place. You want to change those conditions? Go right ahead, but please don't try this kind of prattle to justify your complaints. I'll support the concept of letting folks participate more in government, but you're more concerned with screaming about a phantom outrage.

Re:NASA

[tmosley]

They are doing what NASA did in the 60's for 1/1000th the price.

Combine that efficiency with the full NASA budget, and you will rapidly find yourself going places. Once there is some permanent infrastructure in place, prices will be subsidized by industry (specifically mining).

Re:NASA

[not-my-real-name]

I take it you've never worked in big business.

Re:NASA

[LurkerXXX]

They are doing what NASA did in the 60's for 1/1000th the price.

Kinda shocking. I mean, when they had so little resources compared to NASA. Their only little bump would be...

*50 YEARS OF THE MOST RAPID ADVANCEMENTS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVER*

Think NASA might have been able to do it cheaper if computers with the power currently in your watch weren't normally the size of rooms and cost millions of dollars?

Think NASA might have had an easier time if they had access to modern composites?

Geez, doing it at 1000th of NASA's expense 50 years ago is the minimum that should be expected.

Re:NASA

[Quiet_Desperation]

*shrug* My employer actually increases R&D budgets in bad times so we can have shiny new things to capture business.

Re:NASA

[dachshund]

You don't think big companies have bureaucracies in place? They do, and while they always get out of hand, they at the lest, have a limit to their pointlessness. Government programs know of no such limits.

I've worked for some big companies and I know all about how out of hand those bureaucracies can get. I also know what happens when someone inevitably tries to cut them down down to size --- all sorts of useful and important projects get slashed along with the bad. That's why I find it hard to believe that, say, AT&T would be operating a space probe after 33 years.

And non-profits can get completely out of hand, just like government can. Except in a non-profit you typically don't have voters and elected representatives pushing back on how the money gets used. That can be good and it can be bad. Take a look at the spending habits of, say, the catholic church, or the United Way, and tell me that the money is being used optimally. Of course, very few non-profits can muster the sort of resources that government can --- this is why people don't see as much inefficiency. But it's also why I'm not optimistic about these organizations ability to conduct something as massive as interplanetary exploration.

But essentially your argument walks a fine line. You admit that bureaucracies are important to massive projects like space exploration, but you think that private businesses and non-profits will hit the sweet spot of "enough bureaucracy but not too much". You may be right. Who knows. My guess is that --- until a guaranteed, profitable business is found in space --- the sheer level of resources that government can provide is going to consistently dominate concerns about the efficiency with which those resources are applied.

Re:NASA

[tmosley]

That's great, except they STILL aren't doing it, and those attempts they do make, still cost thousands of times as much. Shit, they can't even get a human being into orbit any more. There is absolutely no reason why they shouldn't have made a super cheap, ultra light craft for delivering astronauts to the space station by now, but they haven't.

These guys are the epitome of waste and incompetence. There was a time when NASA was the best of the best, but that seems to have devolved something awful.

Since NASA can't get their shit together, I say we give their budget to those people who can, and have a chance of continuing to exist even in the absence of any government funding. That's all.

Re:NASA

[jwhitener]

"Although government programs generally are horribly inefficient, do you have any actual data indicating that NASA is just as bad?"

I'd ask where is the data that government in general is "horribly" inefficient.....

I keep seeing this as a conservative talking point, but I have yet to find any data backing it up. Medicare for instance, with its 1-3% overhead costs vs private insurance at 12-15%.

(I know the counter-argument, medicare has all elderly, so relative to administration costs, the payments are huge, thus lowering the relative percent of those administrative costs....but you'd expect that payments going out would require administrative actions and management. If payments go up, administration of those payments should also, yet they don't. Medicare is very very efficient).

Fermi's paradox.

[Hatta]

That would seem to make Fermi's paradox even more troubling. My bet is that abiogenesis is vanishingly improbable. It seems pretty reasonable to be fairly optimistic about every other term in Drake's equation.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would seem to make Fermi's paradox even more troubling. My bet is that abiogenesis is vanishingly improbable. It seems pretty reasonable to be fairly optimistic about every other term in Drake's equation.

My bet is that interstellar travel is exceedingly difficult.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[MyLongNickName]

I wonder what happens if we continue to expand our knowledge about exoplanets at the current rate but we don't discover life on another planet by the year 2100. Fermi's Paradox bugs the hell out of me. I can't see how we are unique... but I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Firethorn]

That would seem to make Fermi's paradox even more troubling. My bet is that abiogenesis is vanishingly improbable. It seems pretty reasonable to be fairly optimistic about every other term in Drake's equation.

We won't really know until we can detect earth mass planets, but from what I've been seeing, I believe that our planet is the equivalent of hitting the galactic jackpot.

Specifically, our huge moon. The impact that did that must of created a sort of 'second stirring', resulting in a climate different than that of Venus and Mars.

I have no problems believing that habitable planets are more than a thousand ly apart, much less habitable planets that develop sapient, tool using life forms. Right now, that's outside of our detection range. Even SETI has a range of only like 60ly, if I remember right.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[zrbyte]

For me the exciting part is that, we can actually try to have a decent estimate for some of the terms in the Drake equation. A hint to the answer of just how improbable (or probable) abiogenesis is, may be found right here in our solar system. By searching for life on Mars, Europa, etc. Just another reason not to slash the NASA budget.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Monkeedude1212]

It seems pretty reasonable to be fairly optimistic about every other term in Drake's equation.

f = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life

I've always found these 2 to be the ones that I have trouble being optimistic about. Just because a planet CAN support life doesn't mean that it definately will. And just because life forms, it doesn't always develop intelligence (see Dinosaurs and Ancient Marine Reptiles).

We've only got ONE case study so far where this has occured, us. I have trouble believing these two have high probabilities.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would seem to make Fermi's paradox even more troubling. My bet is that abiogenesis is vanishingly improbable. It seems pretty reasonable to be fairly optimistic about every other term in Drake's equation.

You could be right. The anthropic principle guarantees that we will find ourselves on one of the planets where evolution got going. Even if there is only one such planet in the observable universe, we're going to find ourselves on that planet.

On the other hand, if abiogenesis is vanishingly improbable doesn't that tell us something about when life would be expected to originate? If abiogenesis is probable we'd expect it to have happened as soon as the planet cooled off. If abiogenesis is improbable we'd expect it to happen somewhere on a normal distribution centered about half-way between the cool-off of the planet and now. Or half way between the cool-off and the latest time that life could have started in order to have time to evolve into us.

Life seems to have started within 100 million years of the Earth's surface becoming solid. Therefore my bet is that abiogenesis is probable.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

OMFGcata

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[IndustrialComplex]

I wonder what happens if we continue to expand our knowledge about exoplanets at the current rate but we don't discover life on another planet by the year 2100. Fermi's Paradox bugs the hell out of me. I can't see how we are unique... but I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.

There are loads of reasons.

1. How long did it take for US to come about? That's a fairly long period of time for a planet to remain habitable. Cut that time down, and you drastically reduce the chance that something like 'us' will come about.

2. What good is intelligence to life? To us, it is necessary, to life? Not really. Algae and bacteria do just fine (and bacteria in some sense can be considered immortal!) Life COULD be plentiful, and intelligent life could well be so rare that it is unique.

3. Consider what we are able to see. We can basically see forms of electromagnetic radiation. That's not too useful for picking out little bits of information that would clue us in to someone else sending out information. Our emmanations are already decreasing (if considered per-capita) We can get more done with less power via directional antennas, better electronics, and now, fiber and direct access communications. We might just not see them.

4. Interstellar travel cost compared to opportunity is well... astronomical. Barring imaginary physics, the only point to go to another planet/star is to colonize it.

Think about it, we human beings are the absolute kings of colonization. We have set foot and abode on nearly every inch of this planet in some form or scope. And even if you argue that our grasp in some areas is tenuous, it certainly isn't due to lack of drive to colonize. We ARE wanderers and travelers, but to even consider something like interstellar travel is daunting to us. Is it so surprising that something which would restrict a human from traveling would also daunt another form of life?

It's not too much of a stretch to consider that our existance is every unique even without resorting to some sort of religious justification.

If it took our planet 4-5 billion years to produce 'us', and the universe is only 14 billion years old, we aren't dealing with much time for starting over. A single asteroid collission at the wrong time and the death of a human progenitor could very well mean 4 billion years of life development resulted in no intelligent life on Earth. It is not some sort of evolutionary goal.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[vertinox]

Fermi's Paradox bugs the hell out of me. I can't see how we are unique... but I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.

The most simplest resolution to the Fermi paradox is... (drum roll)

We just happen to be first.

Or very close to be being first.

Once we (or someone close to us in the tech race) achieve inter-solar system space flight, it will be only a mater of time before the whole galaxy is colonized.

Now it might be likely that most species die off or choose not to do this, but it only takes one species to colonize everything over time.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[MyLongNickName]

All valid points. Also all speculation... just like my thoughts :) That is why I put the "Year 2100" out there. I would certainly think that if there is life to discover that we would have found it after a century of looking. This assumes we continue to grow in our capabilities at the astonishing rate we have seen over the past twenty-or-so years.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[MyLongNickName]

In a galaxy that existed almost 10 billion years before the Earth cooled, I cannot imagine that we would be the first intelligence. The idea seems so preposterous as to not merit discussion.

(that doesn't mean it couldn't be right though )

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[callmebill]

Could be God. Consider: what is more unlikely? That before time there was an infinitely dense concentration of something that burst, creating everything we observe? Or that before time, there was something else that said, "I'll make something today" and created everything we observe? I don't consider either one more or less plausible than the other.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[dcherryholmes]

Perhaps true, but it is not a satisfying answer to Fermi's paradox. Tippler and others have made good arguments for colonization/exploration by robotic probes, which we also have no evidence of. Maybe it's evidence that strong AI is exceedingly difficult?

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[vonhammer]

Then who or what created God? If you say nothing, then isn't that just as unlikely as having an infinitely dense concentration of something that burst, creating everything we observe?

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Chris Mattern]

It seems pretty reasonable to be fairly optimistic about every other term in Drake's equation.

Actually, there's one other you can be pessimistic about, and it has pretty depressing implications for us: the fraction of technological societies that get off-planet. Two big humps here:

Agression: Any species that fights its way to intelligence and technological dominance of its planet will be about as aggressive as we are. A species that is not good at stepping over what's in its way to get the resources necessary for survival is a species that doesn't survive. This raises the question: can a dominant technological species avoid destroying itself with the advanced weaponry it develops (or even inadvertently by triggering an ecological collapse) before it gets off-planet? The jury is still out on whether we'll manage that...

The Lotus-Eater Problem: About the time a dominant technological species starts to develop the necessary skills to get off-planet, it likely also start to develop the skills necessary to create *really good* simulations of reality that are "just like the real thing." Can a culture avoid the lure of just abandoning themselves in fantasies which can be made more exciting and fulfilling than anything in the real world?

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[callmebill]

Right. Who or what created God? Who or what created the initial condensation of matter or energy? Even if we could answer either of these, we'd just be going back into a recursive "who created that?". My point was just to show that none of those two possibilities can be ruled out based on logic or reasoning.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[callmebill]

ugh... neither

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[myrdos2]

Or that interstellar travel is so difficult that it's been infeasible for every intelligent species that has ever evolved.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[adonoman]

Yeah, but it's one out of one! Every earth-like planet we've been able to analyze closely has support intelligent life (and humanoid intelligent life, at that). If journalistic statistics have taught me anything, it's that there's no reason to pay heed to selection bias, so I'm pretty sure every star has a planet with nearly the exact same conditions as earth.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

They could be right next door for all we know.

Detecting signals across interstellar distances -- when those signals are not specifically designed for that purpose -- is believed to be very hard.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Someone had to be first.

I also read a theory that the window for detecting a technological civilization from it's RF emissions is quite small.
As I recall the idea went something like this. In the early days of radio, the signals are too weak to be detected from any significant distance. For the first 50 years or so, most radio advances occurred in increasing signal strength, after that point signal strength begins to drop, and receiver sensitivity increases. Again as I recall the window for detecting a technological civilization from it's RF emissions is somewhere between 25 and 40 years. (Based on a sample of one.)

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[mangu]

Consider: what is more unlikely? That before time there was an infinitely dense concentration of something that burst, creating everything we observe? Or that before time, there was something else that said, "I'll make something today" and created everything we observe?

Considering that an infinitely dense concentration of anything is the simplest possible structure, I would say that it's, by very far, more probable to happen spontaneously than something complex enough to make a conscious decision to create everything.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[vertinox]

In a galaxy that existed almost 10 billion years before the Earth cooled, I cannot imagine that we would be the first intelligence. The idea seems so preposterous as to not merit discussion.

Perhaps natural evolution favors non-technological species that evolve simply to consume bio-mass? (like dinosaurs)

And it takes a freak of nature (say a meteor strike) that not only kills off the larger species but doesn't kill off the smaller ones as well.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[callmebill]

Right, but where did that simplest possible structure get its material? Was it always "just there"? Fine, maybe Benevolent Creator was always "just there".

