Astronomers Estimate Milky Way May Have 100 Billion Alien Worlds

astroengine writes "Last year, using the exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope as a guide, astronomers took a statistical stab at estimating the number of exoplanets that exist in our galaxy. They came up with at least 50 billion alien worlds. Today, astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., and the PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) collaboration have taken their own stab at the 'galactic exo-planetary estimate' and think there are at least 100 billion worlds knocking around the Milky Way."

Comments

Sweet

[jhoegl]

Then statistically tell me which planet has Amazonian Women, hot green chicks, and Galactic Girls Gone Wild.
No tentacle monsters though, they will take all our womens!

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

No tentacle monsters though, they will take all our womens!

Only the Japanese ones.

Re:Sweet

[Nidi62]

You just want death by snu snu

Re:Sweet

[tenaciousj]

Unfortunately, the probability of you finding one of those just went from 1:50 billion to 1:100 billion.

Re:Sweet

[Fluffeh]

Unfortunately, the probability of you finding one of those just went from 1:50 billion to 1:100 billion.

That is assuming that a planet with Amazonian Women, hot green chicks, and Galactic Girls Gone Wild is unique. If it is the sort of planet that comes up once in every ten billion, his chances of finding such a planet just doubled.

Re:Sweet

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You just want death by snu snu

Do you blame him? Without a partner, he's just having snu.

Re:Sweet

[ackthpt]

No tentacle monsters though, they will take all our womens!

Only the Japanese ones.

I experience an alien world ever time I return from vacation, sushi or no.

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

To be pedantic, the chances actually didn't change at all.

Re:Sweet

[vuke69]

So still zero?

Re:Sweet

[mcgrew]

I know you're joking, but you're not going to find any alien species that look anything like human. There are no Romulans, Klingons, nor especially Betazoids. You're probably unlikely to find anything that more than remotely resembles any species from Earth -- look how diverse life here is. We may find intelligent life and not even realise it's alive, let alone intelligent.

Required reading: Isaac Asimov's What is This Thing Called Love? (originally titled Playboy and the Slime God). I've read a lot of Asimov stories, and I don't think the good doctor (a biochemist) had a single alien that looked human-like, and the story I mentioned gives a clue why.

Terry Bison's They're Made Out Of Meat (online at Baen Books) is another good one.

And a thank you to slashdot for waking the muse with this topic!

redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

aren't all worlds, not our own, alien?

Re:redundant

[ThePeices]

aren't all worlds, not our own, alien?

Yes, that's why we call them alien worlds....

Re:redundant

[suso]

I think he's trying to say that its not necessary to say alien worlds, just say worlds. He does kinda have a point, saying alien worlds makes it sound like we're not one of the 100 billion, which we are.

Re:redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

We are the 0.0000001%...

Re:redundant

[Tsingi]

I think he's trying to say that its not necessary to say alien worlds, just say worlds.

If you just say worlds you have to say a billion and one. That's two extra words.

Re:redundant

[Black Parrot]

aren't all worlds, not our own, alien?

Yea, so 100,000,000,001 is total.

This Universe Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Why couldn't I be born to a universe with a less restrictive set of physical laws?!

Re:This Universe Sucks

[symbolset]

You were. You just don't know it yet.

Re:This Universe Sucks

[Skapare]

Those who figure out how to avoid the physical laws are the 0.0001%-ers that don't need money.

Re:This Universe Sucks

[bronney]

God is a man, you insensitive clod!

Re:This Universe Sucks

[sourcerror]

Follow the white rabbit.

100 billion likely way too low

[DumbSwede]

100 Billion is likely too low. Based on a survey of close suns using Doppler shift indicated at least 50% had planetary systems of some sort. I think the future will boost this percentage to 90% or better, probably virtually all suns have some kind of orbiting object that could be termed a planet. Depending on where you draw the line on size this makes for probably more than 2 Trillion alien worlds in the Milky Way alone (which is estimated to have 200-400 billion suns).

As for examining Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs) more closely it seems there is little point to single them out. So what if we know they have planets -- everywhere you could point a radio dish there are planets. I am a big supporter of SETI and this is all good news for SETI, but it doesn't do anything to narrow the search.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[Anonymous Coward]

It will narrow our search by telling us the properties of some of these planets. For instance, it would be nice to know where all the earth-like planets around sun-like stars are. That would certainly narrow the search, wouldn't it?

