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Milky Way Stuffed With an Estimated 50 Billion Alien Worlds
astroengine writes "Using data extrapolated from the early Kepler observations of 1,235 candidate exoplanets, mission scientists have placed an estimate on the number of alien worlds there are in our galaxy. There are thought to be 50 billion exoplanets, 500 million of which are probably orbiting within their stars' habitable zones."
Any truly intelligent life would've detected us and fled to another galaxy long ago.
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Based on my time in high school, I expect those 500 million habitable planets are all inviting each other to parties, picking each other for teams, and definitely getting laid. Earth is getting left out, and nobody has the heart to tell us.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
however, the number of known civilizations (planet wise) is still 1, out of the 1,235. This makes a rather large dent in the computational threshold potential for Drake's famous equasion.
While there might be lots of dirtballs, and even more planets in need of a collossally sized gas-x pill, the number of potentially habitable is small, and of those the number that would be reasonably extrapolated to contain life would be even smaller, and the number with active civilizations even smaller still.
My mother was barely a high school girl when we landed on the moon and since the last time we stepped foot on something other than the earth, she had children who grew to be old enough to have children who were as old as she was, then. We keep cutting budgets, because "we don't need all that there space sci-fi mumbo-jumbo when they can't even fix the potholes in front of mah damn house durr durr durr!". We talk about grand attempts to Mars, which we then never fund or push forward after having fancy press conferences about it. Then we do the same with plans to . . . go back to the moon.
I suppose an optimistic way to look at it is that while we may see no advances in exploration in the near future, we do continue to increase technology which will in turn make future exploration even more successful. Sort of the way you could set a computer to cracking an encryption today that could do it in a few hours, while if you had started cracking that encryption in 1980 and let that computer keep running, it still wouldn't have completed the calculations, today. Still, that doesn't put one at ease over the general lack of ambition. Not to mention the amount that the last major space effort contributed to the technological advances that we have today and are now counting on continuing to advance at a rate so as to re-jumpstart the space exploration.
I think it's safe to resign ourselves to little more happening in our lives. Our best hope is that while the likes of Carmack are building low orbit space planes and the likes of Richard Branson are building low orbit space hotels (which, let's recognize, are going to be nothing more than crammed little pods for decades to come), they somehow stumble into a viable commercial reason to explore some space out there. Otherwise, we're generations away from much more than sending RC cars to the surface of Mars, again.
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Having planet formation at all is the statistically meaningful event. Getting one or nine as the terminal result is just a matter of the initial distribution of the cloud.
And 500 million in the habitable zone is only 5*10^8, which is a really small number to be plugging into a modified Drake equation unless the likelihood of life occurring and continuing to exist is overwhelmingly high and unless the probability of life developing intelligence is similarly high. If each term is 1% (by many estimates, an extremely large value) you are already down to 50,000 planets before you get into terms relating to how detectable civilizations are from what distance and whether they exist over a period such that we're able to detect them at this time and from this distance. Millions and billions of planets may sound like a lot, but it's pretty small from a SETI standpoint.
I watched 2001 again recently and noticed something new (for me). In the first scene which shows the space pod in the room at the end you see an internal display which alternates between "LIF" and something like "NONEXIST". We think we see this from Bowman's POV, but it seems the pod doesn't think Bowman is alive at all.
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I must have missed when they probed those 1,235 planets for evidence of civilization and declared that they were able to rule it out.
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I've read in a few places that we may be one of the first around. Supposedly, heavy elements only came into abundant quantity around ten billion years ago. A much earlier universe couldn't have made our solar system. OTOH, it would be an utter mindfuck to confirm that there is other life out there. Even moreso if it was intelligent. But it would be equally amazing if it turns out that we're the only ones because we came first.
Wow, 50 billion?
That candy bar must have a lot of calories...
It is my understanding that the drake equation wasn't meant to be a predictive tool for calculating the exact or even closely approximate amount of planets that harbor intelligent life. Rather, it was simply supposed to be a means to illuminate the incredibly likely event that intelligent life could possibly exist, given a big enough universe, under incredibly conservative and unstable estimates.