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Opyros]

It's also possible that the transition from prokaryotes+archaea to eukaryotes is a very low-probability event — as far as we know, it only occurred once in the entire history of terrestrial life. See this for details and references.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[aristotle-dude]

Right. Who or what created God? Who or what created the initial condensation of matter or energy? Even if we could answer either of these, we'd just be going back into a recursive "who created that?". My point was just to show that none of those two possibilities can be ruled out based on logic or reasoning.

Aren't you assuming that time and causality have to exist? Wouldn't you run in a similar paradox trying to find out when and how time came into being in your universe without a driver? Time and causality could exist merely to facilitate our physical universe and our ability to make sense of our existence. Without time and causality, the universe would be a confusing place.

If you have an existence before the universe which does not have "time" and god is all there is then your question does not make much sense. Time is construct that we can wrap our tiny brains around while eternity is something that is incomprehensible to us.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[MaskedSlacker]

I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.

Apparently you've never heard of one over R squared. The distance is huge. Travelling it is impractical. Radio emissions at that distance would be indistinguishable from galactic background noise. Most life forms would probably never develop that level of tech--in 5 billion years on earth only one species has so far.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[aristotle-dude]

Consider: what is more unlikely? That before time there was an infinitely dense concentration of something that burst, creating everything we observe? Or that before time, there was something else that said, "I'll make something today" and created everything we observe?

Considering that an infinitely dense concentration of anything is the simplest possible structure, I would say that it's, by very far, more probable to happen spontaneously than something complex enough to make a conscious decision to create everything.

Infinitely dense? Utter nonsense. Nothing in the physical universe can be infinitely dense. All you are doing is taking the concept of an infinitely powerful creator god, renaming it and removing the persona from it to make it sound more scientific but neither concept is "science".

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

Existence does not necessarily imply something had a beginning. God, it could be said, simply always was. One cannot conclude the same thing about the universe, however... since we know it had a beginning (the "burst", as you call it).0

Without God, if nothing existed outside the universe (and I am not meaning to imply that anything does) , it reasonably should have remained that infinitely dense concentration of stuff forever (since nothing existed outside of it to have caused any change), and we would not exist to be having this discussion. If one believes that there was actually something outside (temporally as well as spatially) of the universe which caused the big bang, well then... one may as well be believing in God, right?

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost everything in the universe was helium and hydrogen for the first few billion years. It's probably hard to make complex life with only very light elements being in relative abundance. Until enough big stars supernova'd spreading out some heavier elements, life (as we know it) probably didn't have a chance at all.

Add onto that the fact that you really don't want to go sending out autonomous robots to reproduce and send out more probes until you've cracked AI and are making super intelligent robots. Send out a dumb one that starts grabbing at stuff and reproducing itself will probably piss the hell out of any occupants that happen to be on the planet it's munching on. If they also happen to be near your intelligence level you are probably looking at a nasty war coming your way that you didn't even realize you started.

Next, we're kind of in the backwater of out galaxy. We're probably low priority for the probes. It's much more efficient to send them to the core and the bar and main spiral arms first. Lots of close stars so your probes can explore a greater number faster, find good places to reproduce, etc.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Taibhsear]

Um, there is evidence for the Big Bang. It's called the Microwave Background Radiation. This is not the end all be all proof, but it is evidence. God has no evidence. Thus the Big Bang is more plausible.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

What if the space probes have benefited from the advances in miniaturization that the interstellar-traveling civilization will have made before it became interstellar-traveling...

Maybe the Earth has a ring or a cloud of micrometer-scale or nanometer-scale probes that form a sentient network. Maybe the probes use tiny solar sails to control their orbits. Maybe they have a millimeter-scale factory on the Moon where they make more probes to replace the ones that get killed by radiation.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[robot_love]

This is why Occam's Razor is so important. It may well be true that neither possibility can be ruled out, but which one is more likely?

There are an infinite number of things that we cannot rule out as "first causes". God. Allah. A giant gem-encrusted squid. But not being able to rule them out does not make them each as likely as the next. I think we're all pretty confident it wasn't the squid.

I think it's much more reasonable to say we don't yet know how the universe was started, but the odds that an all-powerful being just like the one described in the Bible did it is vanishingly small.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[MMC Monster]

We won't really know until we can detect earth mass planets, but from what I've been seeing, I believe that our planet is the equivalent of hitting the galactic jackpot.

Specifically, our huge moon. The impact that did that must of created a sort of 'second stirring', resulting in a climate different than that of Venus and Mars.

Moons don't seem to be too rare. Heck, Mars has a couple of them.

Before we discount life on other earth-sized planets, let us at least have the ability to detect other earth-sized planets.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

There's almost no way that strong AI can be very difficult. We are fast closing in on an accurate cognitive simulation of the brain from the neuron level up. Give us 20 more years (at worst) and we will have a computer that can accurately simulate a human brain. If that simulation is not AI, we have some serious misunderstanding of physics/chemistry.

Give us 50 years after that and it will be in a box sufficiently small that we can ship to another star system for a very low price.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

That sentient network communicates using magic? We'd have noticed such a thing, even if its communication was amazingly low power.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[MyLongNickName]

Regardless... when you are looking at a time period of 14B years for the universe you still have an enormous distribution curve. To assume we are within the first ten thousand years of the "fast" tail of this curve is hard to believe

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[HappyHead]

The problem with that is that you're adding in an extra unnecessary step.

Adding complexity to a model with no actual need for it is counter to logic.

It's like the police investigating someone's death via falling into an open sewer saying "Well, yes, it is entirely possible that Larry walked down the street, but isn't it also equally likely that he stopped and jumped up and down first? Since nobody else was there, and he's dead, we'll never know for sure, so you should believe me when I say that he stopped and jumped up and down first." There's no evidence for it, there's no reason for it to be there, and it's just plain silly to add it in where it's not needed.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but it's really depressing to think that there are physical limitations to humanity ever getting past our own system while there's just so much out there to see.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[BotnetZombie]

It's been 20 years in the future for a long time now.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

Someone had to be first, but the first should have happened a billion+ years ago. That WE would be first is preposterous. Had we come about 3 billion years ago and been first, we could have a more serious discussion over whether we might have won the race.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

Not to anyone in the field. 20 years ago it was clearly not 20 years in the future that we would be able to accurately simulate the human brain. I was working on neuron simulations at the time, and it was obvious that even with perfect adherence to Moore's law that we were further out than that.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[misexistentialist]

Really you need some Occam's Rogaine, since the problem with the God hypothesis is its childish simplicity. The gem-encrusted squid is a good start. Now we apply Occam and get just a squid with no gems. A second application and we get tentacles. One more time and the answer is clear: strings are the cause of the universe.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Nyder]

I wonder what happens if we continue to expand our knowledge about exoplanets at the current rate but we don't discover life on another planet by the year 2100. Fermi's Paradox bugs the hell out of me. I can't see how we are unique... but I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.

Fermi's Paradox is nothing but fluff.

Even if every solar system had 1 inhabitable planet, with people just like us, we still wouldn't know it.

How many probes have we sent beyond our own solar system? Let alone to another one? And not to mention how long it would take for any reports to be sent back, if they even could be.

We still discover new animals and plant life on our own planet, and it's way smaller then any distance to another solar system.

And if some other intelligent life was able to cross the vast distances to our planet, I don't think they'd want us to know about them anyways. Seriously, we can't run our own planet decently, so why the hell would anyone else want us to know about them? Let alone risk the chance that we'd get access to tech that would make it so we can spread our love of war, greed, and hypocrisy across the cosmos.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. Ten thousand years is NOTHING in the expanse we are talking about, so there's no need to be in the first ten thousand years. Fast ships with fast reproduction would still take in the millions of years, at least, to cover it all.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[mcgrew]

I can't see how we are unique

For everything there is a first. Perhaps we're just the first planet for life to develop intelligence, or perhaps there are fifty more but they're all on the other side of the galaxy.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[lgw]

Earth has had more mass-extinction events than I can keep straight - 5 or 6 at least of the magnitude of the dinosaur die-off. Clearly that isn't a rare event. Equally clearly, it's really hard to stop life from happening.

The only answer I can believe in for Fermi's Paradox is that we just don't know how to look yet. No one seems to be broadcasting a radio signal our way for our convenience in detecting them. No one has engaged in engineering on a scale that it's obvious from here (a pulsar that bonks the digits of Pi, or some such). Beyond that, we don't really know much about the common-ness of intelligent life yet.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Prove me wrong.
Prove that there is other intelligent life in the universe, that came along before we did.
Until someone proves that. It is possible, however unlikely, that we could be the first.

I am not saying that we ARE the first. (In fact I doubt it.) I just like to believe that all things are possible.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Firethorn]

Not talking about just moons, I'm talking about having a HUGE moon. Luna is 3,476 km in diameter. Earth is only 12.8k km. The moon is roughly 27% of the diameter of the earth.

Mar's larger moon, phobos, isn't even spherical, and it's only 28 km at it's widest.

Around Jupiter, Ganymede is bigger at 5276, along with Callisto and Io. But that's only 3.7% of the diameter of Jupiter. Being out of the water zone doesn't help.

Saturn has Titan - 5k km, 4.2%

Given that there's nearly 200 moons in our solar system, and Luna is #5 while being around a planet that's about an order of magnitude smaller in diameter compared to the other planets, I'll state that I believe Luna to be a pretty unusual feature.

I'm not discounting it, like you said, we won't know until we can not only detect earth sized planets, but also detect beyond that - presense of liquid water on one end, radio signals at the other.

Of course, until we find independently evolved life, we're still operating on a single positive sample, and a lot of dead and non-verified samples. What I posted was only a theory, and not a highly researched or specific one either.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

Big Bang is only "evidenced" after creation of the universe and is located inside of it. It is not something you can compare to what would have been before or "outside" of said universe (God, or Whatever that started the process/matter, etc).

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare you point out both are faith based and just as absurd as the other.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[NotSanguine]

I wonder what happens if we continue to expand our knowledge about exoplanets at the current rate but we don't discover life on another planet by the year 2100. [Snip].

Since it's likely that we're living in a simulation (http://www.simulation-argument.com/), computing resource constraints may be limiting the ability of the simulators to provide extra solar intelligence. It would be a shame if we never discover life on other planets because someone didn't budget enough for SAN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_network) storage expansion.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[pcermomb]

Any species that fights its way to intelligence and technological dominance of its planet will be about as aggressive as we are.A species that is not good at stepping over what's in its way to get the resources necessary for survival is a species that doesn't survive.

A statement that is too human centric, I would say. We don't surely know if any life exists at all out there, and you are already making statements about some highly intelligent species' traits, their ethics, their energy sources etc !

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[mdm-adph]

Moon's the size of ours, in relation to the size of the body they orbit around, _do_ seem to be pretty rare, though, at least as far as we can tell.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[mdm-adph]

It's not infeasible for a creature with a lifespan of say, ten thousand years, to think about traveling to the nearest star 20ly away at 0.10C. Just a hurdle.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[BotnetZombie]

Of course it's farther ahead now, and at some point it really will be 20 years in the future. But there's a lot more going on in the brain than electric transmissions between neurons. Hope you're right though.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[MrSteveSD]

Actually, there's one other you can be pessimistic about, and it has pretty depressing implications for us: the fraction of technological societies that get off-planet. Two big humps here:

The societies themselves might not get off the planet, but their creations might. Intelligent machines would be far more adaptable than biological intelligence. You can see that even from today's non-intelligent machines. Humans have not been to Mars or Titan, but robots have. They can survive in conditions completely unsuitable for biological life.

Machine intelligence only needs a power source and there are plenty of stars around for that. To build more machines they would need raw materials, but almost any planet or asteroid orbiting around a star would be suitable.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

Yes, I'm talking about simulating neurons at the chemical flow level, not at a higher electrical level. If that's not sufficiently accurate to produce AI that will be a huge surprise because it will imply that something that happens at the atomic level matters to intelligence. That would be a huge shock in the field because all of the animal behaviors we've been able to simulate so far have been above that level, and we assume intelligence operates in the same way. Still, it is possible that could prove to be the case, in which case our simulators would then be about 3 orders of magnitude too slow again.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

It's not impossible, it's just not a likely explanation. Probability suggests looking to other explanations first.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Bobtree]

"Technology implies belligerence." - Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Blindsight is my new favorite book after 3 reads this year. Outstanding hard science fiction, very well written, fun to read, incredibly smart and well researched, and truly scary and thought provoking.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Stuntmonkey]

One resolution to Fermi's paradox is to assume that every spacefaring civilization has some analogue of culture. Information exchange (culture) adds intelligence to the individual, and as technology improves the interconnection becomes faster and richer. People a few hundred years ago were happy getting months-old news about events around the world, whereas now people want web/email/phone connectivity all the time. Play this out another few hundred years and it will be unthinkable to willingly separate oneself by more than a few light-seconds from the rest of humanity. In other words, the Fermi paradox is predicated on a false, 20th century idea, that physical space is the scarce resource.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

Occam's Razor: You are doing it wrong.

Take a look here ("Formal objections and counterarguments") for details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Roman Coder]

The most simplest resolution to the Fermi paradox is... (drum roll)

We just happen to be first.

