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One In Five Sun-Like Stars May Have an Earth-Like Planet
The Bad Astronomer writes "A new study, looking at over 40,000 stars viewed by the Kepler spacecraft, indicates that 22% of stars like the Sun should have Earth-like planets orbiting them — planets that are similar in size to our home world and with a surface temperature hospitable for liquid water. There are some caveats (they don't include atmospheric issues like the greenhouse effect, which may reduce the overall number, or at cooler stars where there may be many more such planets) but their numbers indicate there could be several billion planets similar to Earth in the Milky Way alone."
Our planet Earth was terraformed. BY ALIENS!!!!!
I may have aliens living in my belly button too. There are some caveats (mainly I'[m so fat I don't know if I have a belly button).
... from the real-estate con-men. They must be really excited by the thought of billions of Earth-like planets to sell to the marks.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Only our planet has Kardashians and Biebers.
There's a 78% chance we're not living on an earth-like planet. It does however support life. Are their models really that good?
If the speed of light is the absolute max speed in the universe, with no shortcuts in practice, getting somewhere outside of local star group won't be ever possible, and the same will be for everyone else, no matter how advanced they are, and how much similarities are between their culture and ours (at least, our culture willingness to go to space and communicate with others). And, of course, there is time, they should be at the right stage of their civilization, of the 4.5billon years of this planet just in the last 100 we were sending and trying to hear signals to/from somewhere else, and not sure for how much time we will be around. And if well could be earth-like planets "close", sending an expedition even to the closest solar system to just plant a flag is outside our reach, maybe for centuries (and getting there and back will take even more centuries)
The universe may be full of life and advanced civilizations, and we probably won't ever know that someone else is out there. Nor them.
Quick, update the Drake Equation results to 100%!
A roughly earth-sided rocky world, sitting well within the star's "goldilocks zone" throughout its orbit, and spectrographically identified to contain both oxygen and water.
Although even if we find one... what are we going to do about it? It's not like we can even send a probe that far which has a likely chance of reaching it before it experiences mechanical failure.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What cracks me up is that not twenty years ago, I had a long discussion with a physics teacher who must not have listened to his own material and kept on arguing that we were probably the only star with a planetary system.
Epic fail.. Time to phone home AC..
If the speed of light is the absolute max speed in the universe, with no shortcuts in practice,
You know, I have always suspected that there will be ways for people with very advanced science to get around speed of light problem. Several hundred years ago, gravity was a similar looking, insurmountable barrier, and that has proven to be be trivial to 'get around' provided you are willing to make the proper engineering choices. Gravity and relativity are still things we don't have a lot of understanding of, and there is plenty to learn about how and why they work.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
There's about a 100% chance, or something like it, you'll die in the next 100 years.
I can just see, wherever he is, his wicked-fine smile at partial affirmation of some of his speculation.
One of the beauties of Universe is the slew of un-answered questions; that so few seem to give a damn, one of its uglies.
I don't believe we need to go faster than light to get somewhere. Toss in a good fraction of that, say 20% or as little as 10% and things begin to appear a little closer. Within 16 light years there are 53 other stars. At 10% of light speed that is 160 years traveling time, and arguably we could do it now with the proper resources and political will. At 20% - not far off - that is 80 years. Now consider genetic modification or other advances in medical science to prolong human life. If we do so much as double the human life span, 80 years will seem more like 40. Now consider multi-generational ships. I hope more than I could ever convey that there is a way to go faster than light, that there is some shortcut to the wider universe. But even if there isn't, I wouldn't be so defeatist as to suggest we're stuck here or, respectfully, so myopic as to suggest that traveling beyond our solar system would be a futile exercise. While I do fear what is in store for humanity these coming decades and do often wonder whether we're effectively doomed to kill ourselves off long before any of the above is considered seriously by anyone with real power, or the population as a whole, I have hope.
As for E.T. I wouldn't give up quite yet: http://xkcd.com/638/
We wouldn't want to be responsible for some alien plague. They may resent that a bit.
