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Exoplanet Count Tops 700
astroengine writes "On Friday, the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia registered more than 700 confirmed exoplanets. Although this is an amazing milestone, it won't be long until the 'first thousand' are confirmed. Only two months ago, the encyclopedia — administered by astrobiologist Jean Schneider of the Paris-Meudon Observatory — registered 600 confirmed alien worlds. Since then, there has been a slew of announcements including the addition of a batch of 50 exoplanets by the European Southern Observatory's High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (or HARPS) in September."
Why do well-educated scientists consider alien life, even if it's very simple or nothing like life here on earth, to be such an absurd idea? Why do they have so much trouble considering it with any seriousness?
The scientists in your family may not be representative of scientists in general.
I've always assumed that most people who know the numbers involved think that alien life must exist (with a hundred billion stars per galaxy and hundred billion galaxies, it seem like there are pretty good odds).
Whether we'll communicate with, travel to, or be visited by aliens is an entirely different question with a lot more scope for doubt.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
But we know that what we've found so far is NOT a representative sample, because the methods are biasied towards finding jupiter-sized planets?
That's not really good reason to believe they don't exist. A galactic spanning civilization, for one, would only be visible, as you say, across the galaxy. Not across the entire universe. And secondly, as of right now it is only a pipe dream that a couple thousand more years of history will spread us across the stars. We might just as easily blow ourselves up, retreat into a cyber-singularity, or just run out of gas, so to speak.
But anyway, I agree that it's likely that microbial life of various sorts is abundant. And on the other end, I've always felt that it is only a kind of cellular chauvinism that prevents us from thinking of stellar objects as life forms. They grow, they mantain homeostasis, they sometimes reproduce in a fashion, they consume, they die.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.