You're assuming that there isn't some other species out there systematically wiping out other evolving species, so that they stay at the top of the food chain.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Roman Coder]

Or that they're "hiding" from us until we are no longer a 'Prime Directive' race.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is often more useful to think of it in terms of events, not existence. that is, instead of who created what, think of it in terms of what caused what?

We already know that the universe is not infinitely old, so what caused its beginning? God is as good an answer as anything else, really.

Common presumptions about God are that God did *not* have a beginning, so there is no need to answer any questions about where such a being would have originated.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[WrongMonkey]

We are nowhere near neuron level simulation of the human brain. The closest that we've gotten in the IBM project that simulated approximately the same number of neurons in a cat cortex. But the cortex in only part of the the brain and, of course, a human brain is much larger than a cat brain. But most importantly neurons are to a brain what bricks are to a house. Without the right structure, its just a pile of bricks. Structure is not a problem that can be solved by throwing more transistors at it.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

The structural part can be solved, though, using existing technology, and the 20 years are what are needed to get a supercomputer up to the speed where it will be able to simulate all of a human brain.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[NotSanguine]

It's not infeasible for a creature with a lifespan of say, ten thousand years, to think about traveling to the nearest star 20ly away at 0.10C . Just a hurdle.

Why travel so slowly? Assuming an appropriate power source (hydrogen fusion, perhaps?) a round trip to a star 20ly distant could be accomplished in a human lifetime. With a constant acceleration @9.8 m/s2 a starship could approach C in less than a year. This means that the star could be reached in less than 25 years. Use 3-5 years to explore and then return. That's a long trip to be sure, but certainly doable within the human lifespan.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[WrongMonkey]

What existing technology can map the structure of a living brain at a the neuron level?

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help feeling that the moon thing is just today's variant of moving the goalposts. We have no solid evidence that a binary planet is necessary, and we also (in)conveniently don't have a way of spotting them around other stars yet.

To be blunt, there are a lot of people who refuse to believe there's anything intelligent out there, anywhere at all. The more reasonable ones latch on to whatever might be a plausible justification for this belief. As the leading edge of discovery keeps pushing forward, you can sort of see this class of half-hearted denial in effect, since the argument has to keep changing to stay ahead of science.

I'm hoping the resolution of our detectors gets better soon, because then we'll be able to disprove another iteration of the "there can't be other life because no other planet is similar enough to Earth" arguments. Soon after that we'll hopefully also be able to detect moons - some of the planets we've detected probably do have moons but we see the whole thing as one piece right now.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[SETIGuy]

That would seem to make Fermi's paradox even more troubling. My bet is that abiogenesis is vanishingly improbable. It seems pretty reasonable to be fairly optimistic about every other term in Drake's equation.

Actually you don't need any single thing that is vanishingly improbably, just a series of things that is unlikely. And for the origin of intelligent life you can roughly estimate how many unlikely steps there were (i.e. steps that were unlikely to occur in the time allotted.) Suppose I hand you a standard six sided die and give you 12 rolls to roll six sixes. Now it's unlikely that you will do so, but if you do succeed, on which roll with the sixth six arise? The answer (to first order) is that the final six won't show up before roll 12-12/6 or roll number 10. Now if intelligent life is like a bunch of rolls of the dice, we can figure out about how many steps there were that are difficult. The earth has been habitable for 4 billion years, and will remain habitable for between 500 million and a billion years (before the sun's increasing intensity boils away the oceans). That would mean that there are between 4 and 8 difficult steps that were unlikely to occur in that 4 billion years.

I've taken that a bit farther and done some simulations that show the given what we currently know, even if life is common, it's quite likely that the amount of time necessary for intelligent life to arise typically exceeds the lifetimes of F,G, and most K stars. (Heck it took longer than the lifetime of an F star here.) In order to be sure though, we're going to need to find some planets with life that have never developed intelligence. Or we're going to need to find some intelligence. It's far cheaper (but not free) to look for the latter right now. Hence my sig.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[painandgreed]

Could be God. Consider: what is more unlikely? That before time there was an infinitely dense concentration of something that burst, creating everything we observe? Or that before time, there was something else that said, "I'll make something today" and created everything we observe? I don't consider either one more or less plausible than the other.

No reason they couldn't be the same thing.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[LurkerXXX]

Mars is too small to hold onto much atmosphere. That hurts it a lot more than the lack of a large moon.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[one cup of coffee]

I think it's even more troubling than that if we consider for a moment that modern humans were around for roughly 170,000 to 190,000 years before we were able to accidentally domesticate wild plants and animals which led to population booms, sedentary lifestyles, the division of labor, specializations, and eventually higher levels of human organization and technology. Only three regions of our entire planet had suitable candidates for domestication, namely, plants with useful genetic mutations. Only the fertile crescent had most of the plants and animals needed to jump start civilization, and it still took them thousands of years to do it. It seems likely that a great deal of the Earth like planets that do manage to evolve intelligent life similar to that of homo Sapiens will probably do so in the absence of an environment that is conducive to technological advancement. I imagine that on the majority of the already probably small fraction of habitable planets that did evolve something similar to human like intelligence, the intelligent creatures just wind up wandering around their planet for hundreds of thousands of years before going extinct with very little evidence left behind of their existence. Just like the hundreds of millions of people that did exactly that before agriculture was stumbled into about 10,000 years ago.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a divide by zero in both of those options somewhere..

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Zardoz Speaks]

We've only got ONE case study so far where this has occured, us. I have trouble believing these two have high probabilities.

And how many other cases have we examined in adequate detail? None.

However, I would add one more term to the Drake equation:

fe = the fraction of those who develop high technology but abuse it to bring about their own extinction.

If our case study is any indication, that final term may be quite large enough to resolve Fermi's paradox.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[bit01]

but I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.

Personally, I think it is obvious. The multitude of strange astronomical phenomena that scientists can't explain? Advanced alien civilizations at work and war.

The reason we're seeing no communication is that we're not smart enough to understand their communications and we're not interesting enough to communicate with directly (yet).

I only hope they don't decide to step on us e.g. to build a fusion reactor based on our sun or to collect our planetary system for the building material or who knows what else. With panspermia maybe we're the children of one such civilization.

---

You communist! Breathing shared air!

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[bit01]

the fraction of technological societies that get off-planet

You are implicitly assuming every society is the same. Societies, even single societies, are not monoliths. They are complex cauldrons with many different competing interests with many different directions happening all at the same time.

Lotus eaters? Sure but they'll be plenty of "social groups" (for want of a better term) that will think that it's a sin against god (or equivalent) and go in another direction. Civilization limiting aggression? Sure but they'll be many groups/civilizations that get second chances or happen to be powerful because of accidents of technology and compete to go in another direction.

And the thing is, all it takes is a single civilization, in the billions of stars out there, to go interstellar, and geometric progression tells us that the universe will be infested with them in short order.

I suspect life on earth is probably the result of one such alien civilization (due to active, intelligent panspermia) however we haven't grown up enough to communicate with them yet.

---

Marketing talk is not just cheap, it can have negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Quiet_Desperation]

Dude, physics has moved on. There's several relatively new theories about what preceded the big bang and why the bang happened.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[sincewhen]

Where's my -1 Anthropomorphism mod when I need it?

The problem with your reasoning is that something must have created the universe that the something that created our universe exists in. And so on.

So it's turtles all the way down.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[quacking duck]

The lack of a large moon may have indirectly caused Mars' thin atmosphere.

There's evidence that Mars used to have ample atmosphere and water, but after its molten iron core stopped churning and solidified, its magnetic field collapsed, allowing the solar winds and radiation to bombard the planet directly and eventually strip away most of its atmosphere and water.

Our moon creates tidal forces not just of our oceans, but Earth's molten core as well, helping to keep things churning. It's not to say Earth wouldn't have a molten core without the moon, but it would probably be much weaker and less able to protect Earth (and life as we know it) from the effects of the sun.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

No need to do it on a living brain, a dead one will do just fine. There are laser system that can slice the brain into very thin sheets, and combine that with an fmri system to figure out the connection map.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28842.wss

Gives some details on how people are working on this, and a lot of people have ideas for refinement of the process. Based on what I've seen, I don't see any reason we won't have a complete neuron map within 5 years, 10 at the outside. It certainly seems likely to come sooner than we'll have the computer power to execute it in real time.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[kirtu]

Except it's not. We are doing it now with Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. Voyager will cease to be useful by 2025 but they will continue their journey until the Big Crunch (or they are physically destroyed by something along the way). Voyagers 1 and 2 will pass "close" to two different stars in 40,000 years. The Pioneer spacecraft will pass close to two other stars in 2 - 4 million years. Of course none of the four had an explicit interstellar mission.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[kirtu]

We don't need strong AI to begin interstellar exploration. Our current systems will work just fine.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[BotnetZombie]

Are you simulating stuff like serotonin and dopamine flow? If you have some links, I'd be very interested to read about it.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[kirtu]

The galactic core is too hostile an environment for life to arise.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[kirtu]

Phobos and Deimos are too small to create tidal effects. The point is that a moon large enough to produce tidal effects is likely necessary for life to evolve. This may be rare. The Earth and Moon are more or less a double planet system and that may be needed for carbon based life.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[kirtu]

The diversity of life on Planet Earth is amazing. And we have at least three separate life systems: energy from the Sun (most of life), energy from the earth (microbes living under extreme temperature and pressure beginning a mile or so under our feet and getting energy from the Earth's core), and some sea life getting energy from volcanic vents (also from the core but I think they also live on other organic sea matter). Given this it appears likely that if the conditions for life arise, physics and biology guarantee life. So the fraction that develop life is probably close to 1.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

http://neuron.duke.edu/

is a good place to start. Has a lot of info about the high level ... at lower levels ... it would depend very much on what specific areas you're interested in.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

And I didn't spot it at first glance, but they have a publications link with the ~1000 publications that have been made citing the neuron software. That's probably a good place to search for a specific topical title.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[BotnetZombie]

Looks interesting, thanks!

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[WrongMonkey]

Thank you for showing that you don't know anything about brain imaging. For starters, fMRI only measures concentration of oxygen, nothing about neuron level structure. Second, brain tissue quickly decays almost immediately. As soon as those brain cells quit getting oxygen, all connectivity and structure information is lost. Reread the words you wrote, you can't slice the brain in order to figure out the connection map. The method is physically incompatible with the goal.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[IICV]

And then long story short, Southern Methodist Episcopalian Wesleyan Church is exactly right.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[IICV]

Uhm how about this?

If you can send ships to other planets, you can almost certainly create nearly self-sustaining space habitats - and I'm talking like deep space, where there's not much matter or energy besides you. After all, sending a ship to even Alpha Centauri will take hundreds of years, and most of that will be spent in space so empty it would make the Sahara desert look like Hawaii times infinity. And you'll need to be able to do this over the course of hundreds of years - basically, your little colonization capsule will have to be a sort of self-contained society of space Bedouin.

This means that somehow, one way or another, you essentially need to be able to colonize space itself in order to be able to send manned ships to another planet. At that point, why are you even bothering with this "other planet" business? Who is going to want to spend hundreds of years huddling in the most extreme, energy saving configuration imaginable when you can just bask in the Sun's profligate radiation and graze on the solar system's asteroid fields?

So that's where I think the aliens are. They've given up on the whole "colonize other stars" thing, and turned their attentions to a much more fruitful endeavor - "colonize space".

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Surt]

Feel free to go read some actual work being done. I have links to it in other posts.

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, so we have an extremely simple thing having always existed, or an unimaginably complex thing having always existed. What is more likely?

Re:Fermi's paradox.

[mdm-adph]

From what I've read, it's not the acceleration that's the problem, or even the trouble of getting up to C, it's the problems with traveling at or near C -- while a speed of 0.10C is manageable, collision-wise (just have a massive shield in front of your spacecraft), traveling at or very near C makes each collision with a speck of interstellar dust something akin to a hydrogen bomb, right?

Law of Numerous Small

[Rockoon]

This just in: Smaller objects more common than larger ones.

Re:Law of Numerous Small

[Anonymous Coward]

Only in Hollywood

Re:Law of Numerous Small

[Spectre]

The small ones always claim to be bigger than they are, though.

Just ask any girl.

Nah, it's easy

[bhcompy]

Just use the EVE Gate

Re:Nah, it's easy

[AndrewNeo]

How will we know the security status of the other side? I'm not jumping to nullsec!

Re:Nah, it's easy

[bhcompy]

Shush. I don't want them to find out about my warp bubble and my 'cane gank squad parked on the other side

Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[Peter Trepan]

The High Frontier, Redux - Covers the true scale of the distance between planets, and the energy requirements of going between them. He estimates that sending an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star would take as much energy as is produced on Earth in a year.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[MightyMartian]

The distances are astronomical (ha ha). There's no economic gain at this point to going to the stars. Heck, we've barely stepped off our own rock.

Still, one would like to think that right now we're beginning the surveying aspects of future interstellar exploration, and as soon as the physicists deliver us bountiful amounts of cheap energy and some useful way around the speed of light, we will be better able to pick the targets.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[Peter Trepan]

Whoops - between stars.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[MBGMorden]

Energy affects acceleration - not distance traveled. How much energy you want to expend getting to another star all depends on how fast you want to get there.

Personally, I think mankind will end up using some variation of the generational ship to colonize the stars. Send out a nearly self-sufficient ship and let it travel for millenia of need be.

Alternatively, if we ever figure out how to truly perfect some form of cryogenic stasis, then you don't even need to do that. The movie Pandorum seemed to have a good idea on that: set out on a long journey with multiple staged crews. Each crew takes a "shift" of 10-15 years before they wake the next crew and go into cryo-stasis themselves. That way the ship is always manned, but with enough people on board you can go hundreds or thousands of years and end up with the same people you left with.

The universe has a LOT of usable time left in it. Even terribly slow travel can be useful.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting there is no problem. It is a matter of how FAST do you want to get there... For example voyager 1 and 2 will both be going 'somewhere'. It will just take them awhile to get there.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[burnin1965]

While that article was interesting to read when I hit the following point it was obvious that it was mostly just mental masturbation...

they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money).

So first off, while economic benefits from scientific exploration and discovery are common and gladly accepted, the root purpose of science is not to make a buck. Yes it can make it easier to get those who have no interest in science, knowledge or the progress of the human race to chip in as a bet that they may get some extra cash to pay for a few more hookers and wild coke parties in luxurious hotels but it is not the goal of science.

Setting aside that obvious misnomer the article then places some superfluous requirements on interstellar travel, i.e. it must be completed well within a persons lifetime and the sole objective is the habitable planet. I suspect that such an endeavor would incorporate more than a lifetime of scientific objectives and would involve not an as fast as feasible capsule with one human trapped in a can for 40 years but instead would be a self sustained ship on a continuous voyage with a population of humans. That may sound even more infeasible than the 40 year trip in a tin can but that is why we need to first establish bases in our solar system to expand our knowledge and technology to make such a ship and voyage possible.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[Grishnakh]

Wrong. You can send an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star for only a little more fuel than it takes to get to the Moon. We've already done this with the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, which are either in the outer solar system or out of it altogether, and will eventually travel to other stars. Remember, space is a vacuum: once you send a craft in a certain direction, it keeps going that way, unless acted on by an outside force. Once you're outside a star system, gravity is negligible.

Of course, this assumes that you're in no hurry to get to the nearest star system. If you want to keep accelerating for half of the journey, it's going to take a lot of energy. But why hurry? Even if you keep accelerating, using our present propulsion technology, it'll still take decades or longer to get there, so you'll either be old or dead. It would be more energy-efficient to make a big generation ship, send it there at a leisurely pace, and let your great-great-grandchildren colonize any planets that are found there. Now, if we can develop some better propulsion technology so that we can get there in under 10 years, then these issues will be more important.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[MightyMartian]

Our materials technology has going to have to advance considerably. The only way some of the equipment like the Voyager probes have survived is because they are, relatively speaking, extremely simple with very low energy requirements.

You start talking multi-generation biosphere ships or cryo ships you're talking about a huge set of problems that go hand in hand with maintaining an isolated spacecraft for centuries or thousands of years, without meaningful help or even raw materials to be used to fix problems. I'm not saying it isn't impossible at some point, but everything from the kind of materials we build ships out of to robotics and computer systems is going to have to improve radically. We're also going to have to have an economy that has freed up sufficient wealth to produce such a ship.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[h4rm0ny]

There's no economic gain at this point to going to the stars

There's an economic gain in a society being energised by trying new things. Okay, dedicating the planet's resources to sending an Apollo-sized capsule to another star, but there would definitely be great rewards in renewing our space programs,

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which would be energy well spent IMHO...

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[Crudely_Indecent]

Just because they're habitable doesn't mean they're inhabited.

Even if they are inhabited, it's possible that any species living there may have not yet achieved radio communications and would be silent.

Depending on their technological advancement, they may have long outgrown the need for radio communications and have returned to silence.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[roystgnr]

He estimates that sending an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star would take as much energy as is produced on Earth in a year.

5 days, he says, but without assuming inefficiency, so let's call it a millenium to be conservative.

That's as much energy as is produced by our star in half of a millisecond.

By the time our heirs are crowded enough here that seeding civilization around other stars looks sensible, sending those seeds will also look easy.

But by that time TFA is no more relevant than Stross' calculations. The first starfarers will think it's cute that we expected them to want to all climb back down a deep gravity well after they get there. As if we were fish futurists, imagining how useful lungs and legs would be for getting to another pond where we would dispose of them again.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[dpilot]

So this may be the biggest reason to root for Kurzweil and his Singularity.

The only reason we can imagine the technology required for "bodily" interstellar travel is because of our fiction. Faced with the real task of doing it, we don't even know where to start with current or near-in technology. The only real start we could make is - start developing more technology with more realistic near-in goals.

Post-Singularity the whole issue is much different. Pack a few Personalities (to keep each other company at the destination) into our shiny new post-Singularity computing system, slow or completely queisce the whole thing so they don't go batty during the trip, and shoot! We've had the necessary technology for THIS kind of interstellar travel since Voyager or maybe even earlier, and we could do much, much better today.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[mcgrew]

The Star Trek episode Space Seed used the "sleeper ship" premise.

On stardate 2267.9, the Federation starship Enterprise, under the command of Captain James T. Kirk, finds a derelict ship floating in space. The ship is a DY-100 class freighter that was modified as a sleeper ship for cryogenically-frozen passengers. Its hull identifies it as the SS Botany Bay, though there is no historical record of such a ship. It was launched from Earth in the 1990s, in an era known as the Eugenics Wars.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[painandgreed]

Energy affects acceleration - not distance traveled.

Not quite. You need a certain threshold of energy to escape any gravity well you are in or you'll just begin an orbit rather than getting where you want to go.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[lgw]

Making the trip take longer really doesn't reduce the energy needed, because the ship must become correspondingly larger. Charles Stross was talking specificially abut "space colonization" in that article. He's written fiction about various cheaper solutions for other reasons for space travel - a "star wisp" would serve for research.

For a given misison, however, making it take longer stops helping with the enrgy cost past a certain point. Stuff breaks. Space is an increibly harsh environment, and there's just no way to make stuff last forever. The longer the journey takes, the more replacement parts you have to carry, eventually your mass of replacement parts becomes proportional to the length of the journey. If it's not practical to get to the nearest star in a 40 year journey, it's not going to be practical for a 400 year journey. And that's the journey to the nearest "pit stop".

The energy requirements are just absurd even if you postulate anti-matter fuel and near-c exhaust, but still within the realm of "hard SF". With a drive somehting like VASIMR, it's just a fantasy.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[Anonymous Coward]

>5 days, he says, but without assuming inefficiency, so let's call it a millenium to be conservative.

Then let's call it a millennium to be literate.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[lgw]

Voyager 1 is 0.0018 light years from the Sun, and it was launched in 1977. It likely won't survive to a distance of 0.01 light years away. A "big generation ship" won't be more efficient because it's, well, big. We simply don't have any technology that could get any sort of probe, let alone people, to a target 4+ light years away fast enough for it to still have any chance of working when it got there.

There's a way more 0s on the end of this problem than you seem to be thinking.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[lgw]

But if we all live in the holodeck, there would just be no motviation to leave for high latency regions. What you're talking about is a "star wisp", and no, we don't have any technology today that would get one to the nearest star fast enough to have any prospect of it still working. In 33 years, Voyager has made it about 1/2000th of the distance to the nearest star.

Postulate anti-matter fuel and near-c exhaust in your SF story and the energy reserves that a Matrioshka brain would have available? Sure, but then why should we spend our energy budget in space when processes are starving right here on Sol?

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[Grishnakh]

Who said anything about it still working? The issue was about the energy requirements for getting objects to other star systems, not within any particular timeframe. Voyager will almost certainly survive until it reaches another star system; maybe not with any power, but it'll be an intact object (there aren't a lot of other objects floating around in interstellar space for it to collide with).

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[nedlohs]

All you need to do is reach just above escape velocity for the solar system when pointed in the right direction (reading planets as stars).

Now if you want to do it in less than a million years you might want to try a different way.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[lgw]

I was assuming there was some point to your previous comment. Sure, we could send a shoe to the nearest star given 1 trillion years, but that hardly seems relevent. Sending something to another star in such a way that we'd get somthing out of it (even just information), on the other hand, is still pure SF - not technically impossible, but we don't even know what technologies would be used, it's so far off.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[painandgreed]

The High Frontier, Redux - Covers the true scale of the distance between planets, and the energy requirements of going between them. He estimates that sending an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star would take as much energy as is produced on Earth in a year.

Energy is not really an issue. All the energy produced on Earth is less than a ten thousandth of what hits earth from the sun. Making it cheap might be an issue, but there is plenty of energy coming from the sun for any foreseeable project needs.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[Grishnakh]

True. However, the original comment of "1 years worth of Earth's total energy expenditure" seems arbitrary, because as I pointed out, it doesn't take that much energy to send a shoe to the nearest star if you have 1 trillion years. So how long is "reasonable"? To me, anything longer than 10 years is too long, probably more like 5. For others, it might only be 1 year.

Anyway, one possible way I've heard of (and read a SF book about) is to hollow out a large asteroid, stick a mass driver on the back, and send it to the star, using its own mass as fuel. If you accelerate at a constant 1g for half the trip, then turn around and decelerate at a constant 1g for the other half, you'll have free artificial gravity, built-in radiation protection (from all the surrounding mass of the asteroid) plus a travel time of only a couple hundred years to Alpha Centauri. However, because of relativity, the travelers inside will only experience around 4 years of time passage, so they won't age much by the time they get there. Of course, the catch is that when they get back (after 8+ years), hundreds of years will have passed on Earth and everyone they knew will be dead (unless someone's cured the aging disease), but big deal; lots of people who don't have much family would happily sign up for a trip like that.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[burnin1965]

the more replacement parts you have to carry

A starship that reliant on parts is not very sustainable is it.

Making the trip take longer really doesn't reduce the energy needed, because the ship must become correspondingly larger

Based on your assumptions. But your pessimism does lead to other energy questions. In particular, what are the long term energy requirements of a self sustaining starship? Depending on the energy source and the energy needs it may be a long time or perhaps impossible to every consider interstellar travel of any duration.

Of course we do not have the scientific knowledge or technology today that is necessary to build such a ship so it is a difficult question to answer. However, pursuit of the science and technology that would make such a ship possible and provide an answer to that question and others is worthwhile and I suspect would even be profitable for those who base all their decisions on profit motives.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[TapeCutter]

"You start talking multi-generation biosphere ships or cryo ships you're talking about a huge set of problems"

Agreed, the focus in these discussions always seems to be on how to move the spaceship but in reality that is a minor problem with several plausible solutions. When it comes to keeping the crew alive we don't even know how to keep a biodome on Earth from turning into a rotting cesspit after a year or two. Once we know how to do that we can perhaps use the technology to fix the (human) life support systems on "spaceship Earth" before we send a handfull of explorers to look at other planets.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[TapeCutter]

Gravity is indistingushable from acceleration.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[LurkerXXX]

Acceleration's force does not act in every direction at once. (unless you are exploding)

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[TapeCutter]

... gravity accelerates you in one direction (unless you have already exploded).

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[drinkypoo]

You start talking multi-generation biosphere ships or cryo ships you're talking about a huge set of problems that go hand in hand with maintaining an isolated spacecraft for centuries or thousands of years, without meaningful help or even raw materials to be used to fix problems. I'm not saying it isn't impossible at some point, but everything from the kind of materials we build ships out of to robotics and computer systems is going to have to improve radically.

Wasn't there a news item a while back about how our solar system might not be part of this galaxy, and is just passing through? It seems to me like the best way to make a long journey is to move a whole solar system. Of course, this is only a valid means of travel for humans if reincarnation works and is tied to a planetary body. I'm sure there must be some Science Fiction about this out there someplace, if there is and it is any good, I would appreciate a pointer.

Re:Charles Stross has a great article on this.

[lgw]

In order to be really self-reliant, a ship would have to contain the entire toolchain for modern technology. That's the size of a city and a million people, I'd expect. Doesn't seem likely to be a low-energy approach.

Why do we assume we're unique?

[Shadow Wrought]

I never did understand that. It seems far more likely that we're just average and not something special.

Like everyone else.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[Anonymous Coward]

If we were just average, then aliens would be all over the neighborhood.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[nizo]

Except of course the simple fact that perhaps they are just like us, and are too timid to leave their own solar system?

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unique and special are two different things. Our planet's characteristics are probably quite unique.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[Monkeedude1212]

We assume we're unique because we haven't found anything else like us. Does that make sense?

One circle of life existed 65 Million years ago for far longer than we have been alive and yet they didn't develop the intellect to construct anything. We look at the other parts of life around us that are just beginning to use tools - but they're still a long ways away from reaching where we were a million years ago.

Given that we've only been able to study these two sample cases, and both suggest that we're "above average" at the learning curve - we assume we're unique.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[TheLink]

Or extinct before we manage to even get the tech to leave.

We're not even building decent space stations. To me the priorities should be to build a space station that humans can live on "indefinitely". Not waste money on going to Mars.

When you have developed space stations on which people can live on indefinitely, you don't have to rush to Mars. In fact Mars becomes a lot less important economically. The asteroids would be more interesting- build space colonies from the asteroids. From that point you would be closer to having the tech and resources to leave the solar system.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[blair1q]

You are correct. That would be a rash assumption.

However, the qualities of this planet that make it suitable for life aren't as simple as "well, look at it!"

The entire planet has gone through several phases of development (molten, crusty, wet, snowball, volcanic, tropical, tectonic, plus some not-so-planet-killer asteroid impacts) to shape what is now its ecology, and it's not showing any signs of being static yet.

So it would be egregiously inept, given this knowledge, to assume that other planets with sapient beings must exist.

However, the topic of the article is "habitable", not "populated with spacefaring aliens". But even then, "habitable" would have to mean "able to support generations of humans without terraforming or special adaptations." Still-suits or underground bunker homes, okay, because we do things like that to survive some terran conditions. But if you can't walk the surface and breathe the air and eat the agriculture grown in the open spaces, it's a no-go.

And here's a thing: plants like our planet because of the CO2 and the eons of humus. Which means you're going to need to find a planet that's already got a significant history of biomass (billions of years perhaps). And, as I said above, that isn't just a "well, look at it!" proposition, certainly not a "well, look at a few photons with particular spectra that bounced from it!" sort of thing.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[nizo]

We look at the other parts of life around us that are just beginning to use tools...

Actually I would put forth that we are just really really good at killing anything that might even remotely be a (tool using) competitor. Take Neanderthals for example; they had cave art, tools, and bigger brains than us, and I'd guess that we are a big reason why they no longer exist.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[Monkeedude1212]

It's also recently been suggested by a study saying that about 1-4% of our DNA is Homo neanderthalensis - so even had THEY been the dominant species it's likely that 1-4% of their DNA today would be Homo Sapien.

Either way you slice it, any of the intelligent species on Earth appear to have a common ancestor. So whether we killed off other intelligent forms of life and thats why there aren't any is moot: none of the other animal kingdoms have shown anything along the scale that humans have, or else we'd be competing with them like we did with Neanderthals. Or there'd be intelligent oceanic life, or something along those lines.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[nizo]

Or there'd be intelligent oceanic life, or something along those lines.

There is intelligent oceanic life, but it just has pretty much no need for tools, and aside from those crazy octopi, no real way to create/wield tools anyway.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[spiffmastercow]

It's also recently been suggested by a study saying that about 1-4% of our DNA is Homo neanderthalensis - so even had THEY been the dominant species it's likely that 1-4% of their DNA today would be Homo Sapien.

Either way you slice it, any of the intelligent species on Earth appear to have a common ancestor. So whether we killed off other intelligent forms of life and thats why there aren't any is moot: none of the other animal kingdoms have shown anything along the scale that humans have, or else we'd be competing with them like we did with Neanderthals. Or there'd be intelligent oceanic life, or something along those lines.

Just picking a nit.. I'm pretty sure there's only one animal kingdom that we know of. Also, I'm pretty sure that Neanderthal story was debunked. Too bad, it would be kinda cool to find out the two species interbred. Oh well, we still have the hobbit people to make up fantastical stories about..

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think we aren't?

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[Anonymous Coward]

Space stations are nowhere near self-sufficient yet. We're not exactly expert recyclers here on Earth either.

It would probably be easier to create a sustainable base on the Moon or Mars where there's enough land to mine for resources and water, and grow hydroponic crops.

Re:Why do we assume we're unique?

[ensignyu]

I suspect that given a fair amount of time and the right conditions, a highly intelligent non-mammalian life could evolve on Earth, assuming we don't completely trash the place.

Insects and sea creatures are pretty good at navigating using sight/sound/etc which is quite a non-trivial task, and some of them have a basic social structure as well. I think it could happen with other animals in the next couple billion years. Intelligence doesn't always move forwards, but I think it's probably easier than the long climb from single-celled organisms to anything with a brain.

at the core

[Thud457]

That's all well and good, but what are we going to do when the wavefront of gamma & x-rays from stars falling into the black hole at the center of the galaxy reaches us? Then what are we going to do?!!!

Re:at the core

[eleuthero]

buy space folding technology from the puppeteers or the outsiders?

Re:at the core

[blair1q]

Make microwave popcorn without a microwave oven?

Re:at the core

[JTsyo]

better act fast, think someone did some calculations a few centuries ago and came up with 2012.

Define Haitable

[MyLongNickName]

Habitable seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Does it mean if we dropped off a human on the surface, he would be able to breathe? Does it mean that it is roughly the right mass? The right mass and roughly the right temperature? Right mass, temperature and has an atmosphere? All the above and has bountiful liquid water?

I am very excited about our discoveries over the past decade or so. But it will be another before we can truly have a reasonable idea of how many planets are "habitable".

Re:Define Haitable

[Abstrackt]

I assume that in this case, "habitable" means that it's within our technological means to survive there.

Getting there, on the other hand, is another matter entirely.

Re:Define Haitable

[nizo]

Well, a surface that doesn't immediately kill us while we wear minimal life support apparatus would be a good start. Even if we can't breath the air, being able to wear regular clothing and no bulky gloves would be a big step up.

Re:Define Haitable

[Anonymous Coward]

Habitable seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Does it mean if we dropped off a human on the surface, he would be able to breathe? Does it mean that it is roughly the right mass? The right mass and roughly the right temperature? Right mass, temperature and has an atmosphere? All the above and has bountiful liquid water?

I am very excited about our discoveries over the past decade or so. But it will be another before we can truly have a reasonable idea of how many planets are "habitable".

Habitable for humans means ~1G constant gravity, a nitrogen rich atmosphere with a dash of oxygen, and an abundance of organic compounds. Or were you talking about for robots, which may be intelligently designed to inhabit much harsher environments?

Re:Define Haitable

[nizo]

Or even better, someplace that a genetically altered human could live?

Re:Define Haitable

[Anonymous Coward]

The gravity can go much less than 1g, down to ~0.2, and I'd guess only up to ~2 max -- I'm sure there have been studies about high-g survivability, but I'm unaware of them and guessing.

And the atmosphere doesn't need nitrogen for humans -- pure O2 works, at the same partial pressures, and CO2, H2O, and noble gases are all okay on the side.

... For various quantities of habitable

[enderjsv]

This reminds me of Geico commercials. "15 minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance." If you think about that sentence, it really doesn't say anything. The sentence would be true if 1 in 10,000 people who took 15 minutes to call Geico saved more than fifteen percent off their car insurance. I hate to be the cynical guy, but this really seems like a bit of a fluff story. The criteria for "potentially habitable" seems to pretty low, relying primarily on planet mass and distance from the sun. On the other hand, all it takes is the discovery of one earth-like planet to get me super excited, so maybe my cynicism is misplaced.

Re:... For various quantities of habitable

[gstoddart]

This reminds me of Geico commercials. "15 minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance." If you think about that sentence, it really doesn't say anything. The sentence would be true if 1 in 10,000 people who took 15 minutes to call Geico saved more than fifteen percent off their car insurance.

My personal favorite example of such claims has always been "baked with real vegetables" on some snack crackers.

In no way does that imply that the vegetables are ingredients. Merely that they were baked with real vegetables. Throw a carrot in the oven, and the statement becomes true. ;-)

Re:... For various quantities of habitable

[fahrbot-bot]

"15 minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance."
The sentence would be true if 1 in 10,000 people who took 15 minutes to call Geico ...

The sentence is always true as the operative advertising word is "could".

Teh maths

[Quiet_Desperation]

But using some statistics,

Uh oh...

How many sagans is that?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

...there may be billions of potentially habitable worlds in the galaxy.

How many sagans is that?

Re:How many sagans is that?

[cindyann]

5x10^-1sagans.

sudo mod me funny

Re:How many sagans is that?

[MaskedSlacker]

The real question is 'how many libraries of congress would they fill?'

Re:How many sagans is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you just googol it?

Re:How many sagans is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Billions and Billions in this galaxy. (pronunciation guide: emphasize the b's as if eggs would come out of your mouth simultaneously.)

Let's cut to the chase

[Infonaut]

How do we get to the nearest planet inhabited by Orion women?

Re:Let's cut to the chase

[MyLongNickName]

They'd turn you down too. Sorry.

and I may...

[M8e]

...have superpowers.

Does lactose tolerance count?

Re:and I may...

[eleuthero]

...only if you're from an ethnic group that historically demonstrates lactose intolerance.

Pass The Joint ( +1, Helpful )

[Anonymous Coward]

and inhale the marijuana.

Yours In Osh,
Kilgore Trout

P.S.: Carl Sagan says "High !".

Re:Pass The Joint ( +1, Helpful )

[Sponge Bath]

P.S.: Carl Sagan says "High !".

It seems appropriate to hear from Zombie Sagan on Halloween weekend. Let's raise a bowl and toast his accomplishments.

If there are really billions of such planets ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Lets say there are billions of inhabited planets. Then they should be popping into a passing black hole or be blown away for an intergalactic highway project now and then. But I have never felt a disturbance as though millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. How come?

Billions of Linuses

[Compaqt]

Trillions of Beowulf clusters ...

Re:Fermi's paradox. --- Reapers, dude.

[BLToday]

Well, there's the Jungle Hypothesis, the Zoo Hypothesis, and I'm sure a few other ones. While lack of proof isn't proof, there's also the possibility that intelligent life in this part of the galaxy only started recently.

Or you know, Reapers.

What a godawful headline...

[ErikZ]

The Galaxy May Have Billions of Habitable Planets

Or, you know, less than that.

Re:What a godawful headline...

[Attila Dimedici]

That is almost exactly what I came here to post. Until we identify a second body in the universe that supports life (whether in this solar system, or not and whether that life is there because we put it there or it came from some other source), it is premature to estimate how many planets in the galaxy are habitable.

Re:What a godawful headline...

[nizo]

Ahh but see, they are simply narrowing things down to an upper bound. So now we can say there are between 1 and X billions of habitable planets out there!

Re:What a godawful headline...

[prograde]

Or, you know, more.

Re:What a godawful headline...

[adamjcoon]

Or in the Universe there may be an uncountable number of habitable planents..

Re:What a godawful headline...

[incognito84]

Or, you know, fewer than that.

Re:If there are really billions of such planets ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets say there are billions of inhabited planets. Then they should be popping into a passing black hole or be blown away for an intergalactic highway project now and then. But I have never felt a disturbance as though millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. How come?

Because you are not a Jedi.

So that just means

[overshoot]

Lots of room to terraform.

Since I'm doubtful that humans will go extrasolar as individuals, there wouldn't be any pre-existing biosphere to deal with.

Always assuming, of course, that intelligence is really the advantage that we like to believe. Current events lend some doubt to that.

But are their orbits stable?

[g01d4]

There was an interesting article about this here

Theoretically I should be the greateest man alive.

[amanicdroid]

Now I just need to find some proof.

How big they are is only a portion of the equation

[Last_Available_Usern]

You can put an Earth-sized planet where Pluto is and that's not going to mean anything. Assuming they mean "habitable" from the perspective of humans, the appropriately-sized planet must also be at the sweet spot distance from the Sun for moderate temperatures, have a moon to stabilize rotation for normalized weather patterns, and also produce a strong enough magnetosphere to protect an atmosphere. This is completely ignoring a lot of other factors that come into play as well, but the bottom line is I think it's a little premature to start designating M-class planets.

uhh... Cosmos anyone?

[Rooked_One]

Am I the only one that remembers the episode where Sagan talks about this? You can apply all the stats and variables to this, but you can only get a general idea... We (in our lives) will probably never get to anywhere near 1% accuracy of how many habitable planets are out there. Its all theory.

but then again

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe there aren't any, seeing as all of this is pure speculation.

Simple plan

[chebucto]

1) Launch purpose-built exoplanet-finding 'scope into space (like the Kepler or TPF)
2) Find lots of exoplanets
3) Narrow down list to the small rockey goldilocks-zone planets
4) Do some spectroscopy
5) Find the 1 or 2 best hopes in terms of proximity & life-formation
6) Launch a few probes with 100 or 200 year mission life to each of the good candidates
7) Wait 100 or 200 years
8) ???
9) Par-tay!

Re:Simple plan

[jpolonsk]

Your time scale is off. It would be more like wait between 100K and 500K years before a probe reached the closest habitable planet.

Re:Simple plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Your time scale is off. It would be more like wait between 100K and 500K years before a probe reached the closest habitable planet.

And if each probe contained little more than some photosynthetic bacteria and some lichens, it could still be less than 100MY before the galaxy was colonized. By the time the big slow ship (with the 1000 frozen primate embryos and robots to decant 'em from the vats) shows up, say, 10MY, the destination world should be be terraformed.

A civilization that launched one such probe every few centuries (in other words, long enough time for a colony of 1000 kids to turn into a civiliation of its own) to stars 20-50 LY away would cease to exist... but its successor civilizations would be distributed throughout the galaxy in about a billion years' worth of galactic rotations. (or about 4-5 galactic "years" as measured by the time it takes for a star at our distance to make its way around the central core :)

just spin up the stargate and dial them!

[Joe The Dragon]

just spin up the stargate and dial them!

AND !! AND !! And it may have just the one !!

[Anonymous Coward]

I said MAY !! POSSIBLE !! The TRUTH as FAR as ANY KNOWZ !!

Anyone else see something wrong with this?

[Anomalyx]

...they cannot detect planets smaller than 3 times the Earth’s mass.

...they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets orbiting them!

So they're inferring based on the planets that they haven't detected...

Re:Fermi's paradox. --- Reapers, dude.

[ElectricTurtle]

Apes or angels. If there is other sentient life out there the cosmological timescale makes it a high probability that most of it is either so primitive that it can't have an interplanetary impact of any kind, or so ludicrously advanced that it wouldn't give a rat's ass about a bunch of monkeys who are really impressed with how they can move things around by burning stuff. We're either going to be like a PhD looking at an ant hill or they are. Either way we're probably safe, unless we run into an adolescent god with a magnifying glass, like Trelane "The Squire of Gothos".

Heartbreak

[callmebill]

What's the point of identifying more than one extra-solar habitable planet? We've found that Gliese one or whatever it is, which is really nearby. So the next step is to work on means of getting there via ftl or tesseracts or enchanted broomsticks. Why devote resources to finding more places that are even harder to get to? I say we just sit and stream Netflix until someone distant world's Pioneer plaque lands on our front porch.

Re:Heartbreak

[callmebill]

Also, why don't we use these "OMG we could live on this planet if we could travel 30 gojillion megadistances" research dollars to work on something that is feasible within 1.5 generations. Moon and Mars are ready and willing.

Billions?

[clone53421]

If the universe is really infinite*, and if there is any nonzero percentage of planets which are habitable*, then there are infinitely many habitable planets by logical conclusion.

Until or unless we find one, and one that’s close enough to actually learn something useful from it... what difference does it make how many of them are theoretically out there?

*unproven/unknown

Re:Billions?

[fmobus]

The article is talking about the possibility of there being billions of inhabitable planets on the Milky Way Galaxy alone. The Milky Way galaxy is very finite.

Re:Billions?

[clone53421]

Still, who cares?

Re:Billions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until or unless we find one, and one that’s close enough to actually learn something useful from it... what difference does it make how many of them are theoretically out there?

*unproven/unknown

*looks down*
Gosh jolly, I found one!

Re:Billions?

[JTsyo]

No I think it's just finite.

Re:Billions?

[clone53421]

Yes... that was the trivial case. I meant a non-trivial case.

However, you do make the case for studying the one we’ve got and not wasting time hypothesizing about habitable planets that may or may not ever be found.

My favorite Star Trek episodes...

[GPLDAN]

Kirk and Spock would visit a planet where a Starship captain had gone all Heart-of-Darkness/Colonel Kurtz and set himself up as a despot/tyrant on some planet and ditched his duties within Starfleet.


I think of those episodes, as I imagine a starship helmed by Sarah Palin and the type of civilization that would arise if you let her and a bunch of teabaggers colonize a new planet.

Re:My favorite Star Trek episodes...

[tsalmark]

I'll pitch in some gas money.

Re:My favorite Star Trek episodes...

[MaWeiTao]

I think of those episodes, as I imagine a starship helmed by Sarah Palin and the type of civilization that would arise if you let her and a bunch of teabaggers colonize a new planet.

They'd probably be a lot happier than those who ended up on a planet ruled by Nancy Pelosi and friends.

Pointless

[dontPanik]

This is such a stupid article. It doesn't take into account atmosphere or presence of water at all. The only data the the guy uses is that there happens to be one planet 20 light years away that is roughly the same size as Earth. That is the only data he uses to come to his conclusion. What a waste of time.

Re:Pointless

[PmanAce]

Considering most of the planets in our solar system have an atmosphere, it is not that far fetched...

Re:Pointless

[dontPanik]

Considering most of the planets in our solar system have an atmosphere, it is not that far fetched...

That's all well and good, but I'm really a sucker for oxygen.

Re:Pointless

[PmanAce]

Then why assume life out there needs oxygen like us?

Yea Yea ...

[Osgeld]

And I may have crabs, but I dont think it counts still I see stuff moving around

Re:If there are really billions of such planets ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you aren't a Jedi? I hate to break the news to you, but there you go.

Strangely appropriate

[Anonymous Coward]

This month's RealLife webcomic story arc is strangely appropriate.

Billions and Billions

[mbone]

This has been "known" for a long time. If I remember correctly, that's what Carl Sagan was talking about with his "billions and billions."

Re:uhh... Cosmos anyone?

[mbone]

Our children's children's children won't know, really (unless we find a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy lying around). But the statistical estimate will continue to improve.

Paging Carl Sagan...

[SiliconEntity]

Shouldn't that be "billions and billions"?

Re:Paging Carl Sagan...

[mooingyak]

You've got it backwards. It's actually "billions and billions".

Re:uhh... Cosmos anyone?

[callmebill]

He also mentioned how advanced civilizations would quickly destroy themselves (e.g., here on earth in central america, italy, and globally today). Even with round-trip times of a couple hundred years, we'll probably be looking at artifacts from a dead civilisation.

I bet when we do find life it will not be exciting

[parallel_prankster]

We keep making this a huge deal, but somehow I feel that when we do find life in other planets somehow it will not be this interesting. It will be like finding a new crawling reptile in the Amazon. Besides, even if we do find signs of life in a planet light years away, how much will we be able to learn about them? Space travel hasnt really taken off, we dont even have cheap and reliable means of going to the moon!

Re:How big they are is only a portion of the equat

[demersus]

In addition to what you've said, it would also require at least one Saturn/Jupiter sized planet further out than itself to catch any large asteroids that may be coming it's way.

Let me see if I'm following the math here...

[Minwee]

You take a number which you don't know very well, so you estimate it. Then multiply it by a factor which you really don't know, so you just guess that. Next you multiply the result by another number which you may never know, so you just pull that one out of /dev/random, and multiply them all together.

And wow, you get a result that you like! That's amazing!

Re:Let me see if I'm following the math here...

[utuk99]

You take a number which you don't know very well, so you estimate it. Then multiply it by a factor which you really don't know, so you just guess that. Next you multiply the result by another number which you may never know, so you just pull that one out of /dev/random, and multiply them all together.

And wow, you get a result that you like! That's amazing!

So its like project estimations. Probably about as accurate too.

Re:Let me see if I'm following the math here...

[noidentity]

You take a number which you don't know very well, so you estimate it. Then multiply it by a factor which you really don't know, so you just guess that. Next you multiply the result by another number which you may never know, so you just pull that one out of /dev/random, and multiply them all together.

And wow, you get a result that you like! That's amazing!

Wow, you just described how floating-point math works.

Re:Let me see if I'm following the math here...

[noidentity]

BTW, I hesitated on making this joke because floating-point is anything but random, even though it's often thought to be unpredictable. What it is is not the same as integer or infinite-precision math, so attempts to treat it like either fail.

Re:Let me see if I'm following the math here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of a guy named Fermi?

Re:uhh... Cosmos anyone?

[blair1q]

1% accuracy?

This isn't even a single-order-of-magnitude accuracy guess.

once again these articles

[nimbius]

are pointless. its like reading a phonebook, and the subject matter fails to entice anyone...

now, had Carl Sagan so much as uttered the first sentence of a comment he heard related to the summary? My jaw would drop, my eyes would glass over, and I would spend the next three hours digging through the mess in the garage trying to find my old telescope and praying for some miraculous cavalcade of ineffably grandiose funding for NASA.

Yawn!

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me when the galaxy *has* billions of habitable planets.

epic hot damn

[slick7]

Just think, Browncoats and the Aliance, Avatar and Custer's last stand, District 9 and the French and Indian wars rolled into one big ass reality show. Again I say, Hot Damn!

Interstellar travel is inevitable

[mangu]

Barring imaginary physics, the only point to go to another planet/star is to colonize it.

We have sent probes to all the planets in our system, have landed in two of them. Once we have some way to send a probe to another star system you can bet we will.

We are quickly reaching a turning point in economics when manufacturing is so cheap that we will not be restrained by the cost of things. Looking at the world today, the richest countries do not bother to manufacture things anymore, that can be outsourced. With enough robotics, even China will want to concentrate on intellectual creation instead.

My prediction is that in less than a hundred years we will have manufacturing plants in orbit or on asteroids capable of building ships able to reach the nearest stars. The first ships will not be manned, but they will carry self-reproducing machines that will build additional starships once they reach their destination.

Cue forward 50 million years, which is 0.3% of the current age of the universe, and the whole galaxy will have been reached by our starships.

Fermi's paradox has only one explanation for me, we are the first. Someone has to be, of course.

Re:Interstellar travel is inevitable

[burisch_research]

Or maybe other civilizations are smart enough to know not to unleash an aggressive hegemonizing swarm on the galaxy! This is the galactic equivalent of the grey goo scenario.

Re:Interstellar travel is inevitable

[mangu]

maybe other civilizations are smart enough to know not to unleash an aggressive hegemonizing swarm on the galaxy

All of them? It only takes one to start it.

Re:Interstellar travel is inevitable

[burisch_research]

McAffee(tm) AntiVirus(R) Galactic Edition :)

Re:Interstellar travel is inevitable

[ColdWetDog]

We are quickly reaching a turning point in economics when manufacturing is so cheap that we will not be restrained by the cost of things. Looking at the world today, the richest countries do not bother to manufacture things anymore, that can be outsourced.

Stop watching Star Trek and go outside. "Cost of manufacturing is so cheap". Right. Why can't people afford houses. Hell, why can't a huge swath of humans afford to live on more than a couple of dollars per day.

The 'too cheap to meter' stuff you see is mostly little bits of junk that is indeed relatively inexpensive in developed countries. But humans are becoming even more resource constrained that ever. We're running out of (cheap) oil. We're running out of (cheap) water. We're running out of (cheap) land.

Yeah, the folks in Bangladesh, India, China and Africa would really like to live in that world of plenty.

Re:Interstellar travel is inevitable

[SETIGuy]

cue ominous music Maybe in only takes one to stop it.

Re:uhh... Cosmos anyone?

[Rooked_One]

;)

I was going to put that in there, but I figured I would let someone else be the smart arse ;)

Re:If there are really billions of such planets ..

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Touche'

What are we looking for exactly?

[franciscohs]

Earth is habitable to current living species only because it had a biological evolution that created the atmosphere as it is today, etc. Are we looking for planets that had the same biological evolution of earth (and thus, have life) or are we looking for planets that have the same characteristics as the early earth, and that after billions of years could hold life? Because I don't think we'll find an earth like, habitable planet without life in it.

gates

[frogcode]

Be cool if we had something like transporter device that would take us to all those different planets. We could call it a stargate.

"Big Bang" doesn't make sense to me either

[rsborg]

However, a cyclical model to explain the expansion (and eventual contraction) of the universe would be much more consistent.

Personally I like the idea of the big-bang being a white-hole endpoint to a black hole in a different universe ... think of a large bubble splitting and being pinched off (the pinching being a 2-dimensional view of a black hole) into another bubble.

This would also explain what happens to black hole absorbed matter.. it creates another universe.

Ultimately, I feel more comfortable in cosmology over religion in that cosmology can be refined with factual observation. Those comfortable with the possibility of unattainable infinite knowledge (and the uncertainty it brings) are more predisposed to preferring scientific study as opposed to relying on faith.

"Study funded by Weyland-Yutani Corporation"

[Slutticus]

Building Better Worlds(TM)

My guess is they may be habitable with a little bit of help
"You know we manufacture those by the way....."

Re:Fermi's paradox. --- Reapers, dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Either way we're probably safe, unless we run into an adolescent god with a magnifying glass, like Trelane "The Squire of Gothos".

Or someone who's bought the land to build something, notices that some of the vermin act as if it owned the place and then decides to call in the exterminator. That happens to some ant hills...

Re:Fermi's paradox. --- Reapers, dude.

[Lectoid]

I think you mean Reavers.

International Planet Registry

[kryliss]

From the Article: "So think about it: 2.5 billion habitable planets is roughly enough for every man, woman, and child on Earth to each have a planet. ". So for just $49.99. I can send you your very own planet to name and it will go into the International Planet Registry. You'll get this piece of paper that I print out and write your name on as well as this customer poster that I printed out with the location of your planet. Order within the next 15 minutes and we'll throw in a moon for you to name with each order. Now your love ones will be able to remember you each time they look up into the night time sky and see your pin point of light *DISCLAIMER* visible light may vary. Order now before all the planets are named. Please send $49.99 plus $9.99 S&H to International Planet Registry. P.O. Box 419. Batesville AR

Re:International Planet Registry

[I'm not really here]

In response to your sig:

"If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman."

This is a non sequitur. If you're going to bash religion, at least learn logic enough to put up a solid, intelligent, well reasoned and logical argument so that others may have a chance to discuss things reasonably. This statement is a logical fallacy, and proves nothing.

Additionally, it assumes that the intent of the Superman comics was to convey truth. It also assumes that the comics themselves contain even a shred of factual information. The argument also assumes that the factual value of one piece of literature has direct correlative influence on the factual value of another piece of literature (fallacy of assuming the consequent).