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, most of the Earth-like planets in the Milky Way seem to have stargates on them, so exploring those would be relatively easy.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[DumbSwede]

So we find one or two possibly Earth like planets. Likely the other KOIs also had many near Earths that we missed. Eventually we might get some bound on the percentage of systems with Earth like planets, but listening at these few KOIs is like like looking under a street lamp for the keys you lost half a block away because the light is better.

With 200-400 Billion suns to survey and most having Planets and probably 10-50% have some planets in its equivalent of the Goldie-Locks zone, then you are far better of getting on with a broad general survey of thousands or millions (or ideally billions) of suns. I fear concentrating on these particular KOIs will dilute more productive SETI searches. I fear the general public is under the assumption that we were lucky to find these near-Earths because they are rare when the opposite is almost certainly true.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[wierd_w]

The problem is that unless said aliens are pulling the strings on a galactic core super massive black hole and manipulating the plasma jet to serve as a "fucking huge" high gain antenna, the attenuation of the rf signal by interaction with cosmic dust will turn even a real whopper of a broadcast into white noise before it reaches us.

Basically, they would have to be broadcasting a massively powerful signal capable of killing off lifeforms from the raw energy in the wave before we could detect it at our distance.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[Surt]

It's acknowledged in the article that this is only for 'worlds' about 5x as big as earth and higher.
The real number, counting everything that would count as a planet in our solar system, may be 5-10X as high.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[NotQuiteReal]

It doesn't matter, in your lifetime.

To make a car analogy, for the Slashdot crowd; It is like a bunch of hot chicks driving cool cars, you know they exist, but you will never touch them. Just try to keep your basement tidy, since that is where you have to live. If a '61 'vette drives thru the storm doors, you might get lucky.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[RubberDogBone]

Well, it turns out that our own radio and TV signals don't actually get out into our own galaxy as much as we once thought. They make it barely beyond the influence of our sun and then fade.

So aliens next system over are not actually watching our old TV shows.

Another galaxy would be much farther away and even less likely to hear any signals. Space is big. Really big.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[Belial6]

Best car analogy ever.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[PyroMosh]

I like your point, but I think you're missing out on something.

Radio isn't just used to tell stories. It's used to communicate. Nobody is telling stories in the cockpit of an aircraft, for instance. It's just communicating messages. Information back and forth.

There are lots of examples where this is true. And to extend your analogy with other species, there are plenty of other species that communicate on our own planet (even microbes!). It just so happens that the complexity of that communication seems to scale to a degree with the complexity of the organism. And it also so happens that we're the only species thus far that's developed the reasoning level and had the ability to develop tools to extend communication like radio.

Further, any other species that wishes to communicate over great distances on another world, regardless of whether or not they are culturally story tellers or not, will likely face similar problems to us, in terms of the physical limitations of passing messages across space within the universe (whether that space is a light year or a mile).

It stands to reason that similar solutions (radiation) will be sought. You could argue that they'd use different bands. Perhaps. We use the bands we use because they work best in our environment. For instance, most of our environment is opaque on the visual and IR bands, so that doesn't work. That's why we don't use those bands for much. Radio, on the other hand is easy to generate, can give you good range, is not very bad for you (like x-ray or gamma), and much of the world is transparent to it, so you don't need to worry about line of sight so much.

Now that said, we have no idea what they would transmit. Sound? Visuals? Digital representations of something? What are the odds that another intelligent civilization uses sound to communicate in the first place? I have no idea. If not sound, what? If a civilization is transmitting say, smell, or some abstraction of a sense we do not posses, how would we interpret this if we detected it? If we realized that it was intelligent, how would we decode it?

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[RicktheBrick]

I would guess that Voyager is one of two of our satellites that are close to getting out of our solar system. Has Voyager been detecting tv and radio signals from Earth? Has there been a recent steep decline in the signal? I would not think so since we are still communicating with it so it can detect orders sent to it and we can still detect signals from it. I do not know how much power it has to transmit or receive but I would bet that it is less than some of our radio and television stations. I was just wondering where your source of declining signal strength came from.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[Kell Bengal]

You may have missed the "I" bit of SETI. They're not looking for just life - they're looking for intelligent life. Intelligence (including animal intelligence) has this way of using physical principles and resources around it to solve problem. Of such tools developed, radio has proven to be an extremely effective and useful tool.

