New Paper Explores The Prospects For Life Around M-Class Stars (arxiv.org)

Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor summarizes the significance of a new paper describing "The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-Dwarf Stars": Although Star Trek had a minor smattering of "M-class planets" -- a designation that tells one nothing of substance -- "M-class star" is a much more meaningful designation of color, with two size classes, the dwarfs and the red giants... an M-dwarf of 1/10 the mass of the Sun will burn for around 1000 times the time that the Sun does... Therefore, if humanity ever meets an alien species, the odds of them coming from an M-dwarf [system] are already high. If humanity ever meets an alien species that has been around a billion years longer than us and has technology we can't even dream of, then the odds of it coming from an M-dwarf are overwhelmingly high.
This new paper offers "a comprehensive picture of the current knowledge of M-dwarf planet occurrence and habitability," pointing out that most of these stars are apparently orbited by planets packed closely together, with "a paucity of Jupiter-mass planets and the presence of multiple rocky planets." And more importantly, roughly a third of those rocky planets are orbiting in a "habitable zone" -- far enough away from their stars to support liquid water.

Comments

Re:Never meet

[RockDoctor]

Our species is around 200,000 years old.

We could spend the next thousand years developing technology, populating the Solar System with our robots, then travel at 0.01c to the nearest 10 planetary systems, and still not have a species which is 1% older than today.

That's unobtanium-free physics, but I do gloss over the difficulty of crewing and running a generation ship for the thick end of a millennium. It might be easier to develop some form of suspended animation for wombs, and ship frozen embryos for robots to develop, once the robots have built a sufficient space industry at the destination.

I'm sure that I'm never going to see humanity's First Contact moment. If I wasn't dead when it happens, I'd be astonished if any human which even knew it's 21st century ancestors names were involved. (I don't know the names of any of my ancestors even 5 generations back, let alone 30 or so).

A species doesn't need to travel at a significant fraction of c in order to colonise the galaxy. Our society probably couldn't do it in any meaningful sense (are we the same society as a thousand years ago - do you speak Old English, or Norman Frankish?), and maybe our species would have speciated into multiple descendant species by the time they get into other spiral arms. But that isn't "never" - just a very long term plan.