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NASA's Planet Hunter Spots Record 1,284 New Planets, 9 In A Habitable Zone (networkworld.com)
coondoggie quotes a report from Network World: NASA's planet hunting space telescope Kepler added a record 1,284 confirmed planets to its already impressive discoveries of extraterrestrial worlds. [This batch of planets is the largest single account of new planets since Kepler launched in 2009 and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets realized by the space telescope so far to more than 2,300.] The discoveries were a result of an automated technique implemented in a publicly available custom software package called Vespa, which lets scientists analyze thousands of signals Kepler has identified to determine which are most likely to be caused by planets and which are caused by non-planetary objects such as stars. "Vespa computed the reliability values for over 7,000 signals identified in the latest Kepler catalog which identified 4,302 potential planets and verified the 1,284 planets with 99% certainty," said the Princeton researchers that developed Vespa. NASA said, based on their size, nearly 550 of the validated planets could be rocky like Earth. Nine of which orbit in their sun's habitable zone.
Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you? Twenty years ago we didn't even know that exoplanets exist and now we find more and more of them. Since when has record breaking research in astronomy been a waste of taxpayer dollars? What kind of ignorant wouldn't want to know in what kind of universe we live?
Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?
The answer might be in the first two words of your reply.
While generation ships make for some compelling science fiction, the reality is that we have yet to be able to build a sustainable closed biosphere on Earth where we have a ton of advantages like gravity, sunlight, a magnetic field to protect from radiation, no concerns about explosive decompression and a distinct lack of large chunks of rock and ice floating around. Until we understand our own biology and ecosystem more fully, a generation ship wouldn't be a few dozen astronauts dying out of some larger number. Every single one would die.
One thing to keep in mind - according to many charts Mars and Venus are in our own star's habitable zone. Neither seem to have life. Even Earth seems like it would have a much hard time at it if not for some specific factors (ie, a large moon to stabilize the rotational axis - a rare feature for a rocky planet).
If we're batting only 1 out of 3 planets in the habitable zone of our own star actually having life, I wouldn't hold out too much hope of there being life on any of these planets just because its in the habitable zone. My guess (and really that's all we can do until we get a larger sample size of planets having life vs not) is that a very tiny percentage of these planets even in the habitable zones actually harbor life.
That said - even if there was only life in the universe at a rate of one inhabited planet per galaxy, the universe as a whole would still have billions of inhabited planets - it's just that there'd be virtually zero chance that life from one would ever be aware of or affected by life on another.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain