Scientists Estimate 40% of Red Dwarfs Have A Rocky Planet

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Science World Report: "Astronomers hunting for rocky planets with the right temperature to support life estimate there may be tens of billions of them in our galaxy alone. A European team said on Wednesday that about 40 percent of red dwarf stars — the most common type in the Milky Way — have a so-called 'super-Earth' planet orbiting in a habitable zone that would allow water to flow on the surface."

Comments

Drake equation

[jcreus]

The figures should be updated!

Re:Drake equation

[zrbyte]

The Drake equation could be updated, but I think it has too many factors which have very high error margins. This just means that we would not be much smarter with the updated equation.
Hunt for the spectra of the atmospheres of exoplanets! That should give us some idea if life exists there or not.

Re:Drake equation

[na1led]

If we can find evidence of life on Mars or a Moon in our solar system, that should increase the chances that Life exists all over the place in our Galaxy.

Re:Drake equation

[ColdWetDog]

Exactly. If f(little L) (the fraction of star systems that actually go on to develop life at some point) in the Drake equation goes past one, then you linearly increase the chance of intelligent life beyond earth. Doesn't sound all that impressive, but if f(little L) doesn't go past one, then it means we're alone. Period. Somebody made some big mistake way back when and we're the end result of it. Meaning we'd best behave. OTOH, if life pops up most everywhere that planet chemistry allows for the appropriate conditions and time, maybe we're just a garden variety ecosystem and if we blast ourselves back to plankton, no big deal. Somebody else will take up the slack and colonize the Galaxy.

So finding life, anything, even Elvis, somewhere off the planet is a Very Big Deal.

(Maybe the Aliens can help upgrade Slashcode. Stupid incompetent earthling programmers.....)

Re:But only *one* Red Dwarf...

[Richard_at_work]

I was going to go for the Rimmer shot, personally...

Re:They Further Speculate That...

[Anonymous Coward]

they would be given extraordinary supper powers

Is that like, the ability to create a really tasty dinner or something? Or they just get really fucking hungry in the late afternoon?

But are they cold outside?

[mfnickster]

With no kind of atmosphere?

Re:But are they cold outside?

[Oswald McWeany]

Just takes a while. First, protobacteria, then little bugs that spew out CO2 and methane, then some oxygen, wait a few million years and you have Target and Martha Stewart.

So, it's not all progress then.

We Are Not Alone

[chill]

We're eventually going to find out that not only we aren't alone, but we're pretty fucking insignificant and late to the party.

The answer to the question "if intelligent life is out there, where are they" will be "not here because we're boring and common". Like the unpopular kid who throws a party and wonders where all the cool kids are, we're in for an ego-bruising answer.

On a side note, it is looking more and more like we can shave 3-4 terms off of Drake's Equation. R, f(p), n(e) and L are looking to be more and more equal to some big number.

Re:We Are Not Alone

[Oswald McWeany]

As cool as it would be to find another civilization- I hope we never do. At least- no one more advanced than us. (any one less advanced we probably would never find).

Chances of another civilization/species being friendly would be low. Think of it this way.

1) Anyone more advanced than us would likely have computers.
- if you have advanced computers- you would eventually rely on them for advice (at minimum) for running your government/civilization. We can therefore determine that their civilization would base decisions based on logic.

2) Logically- allowing another sapient species to exist would be a threat. There is always a possibility they will attack you, or compete for resources. The logical thing any sapient species should do to any other sapient species is wipe them out (if they can).

- you can always study a civilization from the ruins of their lands- after you exterminate them. We already have the technology to exterminate ourselves- so it is safe to assume any other more advanced species would too.

Re:We Are Not Alone

[tomhath]

Insignificant and late to the party? Certainly any civilization that could contact us is probably far more advanced; but I would expect them to be pretty impressed with what they found. Imagine how excited we would be if we picked up what appeared to be a signal broadcast from another planet, even if it turned out to be the extraterrestrial equivalent of "I Love Lucy" reruns.

Re:We Are Not Alone

[mark-t]

We already have the technology to exterminate ourselves

Really?

Are you *SURE* about that?

Re:We Are Not Alone

[the gnat]

The answer to the question "if intelligent life is out there, where are they" will be "not here because we're boring and common"

I find most bacteria boring and common, but there are plenty of scientists who enjoy studying them, and continue to learn new things from them. If nothing else, they want to sample the diversity of life and find what crazy mechanisms have evolved in microbes we've never seen before. Why wouldn't an advanced space-faring species be the same?

There are too many other reasons to count why we haven't seen any signs of intelligent life. The most obvious is that everyone else is stuck on their planet because they hit a hard upper limit to what their indigenous technology is capable of (or what their global economy is capable of supporting - same thing, really). Extinction is also very likely; keep in mind that the available evidence indicates at one point there were only a few tens of thousands of humans alive. Some may develop industrial civilization and orbital spaceflight, only to discover that the nearest solid object is a Neptune-like object several AU distant (instead of a conveniently placed moon, and a solid planet that might have once had liquid water at a manageable distance).

My guess is the galaxy is full of Voyager-like probes, drifting aimlessly and quietly beeping until they run out of batteries or (inevitably) run into something solid. Throw in a handful of sleeper ships on autopilot fleeing planetary disaster, or a few insane trillionaires looking for adventure - most of these will end up the same way. Probably once every few millennia civilizations actually make contact, only to realize that the distances between them are so large as to make actual travel effectively impossible.

Re:We Are Not Alone

[Radtastic]

I believe that for a species to evolve into spacefaring capabilities, they will have already solved their resource management issues. Therefore we don't need to worry about them being aggressive to other sentient species because of competition.

It's also conceivable that this is humanity's litmus test - if we can resolve our internal conflicts and not destroy ourselves in the process, we will eventually earn our place at the intergalactic table.

It's a equally plausible that intelligence species are like strikes on a match.. the flame starts, glows bright, then dies out. On a scale the size of the universe, the odds of human's development span coinciding with another species' might be incredibly small.

Re:We Are Not Alone

[mark-t]

I do not think you realize just how big this planet is, and how resilient life, even human life is.

There have been explosions on this planet orders of magnitude greater than anything that man has ever produced... and some have even happened during the period while man was walking on this sphere. Yet mankind survived... while many thousands were wiped out in the region of devastation, mankind endured on a global scale... as of course did life itself.

The total nuclear yield of every bomb currently in existence is the equivalent of about 5000 megatons of TNT, which is over an order of magnitude less than the last eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, which occurred circa 74,000 BC. Homo sapiens evolved circa 500,000 BC, and modern man has been around since at least 100,000 BC, so there were definitely people on the planet at that time. In spite of the explosion, and its effects on global climate, mankind endured.

Heck, it's still barely a quarter the size of the Tambora volcano explosion, in Indonesia in 1815, and that wiped out fewer than 100,000 people.

Re:We Are Not Alone

[ZeroSumHappiness]

There are 7 billion humans. That means that we have the equivalent of 650 kg of TNT per person. Yes, I think that's enough to eradicate us if we wanted to.

A single enormous explosion in one particular place might not kill everyone. Carpet bombing every inch of land, however, would likely wipe us out to the point where we couldn't repopulate.

Re:We Are Not Alone

[Rakishi]

You're underestimating what technology is capable of.

All it takes is one self-replicating solar sail powered von neumann machine. In a half a century a high school student could probably make and launch one in a weekend. And that's technology we can easily imagine and conceive of. Can you imagine a dying humanity not spewing them out by the hundreds in a vain attempt at immortality?

Just one that survives and in the tick of the galactic clock the whole galaxy is filled with them. Remove any sanity checks and pretty much every rocky body would be turned into a factory creating more such machines.

That's why there being un-observable civilizations out there is such a conundrum. At least one should have pulled off that von neumann machine trick and you only need one a couple million years ago anywhere in the galaxy to crowd up our neck of the woods.

Re:We Are Not Alone

[na1led]

There could be a flaw to Intelligence, that once it reaches a certain level, it self destructs. May explain why its hard to find other aliens.

Re:I wonder...

[AdrianKemp]

What you asked, yes wormholes are entirely based in science and the current mathematical models that we have for the universe generally state that they must be possible (in some cases, must exist). Not all, but many.

What you meant, is there any *truth* to wormholes; meaning were the sci-fi novels correct: No, not really. Unless you can move the ends of a wormhole there isn't much use to them; and the math is much less supportive of that.

However, generally speaking on average our current physics models say yes they are possible and yes they *may* be possible to create. However they say so in sort of the same way that they say travelling faster than light is possible (in that they don't expressly forbid it, but generally require infinite energy to actually get there).

Some other physics grads/docs will come and call me out for inaccuracies, but please understand I'm intentionally over-simplifying.

Re:I would expect we might find extinct civilizati

[Oswald McWeany]

If the civilizations expired millions of years ago- and the planet is geologically active- there would probably be no trace.

If the civilization were more advanced than ours- we probably wouldn't know what to look for- and would probably never find them unless we landed there.

Re:Not so fast

[Hatta]

The Drake Equation is still useless like that, we have no idea what half the probabilities are, and any one of those can be so exceptionally small that the other ones being near 1 won't matter.

The Drake Equation is useful as a tool for understanding which probabilities are unknown. That's all it was ever meant to be.

Re:But only *one* Red Dwarf...

[mjwx]

Scientists have also discovered these planets are cold outside and have no kind of atmosphere.