Half Full or Half Empty

[medv4380]

Given all the other factors in having Earth like life on a planet are mostly unknown or unknowable it would be more accurate to say that only 25% of the stars have even a chance of maybe having life or a habitable world if we import life. I think they author if the glass is half full type who sees the math as saying look at what we have and doesn't realize that he's making a formula that is meant to exclude not include. I'm the type who falls into the life might be so impossible the only way we exist is because the universe is so near infinite that as long as the possibility isn't zero it can happen at least once.

Probability of Life = 1 X 10^-googol

And the Universe might be

[jebblue]

And the Universe might be a small decorative item hanging from a cat's neck.

oblig xkcd

[PPalmgren]

http://xkcd.com/605/

Re:oblig xkcd

[somaTh]

Strange, I thought this was a bit more applicable.

Re:oblig xkcd

[PPalmgren]

Well yeah, I guess that works too. I was going on the heavy handed case of double extrapolation in the summary.

great sample size...

[kj_kabaje]

Really? Is a dataset of n=160 really big in astronomy? It seems appallingly small in my line of work.

We arent going anywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

cost to send robot probes to extrasolar planets: humongous. barrier; laws of physics make it impossible to go more than 1/4 the speed of light on average for each trip (assuming a hypothetical drive that can get us close to c at the halfway point, then decelerate the rest of the way.) right there, we have decades, centuries, millennia. sending humans: its a life sentence in space. do you know anyone who would be willing to do this? and the threat of one malfunction in the recycling systems, et al, with no resources other than what you bring, make it more anxiety provoking than being buried alive. then, landing on a planet with alien proteins: allergic reactions through the roof, or all life being pure poison. colonizing: we have the problem of limited gene pool if the sample is small, and incredible costs of sending thousands of humans. this group would have none of the comforts of historic migrations on terra: similar life forms to what they left behind, climate within reason, and a fall back position of tens, hundreds or thousands of miles if the terrain is too inhospitable. high tech requires an infrastructure to maintain. they would have NOTHING. Our options in this millenia: making this planet work for us, maybe limited colonies on the moon or mars, a start at terraforming mars. if there is life on these extrasolar planets, we need to either develop kick ass detectors to remotely observe them (thats quite a technical challenge, worse than needle in haystack precision), or send radio signals to each, and set our radio wave detectors on them, and hope someone wants to be our cosmic pen pal. that last is quite beautiful: all of us little gravity well based protein colonies, talking through the ether at each other. no war possible, only knowledge to exchange.

The Galaxy May Have Billions of Habitable Planets

[Anonymous Coward]

...or it may not, who knows?

It feels kind of ironic to say that here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Another possibility is that we simply are not very interesting...

Hey, the same conclusion apply both to aliens and girls!

Whoa, maybe girls are aliens! Way cool!

Generational Ships

[Sloppy]

With cryo-stasis ships, at least there's a reason to eventually settle somewhere. You want to wake up (or stop taking watches) and eventually start your new life. You can bear the hardships of the journey, because you have a personal goal that you intend to some day fulfill.

The thing about generational ships, is that if they're really self-sufficient and comfortable enough that the early generations don't go mad, then what's the point of landing anywhere? You can say that humans need to expand, but the people onboard won't be able to meet that need, and they're just going to have to cope with such a limited existence. But if they succeed, then that culture will be passed down, so you'll have a whole population that is happy staying in their little box. How can you plan so far into the future and keep the plan intact?

There's a Star Trek episode ("The World is Hollow And I Have Touched the Sky") where the people don't even know they're on such a ship, and the more I think of it, the more realistic and believable that seems. People wouldn't ever be able to stick to such a long-term mission in which they don't personally have any stake, so they might as well not be depended upon to achieve it, or even know it's happening. One single centralized authority with infinite patience (a computer) and a secret and tyrannical agenda, is about the only thing that could keep it going.

Re:Generational Ships

[JTsyo]

The ships would be closed systems so eventually they would use up resources. I guess they might stop in some systems and take on material but given the choice to expand out into a entire planet I doubt there would be any society that would turn it down. Also the population would be limited to what the ship can support. Maybe the ship could be like Johnny Appleseed, dispersing humans onto different planets as it travels.

Re:Generational Ships

[Sloppy]

given the choice to expand out into a entire planet I doubt there would be any society that would turn it down.

Oh, I agree with that. It seems like an easy decision for the final 3 or 4 generations ("We're almost there! Keep going!" and "Yippee, we're here!"). But a few dozen generations before that? I can imagine people saying, "Why spend our energy on the acceleration/deceleration rockets? Let's pump it into the holodeck instead."

Re:Generational Ships

[flnca]

I thought about his pretty often, and I think that the most reasonable form of generation spacecraft would be AI controlled, self-repairing, self-sustaining, and very huge, so that Earth-like landscapes could be built in them. A ship that is 1000 km wide and high, and 10,000 km long would not be much different from a planet to its inhabitants. Clarke's 1x4x9 ratio also would make a reasonable form factor. Such a ship can of course only be built when resources are mined from the solar system planets, especially the gas giants have plenty of matter to utilize. With an "army" of robots, such a thing would be comparably easy to build and to maintain. The ship would have to have automated mining facilities, factories and so on. To the people, it would be like an ordinary world. Many of them would not need to know they're on a spacecraft. But some staff should definitely exist (an order perhaps?) that knows about the journey. Also, the government of the ship could be such that it's clear to everyone they're on a spacecraft, but then provisions need to be in place to avoid mutinies, etc.

Re:Generational Ships

[Raenex]

Many of them would not need to know they're on a spacecraft. But some staff should definitely exist (an order perhaps?) that knows about the journey.

Government should be open and transparent, and the people should be informed. It makes me sad that people would even propose such a thing.

Re:Generational Ships

[flnca]

Government should be open and transparent, and the people should be informed. It makes me sad that people would even propose such a thing.

Certainly, you're right. It would be the reasonable choice, to make everything transparent and open ... if it works for a couple hundred or thousand years, that is the question. What if the ship falls into anarchy, civil wars, dictatorships? The ship must still function under those circumstances, and ship its passengers along and nourish them. In a ship with Earth-like conditions, rain would fall and sun would shine, grass would grow, and cows would feed ... mountains and rocks would endure the centuries. People will be born and die, become dust and nourish the trees. I wonder if people would not forget where they are after a couple of centuries ... with all tech happening in the background, they would never even need to be aware of the fact. But who knows? There's a lot of possibilities.

Re:Generational Ships

[Raenex]

What if the ship falls into anarchy, civil wars, dictatorships?

That could happen with the secret order too. Or maybe the secret order will decide to use the people for their own gains. Who knows. The ethical thing to do is keep people informed. A government by the people, for the people -- in space too.

Re:Generational Ships

[flnca]

That could happen with the secret order too. Or maybe the secret order will decide to use the people for their own gains. Who knows. The ethical thing to do is keep people informed. A government by the people, for the people -- in space too.

The secret order should be where the AI of the ship comes in. It would have to select the best new members for the order, and keep them "aligned". This would keep management "cost" in that area minimal. Now picture the consequences of your suggestion: Let's assume for a moment that the ship is governed by a democratic government. In the worst case, it would have control over the ship. There'd be various interest groups that would try to gain control of the ship. Would you like to see them die, the billions of people on such a ship? One tiny error in the control of such a ship can cause all people to die. Now put it in the hands of power-hungry madmen. That's why still in democratic governments, there's still shadow groups like secret societies, and secret services that keep some information out of the hands of even the highest ranks in government. To keep a democratic government at bay and in functional condition, the AI would have to use far more sophisticated tactics (if even allowed to do so). Meh ... I like the secret order thing much better. People can go ahead and have their governments and such, but don't mess with the ship! lol ;)

Re:Generational Ships

[Sigmon]

Ya know... It's funny. As I was reading your post I began to imagine that similar thoughts must have gone through God's mind before he created the 'Heavens and the Earth' - assuming he did.

Just listen to the discussion here... Some of us humans have so little faith in ourselves that we're talking about creating all-powerful computer systems to control people and societies - all toward our ultimate goal. God, of course, also has an ultimate goal I think... he didn't just create the self-sustaining generational ship to get us there (Earth) but he gave us free will. He is braver and has more faith in his creation than we are in ourselves methinks.

Isn't that an interesting parallel? I can imagine God reading /. right now and saying to himself: "Yep... It's not as easy as it looks is it?... to create a self-sustaining world, put people on it and expect things to turn out how you'd like in the end."

Re:Generational Ships

[Sloppy]

It makes me sad that people would even propose such a thing.

Evil space-governments and the far-flung future go hand in hand. It's not sad; it's science fiction! Part of what it means to be an astro-man is to overthrow your government and find out the awful truth about the illusory world that you took for granted all your life. But that ain't gonna happen if nobody hides the awful truth to begin with. And nobody is .. GOing .. to .. TALK .. a computer .. to DEATH, unless there's an evil computer with terrible master plans for the human race in the first place.

Government should be open and transparent, and the people should be informed.

Well, then, no extrasolar colonies for you! My point is was that free people would likely not follow through and do what we want them to do (waste their lives, as dehumanized DNA-cargo (or at best, maintenance techs), on a journey which won't personally benefit them at all).

Putting people on a generational ship is a really shitty thing to do (but maybe it could work). It's an evil premise: possible the most technically viable yet ethically horrible solution to interstellar travel. Oh sure, maybe the first generation were volunteers, but their kids weren't. So let's drop the pretense of having good intentions here, ok? If hiding the truth from the people, denying them any real power over their destinies, and setting them up for a life-long deception under the oppressive-yet-unseen yoke of a ruthlessly far-sighted computer that runs their shadowy government, is what it takes to accomplish our objectives, then I say the ends justify the means! If you don't have the stomach to play god and manipulate the fates of innocent people, then maybe this project is just too big for you, puny human.

Re:Generational Ships

[flnca]

Isn't that an interesting parallel? I can imagine God reading /. right now and saying to himself: "Yep... It's not as easy as it looks is it?... to create a self-sustaining world, put people on it and expect things to turn out how you'd like in the end."

Definitely. Once I had a coworker, who said, after I had explained the concept to him: "What do you need a spacecraft for? There is Earth! Isn't Earth like a giant spacecraft?"

And he's right: Earth is like a spacecraft too. Or, if you expand on the concept of giant spacecraft, our solar system could entirely be contained in some kind of chamber inside a spacecraft, and what we see as stars, might be other chambers with other solar systems. That's the largest of spacecraft imaginable! ;)

Universes could be like snowflakes falling on a winter day, and galaxies like little ice crystals ... who knows? ;)

And then there might be God who sent us on a journey ... question is: Will we ever know when the journey is over? Is there a goal within our reach? :)

Re:Generational Ships

[Raenex]

My point is was that free people would likely not follow through and do what we want them to do (waste their lives, as dehumanized DNA-cargo (or at best, maintenance techs), on a journey which won't personally benefit them at all).

Actually, I'm sure there would be plenty of volunteers.

Oh sure, maybe the first generation were volunteers, but their kids weren't.

So what? Did you volunteer to be born in your situation? Besides, there's more to consider. Before you have a generational ship zooming off to another star, we'll likely have a permanently colonized space ship in orbit. You could even let evolution do the work. The people who are happiest being on the ship will procreate. People who want off will get sent home.

Re:Generational Ships

[symbolset]

There will be some of that. That's why you don't send out just one generational ship. There's also the issue of a people who have been in the ship for so long that when they arrive at the destination they have agoraphobia and no longer want to get out of the ship. All of these perils and more await.

The setting out is easy. Men have been abandoning hearth and home to see what's beyond the edge of what we know since before we were Men - and taking our families with us too. It's our privilege as parents to make that choice for our progeny.

Men will span the reaches beyond the planets and after that the stars, or we will not. If not then we will one day find our end, and we may as well have never been.

Re:Generational Ships

[drinkypoo]

The thing about generational ships, is that if they're really self-sufficient and comfortable enough that the early generations don't go mad, then what's the point of landing anywhere?

Well, since we're speculating, and bringing up Science Fiction, let's invoke Niven and Pournelle's Footfall, in which some wanted to land and some did not. I suspect that this is the most likely outcome. Perhaps the wisest thing to do would be to create a ship that could go on to still more worlds after disgorging a large or merely a small portion of its human complement.

Re:Generational Ships

[symbolset]

Well if we're going to reference sci-fi the relevant issues in Footfall echo the themes given in Tunnel in the Sky given by the Dean of Science Fiction (Robert A. Heinlein) thirty years before, in 1955. Or Methusela's children in 1958. Kids these days.

Re:Generational Ships

[symbolset]

Oops. I meant Orphans of the Sky, 1941 - not Tunnel in the Sky, which was a prequel to Starship Troopers.

Re:Generational Ships

[Anonymous Coward]

Orphans of the Sky

Re:Generational Ships

[drinkypoo]

I have both books. And?

Earth-like planets are NOT that common.

