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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."
... 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.
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?
and these aliens had thunderbolt hammer that were really nuclear weapons, and they flew around in vimanas which were really flying ships from a floating castle mothership, in order to interbreed with earth's primitive dwellers by taking human form.
I love Ancient Aliens. one of the best shows on TV. Watching them come up with their wild pseudoscience theories is like watching a monkey discover how a cigarette lighter works.
Our planet Earth was terraformed. BY ALIENS!!!!!
And we are but fertilizer...
which explains a lot of what I see on Fox News
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So much for intelligent life... on THIS planet.
And the aliens tried to breed the most intelligent of various species to bolster the mental capacity to match theirs. The rejects they sent to work for the history channel.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
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'
So much for intelligent life... on THIS planet.
Hey, I don't see you complaining about unsanitary telephones!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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!
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/
There's a 1.333739068902037589% chance that I'm using a Pentium for my calculations.
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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.
i was gonna mention the 2headed dog with six legs but yeah this works too.
So much for intelligent life... on THIS planet.
Hey, I don't see you complaining about unsanitary telephones!
I've often suspected that our planet was colonized by the "B" ark. There's so many indicators... The Kardashians, reality TV in general, pop music, sensationalist news, congressional press releases, the MPAA, offshore helpdesks, Snooki being on TV for any reason whatsoever, Darwin awards, the Kardashians. Pretty much confirmed, really.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The odds on this subject swing around more than back alley crap game.
I doubt anyone in Vegas would have a line on it. It's that bad.
What will the numbers be tomorrow? How about next week?
Damn, go home and don't come back till this resembles Science.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
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.
Biomass of humans on this planet is neglectible despite Fox news products.
The Kardashians, reality TV in general, pop music, sensationalist news, congressional press releases, the MPAA, offshore helpdesks, Snooki being on TV for any reason whatsoever, Darwin awards, the Kardashians
An optimist - and for these purposes, I qualify - might look and think, "isn't it wonderful that the only reason any of this crap is relevant is that we have a global communications network that can transmit any information at the speed of light to billions of people?" The same optimist would probably point out that in 100 years, virtually no one will remember who Snooki or the Kardashian sisters were, outside of a few obsessively geeky historians of pop culture.
Meanwhile, thanks to the same global communications network, I have access to a vast trove of scientific research, millions upon millions of lines of open-source code, instant answers to my programming questions, and whatever out-of-copyright works have been digitized. Oh, and I can access all this on a computer that fits in my pocket and is significantly more powerful than anything I used as a child.
Right, but that leads us to Oliver's Solution to the Fermi Paradox: That civilization advances to the point where it creates reality TV, and then it collapses.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Panspermia!11!one!!
(with thanks to (in no particular order): Pantera, Black Sabbath, Thinking Machines Corporation, Svante Arrhenius and Chandra Wickramasinghe)
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.