The never ending quest to prove that there is no God. In the end of every life, there is proof positive, only it is too late to do anything about it.
Listen, the Earth is much rarer but I don't know why we would be misled like this.
It's not water, oxygen, temperature that make the Earth habitable for very, very long
stretches of time. It's the nickel core that, through (huge amounts) of static electricity,
build an envelope of protections around the planet. The odds of that happening as
often as "scientists" want us to believe is probably 1 in 100,000,000. Mars is a perfect
example of where this process didn't exist and is lifeless as a result of (most likely)
having free flowing water, and habitable temperatures. Listen, if it did have life, we
would have found something by now.
Earth is a precious gem - we should be taught that instead of making our home sound
disposable and replaceable.
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And you thought having to fly to Florida was bad. Then again I expect the Walt Disney Corporation to colonize Mars long before any government, so it's not like they'll need to go outside of the solar system.
Five in five sun-like starts may have an earth-like planet!
Or it could be one in billions.
I predict it will be somewhere between. Do I get a cookie? How about a web hit?
Seriously - this isn't news. It's conjecture to fill space.
How long it takes us to get there becomes moot the second we can live forever. So to hell with acceleration and without relativistic speeds, you will experience the whole 50,000 years.
This just in: one in two stars may have an Earth-like planet! Seven in eight of them potentially could harbor sentient bipedal life-forms!
Or it may not.
One explanation to Fermi paradox would be that we developed at maximum speed, so did other life forms on other systems, but sign of their presence did not reach us yet because of the distance.
.... so lots of Earth-Mars (EM-class) planets. So Gene Roddenberry was right....
The vast number of potential exoplanets could never be detected by Kepler. Kepler worked by detecting occultations, and the chances of a planet at 1AU distance actually occulting a G0 star 10+ LY away would be ... miniscule. Think about how few visible stars happen to be ON the ecliptic as viewed from Earth; Those would be the ONLY aliens with a Kepler-analog telescope which might discover US.
The fact that the Kepler telescope discovered as many exoplanets as it did, given the geometric odds against it, means that there must be planets orbiting a majority - perhaps a VAST majority - of stars.
I guess he was right after all.....
NY Times article:
By DENNIS OVERBYE
November 4, 2013
The known odds of something — or someone — living far, far away from Earth improved beyond astronomers’ boldest dreams on Monday.
Astronomers reported that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-size planets in the galaxy, based on a new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.
One out of every five sunlike stars in the galaxy has a planet the size of Earth circling it in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot, not too cold — where surface temperatures should be compatible with liquid water, according to a herculean three-year calculation based on data from the Kepler spacecraft by Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mr. Petigura’s analysis represents a major step toward the main goal of the Kepler mission, which was to measure what fraction of sunlike stars in the galaxy have Earth-size planets. Sometimes called eta-Earth, it is an important factor in the so-called Drake equation used to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe. Mr. Petigura’s paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, puts another smiley face on a cosmos that has gotten increasingly friendly and fecund-looking over the last 20 years.
“It seems that the universe produces plentiful real estate for life that somehow resembles life on Earth,” Mr. Petigura said.
Over the last two decades, astronomers have logged more than 1,000 planets around other stars, so-called exoplanets, and Kepler, in its four years of life before being derailed by a mechanical pointing malfunction last winter, has compiled a list of some 3,500 more candidates. The new result could steer plans in the next few years and decades to find a twin of the Earth — Earth 2.0, in the argot — that is close enough to here to study.
The nearest such planet might be only 12 light-years away. “Such a star would be visible to the naked eye,” Mr. Petigura said.
His result builds on a report earlier this year by David Charbonneau and Courtney Dressing of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who found that about 15 percent of the smaller and more numerous stars known as red dwarfs have Earth-like planets in their habitable zones. Using slightly less conservative assumptions, Ravi Kopparapu of Pennsylvania State University found that half of all red dwarfs have such planets.
Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, who supervised Mr. Petigura’s research and was a co-author of the paper along with Andrew Howard of the University of Hawaii, said: “This is the most important work I’ve ever been involved with. This is it. Are there inhabitable Earths out there?”
“I’m feeling a little tingly,” he said.
At a news conference Friday discussing the results, astronomers erupted in praise of the Kepler mission and its team. Natalie Batalha, a Kepler leader from the NASA Ames Research Center, described the project and its members as “the best of humanity rising to the occasion.”
According to Mr. Petigura’s new calculation, the fraction of stars with Earth-like planets is 22 percent, plus or minus 8 percent, depending on exactly how you define the habitable zone.
There are several caveats. Although these planets are Earth-size, nobody knows what their masses are and thus whether they are rocky like the Earth, or balls of ice or gas, let alone whether anything can, or does — or ever will — live on them.
There is reason to believe, from recent observations of other worlds, however, that at least some Earth-size planets, if not all of them, are indeed rocky. Last week, two groups of astronomers announced that an Earth-size planet named Kepler 78b that orbits its sun in 8.5 hours has the same density as the Earth, though it is too hot to support life.
“Nat
What is the speed of dark energy? To go on and on about the speed of light, because we can see it seems to assume that we know something about the speed of dark energy. Assuming we know even one thing about dark energy seems a bit bold. I can only imagine our current fixation on c will sound like the ether to future physicists. Give us a few centuries and perhaps we'll be zipping around nicely (assuming we don't nucularize ourselves first)
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
“The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
Carl Sagan, Contact
Ok, so the study detected 10 "good" planets out of 42,553 stars, a terrible percentage. But, they say -- we can only detect when the plane of the orbit means the planet transits across the star from our point of view. So, that means we get 22%.
To get from 10 / 42553, to 22%, they applied a fudge factor of ~935:1.
Does anyone have any explanation for the 935:1 ratio? is there somehow only 935 angles that we cannot see the planet transit from? Or can I safely assume they pulled this number out of thin air ?
If you have the technology to build generation ships, then you essentially have the technology to build self-replicating space habitats which can duplicate themselves using sunlight and asteroidal ores. (See JD Bernal's ideas form the 1920s or GK O'Neill's from the 1970s or MT Savage's ideas from the 1990s). WIth such technology, there woudl be enough living space for quadrillions of humans in just this one solar system.
Of course, in a thousand years or so, we may be bumping into such limits for the solar system if we grow exponentially. Still, that is without even figuring out how to tap zero-point energy to create energy and matter from "empty" space and also return it to "empty" space when you are done with it.
Also, more likely, humanity may go the way of Italy with declining birth rates way below replacement, in part from an economic system that prevents the young from having enough resources to be likely to start families, and also so many other distractions that make family-building seem less attractive by comparison.. In general, industrialized countries start shrinking population-wise, except for immigration from older less-materially-focused cultures with higher birth rates. Perhaps the Amish will inherit the stars?
Anyway, space habitats are alternatives to "planets". which seem like a very inefficient way mass-wise to create a layer of air and water in a certain temperature. One planet could support a few billion humans on the surface, or the same amount of matter could support tens of trillions of humans if made into space habitats.
Still, with growth in population and technology aroudn the solar system, it would then be almost certain some humans (or their post-human descendants or machines) would try to bring some part of it to other stars for whatever reasons. This would be a bit like of the way ancient bacteria probably spread from other stars to seed Earth? If we can figure out how to productively tap zero-point energy, we may see a gradual expansion of infrastructure into free space between star systems, with people making matter as needed as they go. Not sure of the gravitational collapse risks though, with "gravity pollution" as a future version of greenhouse gas pollution? Well, someone else's problem. :-)
But, sadly, our scarcity-based ideologies may well doom us first, as we turn all those technologies of potential cooperative abundance into competitove weapons of mass-destruction to fight over perceived scarcity (even ignoring the Italy problem), That may explain the Fermi paradox? We need a new enlightenment if we are to survive this phase-change possible by increasing technological abilities. See for example JP Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" which is a story about a generation ship going to a planet around another star.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.