[ilec_geek]

There are many more variables that affect a planet's ability to support advanced life besides it's similarity in mass to Earth. "Simple bit of math based on descent assumptions...." There's your problem. Calculating the probability of all the necessary attributes that must come together for intelligent life to exist is neither "simple" nor should it be based on assumptions. Remember what happens when you assume too much? [ASS-U-ME]. Here's an interesting quote from a prominent astronomer: Teams of astronomers from all over the world continue to search for strange new worlds. As of December 11, 2009, these groups have found a total of 407 planets. Yet not a single one is an analogue to any of our solar system’s planets. None of the newly discovered planetary systems permit the existence of a planet like Earth. The exuberant vision imparted by Sagan has, for nontheists, turned into a dirge. In his book God: The Failed Hypothesis, atheist and particle physicist Victor Stenger laments that Earth, “a tiny blue speck in a vast universe,” is alone, the only locale where advanced life might exist. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Earth and our solar system are unique.

Re:How big they are is only a portion of the equat

[Anonymous Coward]

Size is the limiting factor in what we can search for.

Habitability requires a Jupiter

[WrongMonkey]

Having a large gas giant to shield the Earth from excessive meteors is thought to be a major factor in the habitability of Earth. So even if we take those numbers at face value and assume that 25% of solar systems have an Earth-like planet, only those that have a Jupiter-like planet (1.5%) are candidates for life. Further assuming those two are independant variables, that drops the odds of finding life down to .375% without even accounting for other contributing factors like having liquid water or a significant moon.

Re:Habitability requires a Jupiter

[quacking duck]

I have a small problem with the Jupiter-as-shield theory. I don't doubt Jupiter has protected us before, but it only orbits the sun once every 12 years. There's a lot of space, and even if we assume asteroids, comets, etc are orbiting the sun roughly along the 2-dimensional plane of the solar system (instead of coming at us from "above") that's a lot of time for an object to sail by Jupiter's orbit without it being there.

Isn't it far more likely that an object would be perturbed by Jupter's gravity rather than crashing into it? And if so, it stands to reason there's as much chance this is a bad thing for us, as it is good, i.e. an object that *wasn't* ever going to crash into us is perturbed enough so its orbit eventually intersects with Earth.

Re:Habitability requires a Jupiter

[Squeeself]

Well, so far we've found a lot of very large gas giants, so I'm not sure on the accuracy of that 1.5% figure...Admittedly, most of the ones we've found are larger than Jupiter, but if there's 25% earth-size, well...seems like a pretty big probability gap between the 2 extremes, no? But yes, I think the point is valid that just having an earth-size planet doesn't make it habitable. There's MANY factors contributing to it, such as other planets in system, moons, star age&type, debris in system, etc. I don't think we know enough about the odds yet of these other factors to really figure out good odds of finding human-favorable planets.

Re:Habitability requires a Jupiter

[Maritz]

It's no longer consensus that a Jupiter-like planet is beneficial to a world like ours in terms of acting as an asteroid-sink. It is likely to have flung as many asteroids and comets into the solar system as outward. In fact, the inward migration of the outer gas planets is now thought to have caused the Late Heavy Bombardment. Having said that, a significant proportion of the oceans could be derived from these comets. Hard to say as volcanism would have been another significant source.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Fermi's paradox. --- Reapers, dude.

[BLToday]

No, Reapers (Mass Effect) or The Eternal Ones (Star Control 3). Same idea, harvester of sentient life.

Why don't we...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use the stargate?

But what about the orbital distances?

[vortex2.71]

Its great that these planets probably exist, but what distance is their orbits? While, planet size gives us a good idea of how much atmosphere the planet could have, the orbital distance gives us an estimate of the surface temperature. Also important is the rotational frequency and the angle of tilt. It seems like there are a lot more variables that need to be considered in considering these probabilities.

That means

[the11thplague]

They are over 9000!

How are the rent rates?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Billions of habitable planets? Ok, but how high are the rent rates? Local schools satisfactory for your children? Criminality and local law enforcement? General life style enjoyment?

Please give me the details that count, on your billions of planets . . .

And do they have an affordable DSL . . . ?

Re:How are the rent rates?

[Francofille]

The rent rates are TOO DAMN HIGH!

The Earth May have Billions of People with Sunpox

[Maeric]

Here's a hypothetical story to illustrate a point.

"A recent report came out stating that as many as 1 in 4 people have sunpox. But is the world at risk? A simple bit of math based on some decent assumptions shows that there may be billions of people potentially infected. '... astronomers studied 166 people within 80 miles of New York, and did a survey of the people they found. What they found is that about 1.5% of the people have a terminal virus, 6% have a virus, and about 12% have people think they have a virus. This sample isn’t complete, and they cannot yet detect the sunpox virus as it is still being studied in the one reported case of it globally. But using some statistics, they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of the people have the sunpox virus!' Proving this directly has proven to be an issue..."

For those that may need me to connect the dots for you, how likely would you say that the world needs to be in fear, based on the story above, of the sunpox virus? Now read the headline and synopsis again. How likely are you to believe that there are habitable planets out there just because we live on one? I'm not saying there aren't any out there, though I doubt there are any that have developed with intelligence, but with this kind of thinking it makes science look like a young child trying to jam a piece of the puzzle into a hole that it doesn't fit into.

Obligatory xkcd: gravity wells

[painandgreed]

Wrong. You can send an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star for only a little more fuel than it takes to get to the Moon.

Um, wrong. To get to the moon, you have to get out of the Earth's gravity well. To get out of the solar system, you need to get out of the sun's gravity well which is quite larger than getting out of Earth's to get to the moon. If wikipedia is to be believed, you need enough energy to move something 30 km/sec more to escape the solar system than just to escape earth. With E=1/2mv^2 and a 5000 kg apollo module equivilant, it would require 2.25*10^6 Newtons more energy to escape the solar system than Earth to the moon. Otherwise, whatever you send out will just end up orbiting the sun instead of getting where you are going.

Re:Obligatory xkcd: gravity wells

[Grishnakh]

I'm no astrophysicist, but how much fuel did it take to send the Pioneer, Voyager, and New Horizons space probes on their current trajectories out of the solar system? These craft were all probably around the size of an Apollo capsule.

Don't forget, the energy required to get from place to place in the Solar System isn't absolute (as the xkcd strip would imply), it depends greatly on the course you take, because you can use gravitational slingshots to greatly decrease fuel usage, usually at the expense of time. This is why it usually takes several years for us to get a probe to Mars; we're not doing it in the fastest way, but the most fuel-efficient way. The 70s probes (V'gers and Pioneers) saw all the planets of the system pretty cheaply by taking a "grand tour" route that took advantage of a rare alignment of the planets.

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

Re:Obligatory xkcd: gravity wells

[painandgreed]

Point taken. Energy required is as xkcd implies, but you can get energy from slingshot effect, thus reducing the fuel needed.

Replying to myself

[Firethorn]

Should have perhaps stated this earlier, but one massive difference between the Earth's moon and the others around rocky planets is that current theory is that it was created by a body around the size of mars slamming into the proto-earth with a good chunk ending up as a ring around earth that eventually coalesced into the moon.

That sort of thing is going to have an impact on rotational period, magnetic orientation, tidal forces, composition of the planet, etc... Thus my usage of 'second stirring', because it basically turned the Earth back into a molten mass.

Oh, and my 'more than a thousand ly apart' should be 'on average'. Given the size of the milky way that still means around 8k habitable plants, so I suppose I'm a pessimist compared to this article's writer.

Maybe I should draw a line between 'habitable' and 'life bearing'?

Jesus..

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Wow so many planets and possible life who do not know that Jesus died for our sins on the cross! sri

This passes for science... Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is so nice that Science doesn't have to rely on actual science anymore. You can just extrapolate, theorize, and make up things that sound remotely feasable, and that passes for science. We should be proud of how far we've advanced.

Re:Fermi's paradox. --- Reapers, dude.

[Lanteran]

It is quite possible that we're one of the first or the first, and we'll take the role of progenitor and assistant of other developing species on other worlds; like the aliens in 2001/10/63/3001.

Venus

[iconic999]

Venus is an earth sized planet. How many have an oxygen atmosphere with a stable weather system (among many other things we enjoy here)? No way to know. All guesswork. Utterly useless drivvel. Nothing to see here, move along.

42, but what's the question?

[Francofille]

We keep seeing stories like this but have we really thought about what it would mean to colonize another planet? It's not like the world's current population would go there in a giant space-bus together and our planet would be saved.

When Europe colonized the New World and all the rest of the planet, people stayed behind in Europe and it was still as crowded and dirty as ever. Their populations did not shrink. They just provided some people to populate previously pristine places.

Furthermore, the life the pioneers led was hard and miserable. Conditions were poor, unpleasant, inadequate, and unhealthy, and that's for the ones who made it at all. Now taking volunteers for the interplanetary version of the Donner party.

Incontrovertible

[Spykk]

A simple bit of math based on some decent assumptions shows that there may be billions of potentially habitable worlds in the galaxy.

That's proof enough for me.

Re:Fermi's paradox. --- Reapers, dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too may assumptions about the pace of development, I think. We don't know if there are potential plateaus, how likely they are, how long they might last. Something at the level of pre-agriculture humans would be intelligent and worth talking to, but we have no ability to see them yet - they could be ridiculously common, and we currently have no way of knowing. We were at that level for maybe a couple hundred thousand years, but we have no idea whether that length is normal.

All we really know, by logic of the fermi paradox, is that a certain development range of intelligent life isn't common in our galaxy - the range that is somewhat above us technologically, but not so high as to be gods indistinguishable from nature. Below that is invisible, above that is by definition invisible, but in between, if they were common, they would be here already or we'd be able to see their engineering projects with our telescopes. Call it Star-Trek-level civilization if you want. If they exist, then they only hit the technological jackpot under a hundred million years ago - the light hasn't reached here yet for us to see, or the ships haven't got here yet, whichever is faster.

But it could just as easily turn out that ships and nanotech are HARD, and that there are arbitrarily advanced civilizations all along the tech spectrum. Because if they're not close, not intentionally beaming signals at us (inside the window of time in which we can see them), not coming here (because they can't), and not engineering the spectrum of their stars, we still can't see them yet, and possibly they can't see us either. I'd like to think that our advancement will be faster, that our potential will not run into permanent walls... but how do I know it won't take another fifty million years? Because it could - we've got a solid several billion years left before our Sun's life cycle starts making things unpleasant.

Well, we haven't finished surveys specifically looking for signs of things like Dyson spheres yet, so maybe I'll be proven wrong. That would be cool.

Target practice?

[SteveFoerster]

Voyager will almost certainly survive until it reaches another star system; maybe not with any power, but it'll be an intact object (there aren't a lot of other objects floating around in interstellar space for it to collide with).

Unless, of course, it's blasted to bits by a Klingon.

What are the odds...

[grikdog]

...that one (or any) of those planets contains a richly diverse ecosystem and at least one race of highly intelligent sentient creatures who view the prospect of human visitation with calm and mild disdain, secure in the knowledge that nothing made of meat can make a journey of even 4 lightyears inside a tin can without eating itself alive.

Re:How big they are is only a portion of the equat

[Quiet_Desperation]

You can put an Earth-sized planet where Pluto is and that's not going to mean anything.

Well, it will mean enough to make people say, "Holy shit! How'd you move that planet there like that!"

are you kidding?

[t2t10]

But if they succeed, then that culture will be passed down, so you'll have a whole population that is happy staying in their little box.

Humans aren't "happy staying in their little box" (earth) right onw, so what makes you think many of them wouldn't jump at the opportunity to land on a planet?

not actually a problem

[t2t10]

It's a problem if you must fly there right now. However, if you take a long-term perspective, it's not that hard. There are plenty of objects between here and nearby stars and you can hop from one to another, settling and recovering as you go along. And long term, stars move relative to one another quite a lot, so once you've managed to get to your neighboring stars and settle them; a complete galactic orbit takes about 200 million years.

So, between spreading out and having things mixed up while orbiting the galactic center, humans could spread out over fairly large numbers of planets fairly quickly (on a cosmic scale). We need to master traveling to, and living on asteroids and oort cloud objects, but once we have done that, humans will spread across the galaxy. It doesn't even matter whether "we" think it's a good idea; it doesn't take a lot of humans to get the process started.

Re:uhh... Cosmos anyone?

[kirtu]

We (in our lives) will probably never get to anywhere near 1% accuracy of how many habitable planets are out there. Its all theory.

We only have solid data since 1995 (except for the pulsar system from around 1969 that showed three planets one of them Earth sized). Given the results from the past 15 years we will know fairly well over the next 15 and max 30 years the percentage of Earth like planet in our stellar neighborhood and can continue to refine the estimate. So in our lifetime we are really going to know accurately the percentage of habitable planets at least in the stellar neighborhood. Now whether they are inhabited in some way is another matter.

Re:How big they are is only a portion of the equat

[blind biker]

have a moon to stabilize rotation for normalized weather patterns

A moon that would stabilize weather patterns is NOT indispensable, for the planet to be habitable, even by humans. That planet's dwellers would have more trouble traveling around, sure, but that would only marginally delay their evolution. Read Baxter's "Manifold: Origin", for a description of just that kind of planet (it's not the main plot device of the novel, so I have not spoiled anything, don't worry).

Re:Fermi's paradox. --- Reapers, dude.

[Squeeself]

Luckily, we've only got a 144 more years until Commander Shepard is born. He/she will take care of that pesky Reaper problem, so we all we gotta do now is work on settling Mars so we can find those advanced technological ruins there...