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Swedish Scientist Suggests That There Is Only One Earth (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: The conventional wisdom has been among scientists is that a myriad of Earth-like planets exist in the universe, some of which have to be the abode of life, even intelligent life. However, Astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden has run a computer simulation of the universe, incorporating what we know about exoplanets thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, the laws of physics, and the state of the early universe. The computer simulation came up with exactly one Earth, which is to say the one we live on. Every other planet in the universe does not have the conditions necessary to sustain life. Indeed, strictly speaking, Earth itself should not exist, according to the computer model, according to the story in Discover Magazine.
I read it in a book
If his model says that Earth should not exist, then there's something wrong with his model.
Also, considering how life thrives even in hostile environments here on Earth, it's simply a mathematical impossibility that there are no other planets in the universe capable of supporting some kind of life.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
If earth is such an uncommon place to live in, then maybe we, in fact, are the extremophiles
The huge problem here is that his data is based on what we know about exoplanets so far. Of course his model will show most of the planets are much larger than earth. Those are the ones we're able to find so far.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
If this is accurate this is good news. One of the standard explanations for the Fermi Paradox is that Earth-like planets are very rare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis. You may ask why this is good news? The reason is that something is making civilizations rare. We don't see any signs of major civilizations, either in terms of visits, radio waves, or most importantly, megastructures and large-scale engineering projects. At this point, we've looked at 100,000 nearby galaxies and essentially none of them show signs of a highly advanced civilization in terms of energy use http://www.universetoday.com/119931/100000-galaxies-and-no-obvious-signs-of-life/.
The standard explanation for this is that there is some "Great Filter" which is making civlizations rare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. If this is something in our past (e.g. habitable planets are rare, it is tough for life to evolve, it is hard to get those last few steps to necessary levels of intelligence, etc.) then we don't need to worry. But if it is something in our future, something that civilizations do to wipe themselves(e.g. nuclear war, bad nanotech) out then we're in trouble. We need to figure this out soon, since if there is a future Filter then it likely occurs very close to our current tech level.
Every piece of evidence for early filters should make us breathe more easily since it makes late filters less necessary. Unfortunately in the last few years, almost all new evidence has been in the other direction: we've found lots of planets and it looks like even small, rocky planets are common. So this is a refreshing piece of news. However, I'm very skeptical of it. First, it seems to go against other similar studies suggesting that as many as 1/3rd of stars may have an Earth-like planet (see e.g. here http://www.universetoday.com/119931/100000-galaxies-and-no-obvious-signs-of-life/) and they appear in order to be getting this result in part to be using an extremely narrow notion of what a habitable planet would look like.
There may be life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Sensor scans are inconclusive. I recommend an away team investigate more closely.
When one refers to a "1 in a million chance" they are not implying that they actually tried something 1 million times and it only worked once. They are implying that *if* they would have tried something 1 million times it would have only worked once. So if you win the lottery jackpot, your winning ticket was still "1 in 300 million" regardless of how many other tickets you bought or how many exist.
The title of the article is "Earth may be a 1-in-700 quintillion kind of place", but the article cites the 700-quintillion number as the total number of planets, and then goes on to say that according to the scientist's calculations, the earth should probably not exist (i.e. the odds of an earth like planet are even lower than 1 in 700-quintillion). So what are the odds that earth should exist? Who knows, it's not even mentioned.
This would be like if I reported on some guy winning the powerball and said "This guy bought 100 lottery tickets and one of the tickets won the jackpot. That was an amazingly improbable event that happened, making the ticket a "1 in a hundred kind of ticket.""
I have no idea if the statistical analysis done by this scientists is good or bad. But all I ask is that it is presented in a way that is coherent.
...according to the computer model.
Says something about the model, then, doesn't it?
Yeah. Since it was created on Earth, it shouldn't exist either. But I'm not really telling you this.
Anthropic Principle
We tend not to observe universes in which life is impossible.
-Dave
All this speculation is pretty silly IMO, because you're trying to draw conclusions about possible civilizations far more advanced than ours, using a ridiculously small and limited amount of data from a civilization that hasn't even really left its own planet yet, except for a few primitive robotic probes within its system and one manned mission to its nearby moon for rock collecting. We haven't even visited our nearest neighboring system.
We have no idea how many habitable planets are out there, because we can't even detect them. All the exoplanets we've seen have been big and very close to their stars, because that's what our limited technology allows us to see. We would not be able to see an Earth in orbit around Alpha Centauri, much less a much farther star. 20 years ago, we didn't even know definitively about any exoplanets at all, but when we developed the capability of seeing "hot Jupiters" suddenly we started seeing hundreds of them. Most likely, there's an enormous number of Earth-sized planets out there, we just can't see them yet.
The search for radio waves is dumb. We don't even use high-powered radio waves any more, we only did for a very brief time, and radio is very hard to detect over large distances due to the Inverse Square Law. The whole SETI search seems to be based on the silly idea that ETs are out there, working their asses off to build the biggest radio transmitters they possibly can and then devoting all their energy to powering them, just so they can point these transmitters at us to send us a signal. We don't do that, so why do we assume anyone else is going to?
The megastructure thing is pretty silly too: a Dyson sphere (or better yet, a Dyson swarm which is much more realistic) wouldn't be easily detectable by us because it'd be blocking all the star's light, and would only be detectable by IR radiation. Are we even actively looking for such things? And would we be able to detect them?
Honestly, even if there were a Star Trek TNG-level civilization out there in the Delta Quadrant, we wouldn't be able to see it. It's too far away, and we wouldn't be able to detect their technology. There's a lack of signs of civilizations because we do not have the capability of seeing them, and we haven't put that much effort into looking, and certainly not into leaving our star system to check out neighboring systems. It's a lot like living on an island and concluding there's no other civilization out there because you haven't seen any come visit you, when you haven't even bothered building a boat and looking for yourself.
Actually, according to Dr. Drake, the inventor of the Drake Equation, founder of SETI, Earth is becoming less visible all the time. The satellites you talk about aren't pointed out into space, they are pointed towards Earth. We have also switched from analog to digital transmissions, so essentially everything we're transmitting at this point is indistinguishable from noise. Broadcasting large amounts of energy into the universe in analog is not something that we can expect other civilizations to do for a very long time, if our own civilization is any guide. Not only that, but the Sun also produces a fair amount of radio-frequency radiation, so there's a pretty high noise floor. Even when we're trying to talk to Mars, the SNR is miserable.
The odds against detecting extraterrestrial transmissions, or extraterrestrials detecting us, are so insurmountably vast as to defy description. I think that Dr. Drake should accept the logical conclusions of his statements and end the SETI project. We have met the Great Filter and he is us.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The "half colorblind world" is not an apt analogy for faith in God.
A defining feature of faith is the untestability of its object. The inability to convincingly communicate it is not. Nor is the unawareness of a provably extant characteristic.
In half colorblind world, you could perform any number of tests to show that color-sighted people can distinguish patterns or shapes of equal luminosity but different hue.
Likewise, colorblind scientists would be able to investigate both the visible spectrum and the effect various wavelengths had on the weird cone structures that only existed in the eyes of color-sighted people.
That analogy might work better for antivaxxers or climate deniers. "We know this is something you can't poke with a stick, but you'll have to take it on 'faith' that the overwhelming conclusion from hundreds of studies is that some people can discern different parts of the visible spectrum."
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