It stands to reason that any sentient and even mildly industrious intelligence is going to stumble on it and put it to use. Yes, we only have a few data points for tool use, but the rationale behind the development of radio is very strong. The big factor is that there may be better forms of long-range communication out there that we haven't discovered yet because their physical principles are as-yet hidden to us. However, until we stumble on them, radio is what we have to work with.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[khallow]

The problem is that unless said aliens are pulling the strings on a galactic core super massive black hole and manipulating the plasma jet to serve as a "fucking huge" high gain antenna

They could always just build a big antenna with some power and decent cooling. And we could do the same. No need to sterilize a galactic core any more than it already has been. Cosmic dust is not that effective an attenuator or we wouldn't be able to see objects billions of light years away.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[tigersha]

No, the Voyager probes transmit at 23 Watts, which is basically nothing. The entire power system on the craft can generate about 250 Watts, which is used for all the systems. The fact that Nasa can track an object transmitting half the power of a lightbulb 11 billion km away to very fine precision is absolutely the most amazing thing they ever did in the space program IMHO.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question431.htm

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[tigersha]

Here is a very fine example of an supernova in another galaxy that is visible from earth, but modulating this to carry information would be somewhat challenging.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/SN1994D.jpg/600px-SN1994D.jpg

That is one beautiful pic though.

Re:100 billion likely way too low

[delt0r]

Well lets run the numbers shall we.

Lets listen to Andromeda which is 2.5 million light years away or about 24x10^21 meters away. Lets assume that that the intelligent life in Andromeda only transmit to the closest galaxy, us. Lets also assume we have a perfect quantum efficiency detector at the 1.420GHz "water hole" and that we have zero noise and hence only a photon per second can be considered enough data to rule out anything but ETs. Finally we assume that we have built a 100m radius antenna to capture these photons.

Ignoring diffraction and the relative orientation of the milky way to Andromeda, we assume they only need the energy to stream that many photons through the milky way disk. The diameter of the milky way is about 100,000 lty so the area is 703x10^39 m^2. We want one photon per second per 100m radius antenna or per 31x10^3. The total number of photons per sec is 22.7x10^36. Each photon has energy E=hv or 937x10^-27J and the total power required is *only* 21x10^12W.

Obviously there are other losses and diffraction, but the real limit is the noise floor at 1.420GHz. I have no idea what that is, but once we consider shot noise etc we start to see that we need a bit more power than 21TW. However this is not an impossible power level, and is not "life sterilizing" really. But then again its only 2.5 million light years away. In terms of galactic distance, that is just over the fence. Also the guys over at Andromeda have to really want to let others know they are around. Which with the distance involved seems less likely than local civilizations.

Your prize is...

[syousef]

I put my estimate in at 150 billion. What's the prize if I guess the closest?

Alien invasion!!! Blerg! We come in pieces, shoot to kill! Take me to your ladder!

Alien life would be quite different from Star Trek

[bejiitas_wrath]

Alien life in the universe that we could encounter, depending on the climactic conditions, gravity and atmosphere would be very different from humans to say the least. They would not be all humanoid races that speak english and can walk and act just like humans, they might be boneless creatures like an octopus or evolved dolphins that pilot ships full of water, or something that we have not even encountered yet. Dolphins show amazing intelligence so it is easy to imagine, that if they evolved over the course of millions of years on a remote planet and developed mathematics and science, they could invent space flight. Star Trek had humanoid aliens as standard, but the science fiction of Larry Niven envisaged quite different creatures such as the puppeteers.

Not to forget the even stranger aliens in the book Sundiver by David Brin. Discovery channel one time showed a Jupiter sized Earth like planet that had small creatures crawling along its surface that had to eat continually in order to have enough energy to move in the massive gravity. I am not sure if it is possible for such a large planet to form, most large planets that have been discovered are gas giants. But any alien planet we visited could have alien bacteria that we would not have a immunity to and it could be very dangerous if we brought it back to Earth. So any future space exploration would still require caution.

