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."

Comments

Why so much disbelief in aliens among scientists?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just spend the weekend at a family gathering. Many of my relatives are doctors, scientists, and professors. The topic of alien life came up, and almost all of them laughed it off! Now I'm merely a computer programmer so I didn't say much, but when I hear about there being hundreds of exoplants out there in space I can't help but think that there may be life on at least some of them. After all, these are only the planets that we know about so far! There are probably millions upon millions of other similar planets out there that we just haven't discovered yet.

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?

weird

[khipu]

The more planets and potentially earth-like planets we discover, the more paradoxical the Fermi paradox becomes: "where are they?"

Re:Why so much disbelief in aliens among scientist

[PPH]

We can restate the original premise. Our methods are biased towards finding large planets close to stars.

Given the limits of our current techniques, it should be possible to quantify the limits of their resolution. Put this together with some models of solar system formation and we can extrapolate our observations using a model that says X% of all planetary discs tend to evolve into systems with large planets that migrate in toward their sun. So 1-X remain in some other state. perhaps one we can't detect (yet).