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
Not to mention this whole "habitable zone" thing is a load of crap IMHO. I mean what are the odds that some alien race is gonna come out just like us and therefor need the exact same conditions as us? We have already detected the possibility of liquid water on Europa IIRC, and that is pretty damned far from the "habitable zone" so who is to say there aren't plenty of creatures living on worlds farther out?
We have no idea what kind of gravity or other conditions may exist there so until/unless we find a way to actually get out there and look their guesses are about as useful as throwing a dart at a dartboard. hell on our own planet we have things living in conditions that would kill us instantly, things that live in unbelievable depths, things that live on methane, etc, so any guesses right now will probably be as worthless as primitive man trying to guess how the world worked.
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When did they show that there was intelligent life here on Earth? I'll point to Reality TV as an opposing opinion.
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Kepler is only looking at Sun-like stars, which only account for 13% of the stars in our galaxy. Also the mission has only been going on for two years and they need at least two transits to say they might have found a planet, so this wouldn't count planets much further away from their star than Earth is from Sol.
It's not an error, it states 50 billion likely worlds in total based on current sample statistics. 500 million of those 50 billion are probable to be within what we currently consider to be potentially habitable orbits.
the numbers are referring to two different concepts. in other words, they're positing that 49.5 billion of those expected worlds aren't likely to be within a potentially habitable orbit and that just considers distance from their suns, who knows about all the other possible variables that may be required for life as we know it at least.
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In practical terms that's not really meaningful. Considering the timescale involved, you're probably dealing with a margin of error of +/- 1 billion years. Then consider that the speed of evolution, in all its forms (i.e. planetary, geological, biological, societal, and technological), is influenced by an incalculable number of interrelated factors. So, in reality, being "one of the first" could mean that we're several billion years behind some and ahead of others.
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Not only that, but there are two further qualifiers: One is that possibly radio-waves aren't the best way of communicating. Maybe there's some fancy quantum-entanglement doo-dad that we're right around the corner from discovering and which civilisations almost always progress to once they pass radio waves. Granted, it seems unlikely to us, but how would we know from where we are. Second idea is that sufficiently advanced civilisations tend not to waste power by needlessly broadcasting massive amounts of radio waves into space. We bounce ours off satellites. Maybe they do the same only even more efficiently. Maybe they all use focused lasers with really good aim. Maybe their planets become super-wired with fibre-grids and satellite relay becomes the less efficient option. Again, there ought to be some leakage, but it could cut down on the amount of transmission considerably. The phase during which a civilisation broadcasts Hitler opening the Olympic games (reference to the film Contact), could be a very, very narrow window in the grand scheme of things.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I think the era of humans living in space (exploring space is a mere idle pastime if all you're going to do is to snap blurred photos or vicariously poke some pebble in some distant landscape) will turn out pretty much like the fabled Year of Linux on the Desktop. There won't be a year of Linux on the desktop. We're just going to find out one day we are using Linux on the desktop. Or we won't (because by that time we'll all be using wallpaper or holographically projected computers).
Right now all we have is a token presence in space. Maybe in a decade, there will be another "international" space station where another half a dozen people will live for weeks at a time. Then maybe in another decade down the line, there will be hundreds of people living in half a dozen stations independent of any national space agency. By then maybe we'll have a moonbase or two (one for the international community and the other for some lone wolf space superpower). Like the first humans out of Africa, the trickle to space continues until one day we cross the threshold (a 1000 or 10 x 1000?) when we can say humanity is truly a space faring species.
Then again, maybe, like the explosion of the tablet computer (2010?) or Android phones (2011?), there will be one breakout Year that future historians will point back as the true start of the Space Age, when even mere millionaires can hop on a junket to low Earth orbit.
I started to read your comment, but then gave up when I realized you're really just meat that talks. Disgusting.
I really didn't need to know this. It's way too big an always-out-of-reach carrot for a guy who's always thought the pasture he couldn't see must surely be greener.
Be careful - that pasture may BE greener, but that green might also be a toxic slime mold.
Humans are not designed for space travel. We don't live long enough. We're too fragile, need too much energy just to stay alive and can't eat electricity. Whether we overcome those design "mistakes" in biological or mechanical solutions will be an interesting turn of events. However in time, we will send stuff out there - though if history is a guide, it may be running away from us.
