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An international team of astronomers have reached the most definitive conclusion, one with profound implications: our galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets. Of those, most are small planets like ours. Statistically, every star would have at least one planet.
According to Stephen Kane — at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at CalTech in Pasadena and one of the authors of the study — “not only are planets common in the galaxy, but there are more small planets than large ones. This is encouraging news for investigations into habitable planets.”
Kane is being too conservative when he says that this is “encouraging news”. This is amazingly great news! The number of Earth-like planets is much higher than Jupiter-sized giants. The rough estimate is that there are at least 10 billion terrestrial planets across our galaxy.
That is a mind-blowing number.
Couple this with the increasing number of planets orbiting in the goldilocks zone — the area where Earth-like environments can happen — and the fact that life happens spontaneously even under the most extreme conditions, and the idea of a Universe thriving with life is impossible to deny. There’s no doubt that, statistically, there’s life out there.
Of course, how much of this life is smart enough to build computers, communication dishes or Imperial Star Destroyers is another matter altogether. As far as we know, all those habitable worlds may be full of killer snails and dozy fish
But the fact remains that, until now, we could only guess much of this stuff. Now we know. That makes a big difference.
The fact that there are at least 100 billion planets in our Milky Way alone has profound implications for our understanding of the Universe. These discoveries, made using Hubble and Kepler, are finally putting some real numbers in the Drake Equation.
The equation — created by Frank Drake, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz — is used to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.
Until know, as Dr Sagan explains in the video above, we could only use educated guesses. Now we are starting to fill in the gaps and things couldn’t look better. [Hubble]
Again…why do people assume life out there will be the same as us and need exactly the same things/conditions as us to survive?
I don’t think people assume that, it makes the nay sayers more likely to believe on the possibility. My personal opinion is that there is life for sure same and different.
We don’t, but we’d be most likely to be able to understand life that has at least some baseline similarity to us and even recognise it as life.
Dont post the Sagan Video as if you watched it. The Drake Equation has more than 2 parameters. So statistically, life more likely say five of orders of magnitude. (other parameters held constant) But hey, make a neutrino five orders of magnitude bigger and its still at least more than an order of magnitude smaller than a quark. Stick with what Arthur C Clark said.Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
This is indeed terrifying news.
It seems that it’s only a matter of time before First Contact. Why is this worrying? If you look at the groups of humans that drove our exploration of space you see that their motivations aren’t exactly benign – the Americans and Russians were trying to get one up on each other to assert military superiority in the 50′s and 60′s, now the Chinese and Indians have a similar motivation.
It’s never nans or lollipop ladies or drunk horny models at the fore front of space exploration, just generally types that you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley late at night.
They’re the ones heading for Earth, only they have two heads, four arms and six arseholes.
In the Sagan video he scoped that we have twice as many planets as we currently think, and playing with the figure regarding how long a civilisation lasts gets figures ranging from 0 to 1,000,000′s of civilisations – and that is the problem.
Then some think that life may not have happened in our Milky Way until this current point, due to certain factors being right, if that is the case by a major fluke we may be the first, and only have a few million years to wait before loads of others appear.
The biggest factor appears to be how long a civilisation lasts, some thing that the leap from level 1, where we are, to level 2 is a risky one and few will ever make it – the biggest factor to support that is that nobody more advanced has ever tried to contact us, but if you were a more advanced civilisation would you want to contact us? I doubt it, we seem to still like war machines a bit too much for my liking.
And that makes me think of Hawking when he said we should be careful in trying to contact alien life, sure we may contact a super intelligent race that will advance us to no end, or we could contact some warriors that love carbon based burgers – the wise thing to do is try and look for advanced life on other planets while keeping a very low profile.
Don’t forget we still have a bunch of people that thin God’s are cool and the Earth is 10,000 years old, that stoke pile guns, while that is the case I pity the fool that contacts us, on the poor bastards we happen to find.