And one planet has been identified

[SpaceLifeForm]

as having no intelligent life.

Just a factor of 2?

[chrism238]

50 billion here, 100 billion there. Pretty soon you're talking big numbers.

Oblig. Arthur C Clarke quote

[Kittenman]

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.

Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.

But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many--perhaps most--of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven--or hell.

How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars. "

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[c0lo]

Alien life in the universe that we could encounter, depending on the climactic conditions, gravity and atmosphere would be very different from humans to say the least. They would not be all humanoid races that speak english and can walk and act just like humans, they might be boneless creatures like an octopus or evolved dolphins that pilot ships full of water, or [...].

Ships full of water - multiply the difficulties to escape the gravity well by about 1000.
Imagine developing metallurgy and special ceramics (I reckon these would be needed for at least propulsion) in/under water...

"alien worlds" count not so interesting

[iggymanz]

In a couple years kepler will have sufficient data so we can estimate the number of rocky worlds in habitable zones, that's what is most interesting to me. Once we find such worlds, we'd need to fund the type of probe that can analyze atmosphere, life as we know it does a very detectable transformation. Then step up our optical SETI efforts in those world's directions (they won't use radio waves, sorry microwave SETI dudes....)

Re:"alien worlds" count not so interesting

[rubycodez]

funding runs out November 2012. The cost is $20 million per additional year, and NASA would like four more years to have 7.5 year mission, that will allow them to get more transits from earth sized worlds that are hiding in noise currently (stars are more variable on average than was thought, a discovery in itself) http://www.space.com/13857-nasa-kepler-mission-extension-alien-planets.html

Drake equation++

[FuturePerson]

I recently had the misfortune of meeting some extraterrestrial aliens from outer space right here on earth.

I have not much time now, but I'll jot down what I can.

They were very enthusiastic. They explained how wonderful it was to find a planet with the temperature and the water and the magnetic field and the life and the intelligence and the technology and ... advertising(!?) .

They we're an ancient species, homeless since eons. They had been scouring space, looking for intelligent life that could scratch their itch.

Their itch is having control. They get off on manipulation. They crave displays of advertising and propaganda, whatever moves masses to act against their own self-interest, or something.

They have evolved telepathy. It is the result of a million years of marketing, the art of lying, the pinnacle of manipulation.

I would describe them as psychopathic and sadistic. I think they want to enslave people for the joy of seeing a living, feeling life form manipulated.

They had me devising marketing campaigns. I escaped. Other ET:s helped me. I'll tell about it later. I'm too upset now to be very coherent, maybe.

I have to go now. I do not want to be anywhere near these creatures. Watch out for the mindfuckers!

Re:Drake equation++

[giorgist]

So you went out on your first date, don't be so dramatic.

Re:Fermi Paradox

[DumbSwede]

I'm not sure why you want to shout Fermi Paradox, it is not an answer but a question.

20 years or more ago we could have speculated that planetary systems were rare, thus life had few places to evolve on and that could have been a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox -- finding so many worlds deepens the Fermi Paradox.

Let us hope Fred Saberhagen doesn't have the correct answer to the question with his Berserker series of novels.

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[mjwx]

Ships full of water - multiply the difficulties to escape the gravity well by about 1000.
Imagine developing metallurgy and special ceramics (I reckon these would be needed for at least propulsion) in/under water...

Who said the ship needs to be full of water. given many of the oceanic creatures on earth only the breathing apparatus needs to meet the creatures environmental requirements. Isn't it entirely possible to create a space suite for an aquatic organism in the same way we have pressure suits for humans?

Your second point is much more interesting. I the best guesses I can come up with are either do it on land using machines (in the same way we use submersibles to work under the sea) or have an entirely different method of smelting and fabrication that we've never considered.

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Alien life in the universe that we could encounter, depending on the climactic conditions, gravity and atmosphere would be very different from humans to say the least.

Not proven until we meet one.

They would not be all humanoid races that speak english....

Star Trek did not portray this.

Dolphins show amazing intelligence so it is easy to imagine..

No, it is not easy to imagine. Dolphins lack the dexterity to build a space ship. We may find out that any given species rarely (if ever) reach space unless they meet certain other criteria like opposable thumbs and originate from a planet where it's easy to start a fire. We don't know what all is involved in inspiring a species to leave the planet, just that it likely requires a complex series of events.