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I imagine it would be much easier to just build a Bernal sphere or O'Neill cylinder than to physically go to another world. For discovery purposes, nothing beats exoplanets, but for colonization, space stations are cheaper.
Beyond that, if we go there and find intelligent life, then it'll be much easier to establish a relationship with a species that breathes our air, has an overlapping thermal range of comfort, and lives under gravity and pressure conditions comparable to our own.
I don't know about that. We don't seem to be able to establish much of a relationship even with dolphins or whales, reasonably intelligent species on our own planet. Indeed, they apparently have no interest at all in establishing a relationship with us. In fact, besides humans, I can think of very few species which fraternize outside with other species, unless they've been bred for it by humans. We may be the exceptional case rather than the typical one.
Establishing relationships might turn out to be a tricky affair, even with life which has evolved under similar conditions.
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Lost in time. Lets say all those 500 million planets are earth like. That means they got a lifespan of a mere 10 billion years (earth is 4.5 billion old and got about 5 billion years left). On this planet (as far as we know) there has been one species influential enough to possibly be noticed in space or indeed notice space itself. For a grant total of just over a hundred years. In 10 billion. We have no way of knowing how long civilizations such as ours manage to survive. But even if you make it a thousand years, it still the shortest of blips on the time line of our planet.
Even if you account for that the fact that our planet wasn't always habitable during its life, it is still a VERY wide window in which to look. We could look at every single habitable planet and just never ever be looking at the right time to see life.
Every single planet could spawn life within its own lifespan and we still would never ever know about it. There are places in our own solar system that have possibly supported life and some still might, and we don't know for certain (yet) because we can't look for it yet.
I can not see a dinosaur, nor a dodo or an elephant bird or countless other forms of lifes which we know to have excisted, merely because time gets in the way. Space got far more time. We are not alone, just lost in a sea of time.
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Not to mention this whole "habitable zone" thing is a load of crap IMHO. I mean what are the odds that some alien race is gonna come out just like us and therefor need the exact same conditions as us?
Habitable zone === possibility of liquid water on open surface. This is much broader than the exact same conditions we require, and as we've had theorists thinking for a long time about possible life chemistries that are different from our own, and most still think that water-based life is the most likely to occur, it seems a reasonable starting point.
We have already detected the possibility of liquid water on Europa IIRC, and that is pretty damned far from the "habitable zone" so who is to say there aren't plenty of creatures living on worlds farther out?
Europa is a pretty unusual situation. It also has a few serious disadvantages that may make it less likely that life would occur on it than a typical "habitable zone" rocky planet, some of which are likely to happen anywhere a similar feature occurs. The biggest is that it's quite small, which reduces the likelihood of a life-starting reaction occuring there. It's energy-starved in comparison to a planet with a warm surface, which also makes the likelihood of a life-starting reaction lower. Both of these issues are likely to apply to Europa-like moons in other star systems.
Why should be able to see and hear them? Are we sure we would even identify them if we did? Will it only be clear in retrospect? We just ran into a tribe living in the Amazon that hadn't been contacted. They saw airplanes, regularly and just associated them with the environment. They had sightings of cruise ships and military ships but since there was no such thing as a boat that big .... they didn't make anything of it.
The sun is getting about 10% more luminous this billion years. Your timeline is off. Think of it this way. 2 billion years ago solar radiation was only 6% less than it is today.
Why?
You seem to be confusing time and space. If there were 1000 of them over one billion years then the probability of their light cone intersecting ours is tiny. Unless you assume that on reaching maturity they somehow become a galactic civilisation with a presence in every star system. Even big noises like broadcast TV and nuke tests only propagate at the speed of light. If each civilisation manages to make a big noise for 1000 years after inventing radio then you still need to be in the right point in space, at the right point in time, in order to hear them.
Sad fact of the matter is that all of the grand space opera visions of the future rely on FTL that just doesn't look feasible. The alternative is life scrabbling around in its own backyard before it destroys itself. Unless our immediate neighbours go through the same process at the same time it will look like we are alone. Of course this isn't a testable/falsifiable difference to your opinion - they're both observationally equivalent.