It's easy to jump to the conclusion that every planet that sports life will create a random space faring civilization species. However, to put things into a more realistic perspective, consider that this planet has created over a hundred million species of life and only one has intentionally gone into orbit.

Star Trek had humanoid aliens as standard...

No, they did not. The 'humanoid' races were explained by one species that seeded our area of the galaxy with similar genetic material. Elsewhere in the series, the Federation was accused of really only allowing humanoids to join.

We just don't know.

whatever

[milkmage]

everyone knows they'll ignore us until we have warp capability.

2 weeks to the Moon?
9 months to Mars? lol.

Re:Fermi Paradox

[rubycodez]

we could be awash in ETI signals and not know it yet. there is no reason to even think we have a Fermi Paradox, we're too new at long distance communication.

Re:Fermi Paradox

[wierd_w]

Or even some clever use of entangled particle pairs. (Simply because we haven't figured out how to use them for comm doesn't mean others haven't.)

Personally though, I think seti is looking for the wrong things.

Instead of trying to eavesdrop on the grey aliens ordering space pizza from planet foodcourtia, they should be looking for localized light displacements from known stellar markers, as caused by the huge gravitational eddies that several hypotherical FTL systems would make. Interstellar highways would show up on a sufficiently detailed map of the CBR because of the regular disruptions.

(This assumes something like an albucare (however you spell his name...) warp drive though, which create a wave of negative spacial curvature behind the vessel, and a synthetic gravity well in front.)

Our current CBR maps are pretty coarse, since we are dealing with single measurement devices with very wide frequency emmisions, so a highway search would require interferometry to be fruitful. We need to launch about 50 more COBE sats up.

Re:Like Pluto?

[cas2000]

Disney sued them for copyright infringement. That's why they had to stop calling Pluto a planet.

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[mjwx]

I think the issue is how does this water creature develop fire and metal smelting in the first place (you know bronze and iron age level) - once they have technology working around it is easy, the tricky bit would be developing that technology in the first place.

You can create fire underwater, it's a different chemical process to on land.

Besides, you dont need fire for smelting, you simply need heat and there are plenty of active underwater volcano's on earth as well as other heat sources.

Needless to say, an aquatic civilisation would develop things in radically different ways to the way we have.

Re:I'll jump in

[Surt]

It doesn't matter, you lose, by a long shot.
(Which you learn when you read the details and learn that this only applies to worlds about 5x as big as earth. Everything smaller is left out of the estimate, and may result in the final number being as much as 5-10x higher).

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[Ethanol-fueled]

Man, that episode sucked, but it was some brilliant meta-humor lampooning the anticlimactic ending of the episode.

Basically, a guy dies, leaving clues to a big mystery. Piccard, as well as a Klingon crew and Cardassian crew are all in competition to independently solve this mystery, hoping for gold or secret mega-weapons.

They all solve the mystery at once and meet at the same place where the secret is finally activated: It is a hologram of a proto-humanoid, describing(in English) how their race seeded their genetic material across the galaxy and that they are the common ancestor of all humanoid races.

Afterward, perfect comedic silence before the Cardassian says, "That's it?!" The Klingon captain responds with, "If she were not dead, I would kill her myself!"

Galactic Explanetary Estimate?

[Chas]

Jeeze.

Why not just call it what it is?

An ass-pull number.

Re:Galactic Explanetary Estimate?

[JoshuaZ]

Because it isn't. They've done some very careful estimating here. This works off a combination of modelig and empirical data. We know how many stars Kepler has looked at and what approximate fraction of the total set of stars in the galaxy that represents. For those stars, we have a pretty good idea of lower bounds of how many planets they have, and we know what sorts of planets are the sort that Kepler would have trouble detecting. We can look at that distribution and use it to get a rough estimate. No one is claiming that this number is precise. But the true number is likely not more than an order of magnitude or two off. This isn't an asspull. This is scientists working very carefully very difficult stuff on the cutting edge and doing their best with hard work and rigorous thinking to produce an estimate. This is what real science looks like.

Re:Galactic Explanetary Estimate?

[rubycodez]

no, not totally ass-pulled. kepler now lets us know that planets are common, and there is not even the pattern of rocky-inner gassy-outer like we have in the solar system, they can be mixed up. planets can be in habitable zone, but they are often the wrong size/type. there are now some hard real numbers to make estimates. We long have had have rough idea of sun like star percentage (5%), we have rough idea of earth-like planets in habitable zone percent of those (about 2%). Soon (a couple decades or I hope less) we'll even know percentage of those that have similar atmosphere to earth, either pre or post oxygen breathing creature modified. Things are heating up in the search for life elsewhere, all science geeks should be getting some serious wood from Kepler!

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[dbIII]

Alien life in the universe that we could encounter, depending on the climactic conditions, gravity and atmosphere would be very different from humans to say the least.

My favourite example at the moment is Solaris (the book by Lem, not the new movie I've never seen or the old one I can't remember). In that example humanity has spent a lot of resources over a century trying to understand WTF is some connection between themselves and the alien/s and at that point even the human experts have trouble communicating to each other about the subject. Meanwhile the aliens seem to be trying to communicate as well but despite Godlike powers and the ability to create human shaped avatars with human thoughts about all they can do is confuse people and their own avatars.
I think the theme was that aliens are not going to be some guy with a weird accent and a funny hat, but instead something we can't understand without vast amounts of time and effort.

Re:Like Pluto?

[reboot246]

I get the joke, but Disney's Pluto was named after the "planet" Pluto, which itself was named after the god of the underworld who was around a long time before Disney. :)

Re:Like Pluto?

[yndrd1984]

Since when has prior use stopped them from suing someone?

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[netsavior]

The final season of Enterprise dealt primarily with the Xindi, one of the Xindi races (5 different sentient species on one planet) were spacefaring water creatures that weren't humanoid, and flew in ships filled with water, this fact was not particularly shocking or foreign to the captain of Enterprise, nor his highly experienced Vulcan crewmate. But also the Federation are a bunch of bigots who only let humanoids in anyway.

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[james.mcarthur]

And if you had tentacles your technology would only need to reach the stage where you can trap helpless human females.

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[Grishnakh]

You do realize that only the humans in Star Trek spoke English, right? Everyone used universal translators to reduce communications problems. They just didn't portray it the way some other sci-fi has; for instance, in the movie Dune, in the first scene, when the Guild Navigator meets with the Emperor, his helpers speak first using a mechanical device that translates their language, and you can hear both. Star Trek just eliminates that for budget reasons and to avoid distracting viewers.

Besides, 300+ years in the future it's quite possible we won't be speaking English at all, or it might be very different from what we speak now. With any sci-fi that's in English and set in the future, you might as well assume that all the dialog has been translated into modern English for the benefit of the reader. I believe the Dune series (set 10,000 years in the future) even explicitly says they use a different language, or several in fact, but the characters' dialog is still in modern English so that the author didn't have to invent a new language like Tolkein's Sindarin.

I'm going to guess....

[ArcadeNut]

100,000,000,001.

Hope I win!

Re:Junk Science

[fyngyrz]

The calculus of events that came to form life and then intelligence is unique.

You have absolutely no evidence to back up this assertion; your argument, then, fails utterly.

Re:TPIR

[Tsingi]

But with alien slave girls, amazons, and the like, wouldn't it be more aptly named "planet 'boobs'" instead?

Amazons? Then that would be planet "Boob".

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[Belial6]

An aquatic version of That Darn Cat. http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/That_Darn_Cat/70026374?trkid=2361637

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You do realize that only the humans in Star Trek spoke English, right?

Well... humans and really nerdy Klingons.

640 Billion

[flyingfsck]

Well, 640 billion should be enough for anybody...

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[Ethanol-fueled]

The DS9 episode Little Green Men, shows Quark and Roms' universal translators fail, so we see them picking through each others' ears trying to "reset" them talking in Ferengi while USAF personnel look on in amusement.

DS9 was really good at bringing back that old-skool camp, especially in this scene.

Re:Fermi Paradox

[rubycodez]

the truth is much more boring. instead cultures invent an internet, and become self-absorbed watching entertainment and marketing and posting/friending/liking on Sensory-Pod-Book.com, and lose all interest in science and education. civilisation collapses or stagnates

Please don't start using Drake's equation

[Karmashock]

We have some data points on exoplanets... that's great and you can probably start estimating the numbers in the galaxy from that.