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The two big problems are time and distance. For us to detect an alien civilization, they've had to have developed radio techology. They also need to have not progressed beyond radio. We're already moving to cabled systems instead of radio broadcasts. To an alien civilization trying to detect us, we'd be getting fainter and fainter. So there's a short window of time in which we could detect alien broadcasts.
In addition, space is big. (Insert Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy quote here.) If an alien civilization is 10,000 light years away from us and developed radio technology 5,000 years ago, we wouldn't detect their broadcasts for another 5,000 years. The radio waves would have a huge amount of space to cover before reaching us.
Finally, considering time on our side, we've only been listening for a short period of time. If that hypothetical alien civilization 10,000 light years away developed radio technology 12,000 years ago and moved past the technology 11,000 years ago, the last alien broadcasts would have moved past the Earth in the early 1900's. They would have swept right past us without us knowing at all.
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I saw on a BBC documentary how humans and dolphins would work together. The dolphins would push the fish inside the fisherman's giant nets and in the end, the dolphins get to eat a few fish for the day. But then again, that's just like training a dog, kind of... Another one was when the African tribal men would speak to birds to locate honey, and the bird would let them know. In the end, the bird does get a good cut. Some animals will work with each other to reach their goals too and I think that is the case with any animal that has the instinct of feeling more comfortable when there is partnership (like wolves, lions, elephants, etc).
Going back on topic, life doesn't always have to be carbon based and that has been proven last year by NASA, and there are definitively "life" in the most extreme parts of the world. It wouldn't be a surprise if there is life on Mars, in fact I'm 99.9% confident that there is, except it's not really an exciting kind of life form. The great thing about space travel now is that we don't have to be there to explore it. We've sent probes and robots to do the scouting for us, so if we need to scout planets with other human / non-human colonies which we will eventually, we're likely going to do it in the shadows.
Wow, way to be a downer. Did you stop to consider the possibility that, in every 1/100 of these habitable planets, there could actually be thriving, intelligent space faring civilizations that are either
A) So advanced in technology that we simply do not possess the means to recognize them as being a civilization.
B) So far away that their communication signals have simply become too weak and/or distorted to be recognized by the time they reach us.
C) So far removed in time (evolved to spacefaring, lasted for thousands of years, and still died off before we stopped throwing rocks at each other) that we simply missed the evidence that they existed.
D) Or, finally, so far ahead of us in terms of cultural maturity that they have, thus far, decided to hide themselves from our view until a later time when we can accept them as a civilization?
There are 1,001 reasons that there could be advanced, sustaining, prolonged civilizations which exist in our galaxy, but which are still undetectable by our current means. When it comes right down to it, the only way we are really going to determine if there are advanced spacefaring species in our galaxy is by becoming one ourselves, and going out and looking with the level of technology required to become a spacefaring species. So don't give up hope and go slit your wrists just yet. There is absolutely no reason to assume that we will fail in our endeavors in space. Thus far, humanity has a great track record at achieving that which was once thought impossible, even if those journeys all had their minor setbacks.
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Really good encryption is very similar to random noise. Civilizations could go silent by using wire or laser communications to avoid wasting power, ala. your comment, or by using highly efficient encodings, or probably by a dozen various other ways that are likely to get invented within a few hundred years of radio, without it having anything to do with extinction. It's intregueing that we can think of several things besides technological civilizations being inherently short lived that could explain a lack of radio type alien signals, but extinction hypothesi are still very popular with a great many people.
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C) So far removed in time (evolved to spacefaring, lasted for thousands of years, and still died off before we stopped throwing rocks at each other) that we simply missed the evidence that they existed.
Your other arguments have merit, but this one I really don't believe is possible. The more a species spreads out, the greater its chance of survival is. For the most part, any civilization that has developed the ability to move off world in large numbers has freed itself from all known forms of extinction. Any other "what if" scenarios you throw at the equation are likely to be countered by advancements in technology, distance, or rapidly-growing numbers. As I like to say, "humans are just as resistant cockroaches, we just require our technology to do it." The same would be true for any alien species that developed past our level of technology.
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