Right now someone is trying to come up with a way to estimate life or even intelligent life or even star spanning civilizations. Don't do that until we have actual data... please... Drake's equation has done enough damage.

Re:Alien life would be quite different from Star T

[Grishnakh]

I have eyes, and I can tell you that what the show claimed to be starships flying in space and firing phasers were in fact actually models, with late 80s-quality special effects added on top in crappy NTSC resolution.

Re:I'll jump in

[Surt]

Then you've won the showcase showdown! Vanna, tell him what he's won ...

Re:Fermi Paradox

[digitallife]

It strikes me that the likelihood of other life out there somewhere is probably very, very high. In fact I'd be surprised if the galaxy isn't teeming with simple life. The question is more one of technological life (not 'intelligent', as some think, or even tool users - they have to be progressive tool users getting more advanced with time). It's really hard to make any useful estimates about the chances of technological life developing somewhere, but I think it is clear that it is not inevitable from any given life pool. Here on earth it took hundreds of millions of years after anything more complex than bacteria for a technological species to come about - and we've only been technological for 10,000 years... Who knows how long we'll stick around for. It seems obvious then that only a very low percent of life bearing planets will develop technological life.

If we assert that 1% of planets have life, and 1% of those have technological life (optimistic estimates to be sure), and we have 100B planets in the galaxy (10M tech civs), and 300B stars in the galaxy, then we would have a density of 1 technological civilization per 3000 stars. We can estimate that there are 3000 stars within 4000 ly. Therefore the next technological civilizations (aliens) would be around 8000ly away.

Right away one important thing pops out about that number - they would be looking at us building pyramids, and have a long time to wait to see our tv and radio signals. Furthermore, considering the inverse square nature of radio waves, those tv and radio signals are not going to be of much use at 8000ly (in fact they will be weaker than background noise after only a few light years).

Think about that, and then ask yourself why an alien civilization would be any different from ours in this regard? Basically the only way we could detect them is if we are pointing SETI telescopes at them at the exact same time they are focusing an intense signal at us, in a frequency we can detect... Not very likely. No, it's always struck me as a hopeless search, looking for alien signals, as even in the most alien rich universe I can imagine there is basically no chance of detecting them. There really isn't a Fermi Paradox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Count_of_stars_by_distance_from_sun.jpg

Re:I'll jump in

[Jappus]

And I would say that I happen to know for a fact, that there are at least 8.

Re:Fermi Paradox

[digitallife]

This is just baseless speculation. I think it is fairly obvious that it probably isn't likely.

First of all, even if ET's were common, the galaxy (let alone the universe) is an enormous place. We're talking like all the matter put together in the galaxy is a couple grains of sand in a stadium. Even if you disregard problems like the speed of light, there is simply no reason to think an ET would have been anywhere near our planet.

Second, even if our solar system was a freaking interstellar highway, we probably wouldn't notice unless they started taking pit stops in Hawaii or something. We can hardly spot asteroids whipping around the planet - a little spaceship millions of km's away would be invisible. Even the communications would be tough to spot... Due to inverse square nature of light, radio waves drop off in power very fast... I doubt they would be focusing a signal straight at us.

And then you have the problem of travel: we don't even know if FTL travel is possible, or what form it would take. Maybe it's not possible, or very expensive, or simply impractical. Beyond that, maybe an ET civ simply has no need of spreading to every possible planet... I mean 100B planets in our galaxy is a lot of planets...

To summarize, not only did you base your speculation on nothing, there are numerous reasons why it's unlikely to be true. I doubt I've covered half of them.

Re:Fermi Paradox

[flirno]

If they do what we did then it is going to be hard to spot broadcasted alien communication. Eventually they may learn how to encode data and then to encrypt it to the point it looks like noise/garbage. On the planetary level their emissions may be relatively brief and easy to miss if the normal trend is towards using cables or some such medium instead of broadcasting bare outward. Or maybe better knowledge of physics opens some other avenues of communication we have no idea about yet. SETI and all such efforts are just shots in the dark. We just don't know.