Posted on 06/24/2020 9:09:55 PM PDT by RomanSoldier19
A new estimate suggests the Milky Way is home to six billion Earth-like planets. So far, we’ve found just one potential candidate.
In 2009, the Kepler space telescope constantly watched over some 200,000 stars in our corner of the Milky Way. It was looking for where life might exist—by pinpointing small, rocky planets in the temperate zones of warm, yellow suns, and figuring out just how special Earth is in the grand scheme of things. While the mission revolutionized the study of exoplanets, those main objectives went largely unfulfilled. A mechanical failure cut short Kepler’s initial survey in 2013. Astronomers would later discover just a single Earthlike planet in its dataset.
A decade later, researchers are finally closing in on some of the answers to the questions Kepler raised. Earthlike planets are probably rare, but not exceedingly so. Roughly one in five yellow stars could have one, according to a new analysis of Kepler’s data published in May in The Astronomical Journal. If the researchers’ conclusions are correct, that would mean the Milky Way might be home to nearly 6 billion Earths. Yet of the 4,000 likely exoplanets we’ve spotted, just one looks anything like our home planet. So where are the rest?
“[Truly Earthlike planets] are not hiding per se, it’s just that the sensitivity of our telescopes is simply not good enough yet [to find them],” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, who was not involved with the research.
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
And we are not the oldest planet in that mix.
They are NOT out there.
Disagree. If say a species was significantly advanced that they were ahead of us technologically then they likely don’t use anything like am/fm or any radio bands but something digital and perhaps laser. It could be simply that their oldschool communications and media has already passed us by. Their is also the chance that it simply hasn’t been enough time to reach us or they haven’t reached the level necessary to broadcast information. There are a million reasons why we haven’t heard from any of them. After all our first broadcasts are just 110 light years away.
“we overestimate our intelligence.”
May be. But no one can accuse us of overvaluing it...
I bet when aliens fly by Earth, they lock the doors.
Watch the skies everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!
The analogy I like to use is ants.
What do ants think of a species that is more intelligent than they are (humans, for example)?
Do they recognize we are more intelligent?
Ants don’t know what they don’t know.
I think that would be our relationship with any advanced alien intelligence.
And their broadcasts are even further away across vast contiunuums of time.
[humans are stunningly stupid]
Well, Manchurian Candidate Barack Hussein Obama did win, not just once but twice.
And there were many that wanted Hillary.
So, your point is well-founded; and that’s just with some portion of the population in America.
It depends where in ‘time’ we are. We could be the first to reach this level of sentience in which case we’re basically alone at this level... or we’re the latecomers and all the other sentients at this level have ascended, evolved beyond our understanding, or simply died out.
The other thing is that the speed of light, as we understand physics right now, is the uppermost speedlimit. That makes going places a bit difficult as well as making communication a problem. We still can’t talk much beyond Alpha Centauri with our radio technology, and that’s with *years* of lightspeed lag on the roundtrip if we were to build such a setup.
“We’re literally 1 in a million or billion or more.”
Perhaps
— if we are one in a billion, there would be around 300-400 other civilizations in the Milky Way.
— if we are one in a million, there would be around 300,000- 400,000 civilizations in the galaxy.
When you are dealing with 300 billion plus stars, it’s hard to know where to start looking!
But look we will and find we shall!
It could also be that that same species was smart enough to realize that maybe beaming signals out into the wider universe might just be a sign saying, “Hi, we’re idiots, please come eat us!” and use broadcasting sparingly. Or they may have gone to quantum communications instead and don’t have any detectable broadcasting at all.
C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy tackles this question quite well from a theological point of view. I loved the first two. The third book kind of lost me though. Haven’t read them in years.
This is just the Milky Way not the entire Galaxy. There are possibly hundreds of billions of earth like planets if not trillions out there in the Galaxy.
They are just so far away we could never realistically communicate with them let alone ever reach them.
Terence McKenna has some interesting (and far out) thoughts on the “communication without being detected” concept.
He would use communications that were disguised as “background noise” of space, that could not be detected unless you knew the “code”.
Yep, there’s not ‘one’ missing link - they’re ALL missing.
Why can't they find us? For similar reasons perhaps? I would imagine even with an advanced civilization, sending messages or traveling across hundreds or thousands of light years is not easy, if not impossible, for any life form.
oh we can get there
Warp Drive More Possible Than Thought, Scientists Say | Space
Search domain
www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-spaceflight.htmlhttps://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-spaceflight.html
A ring-shaped warp drive device could transport a football-shape starship (center) to effective speeds faster than light. The concept was first proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre.
Yeah, seen that concept. It does look like for our species the real life answer may be quantum communications, where altering the spin of one atom that was paired with a second alters the spin of the second at any distance with no discernable radiation or intermediary transmission. We know it happens, so it’s now an engineering issue.
Even without that, it’s notable that we’re reducing powerful broadcasts from the surface as we change to viewing content from the internet or cable networks instead of broadcast networks. We may not be a giant radio beacon in space for too many more decades and it’s plausible that other species would go the same way.
I disagree -- there are many possibilities. Just a few:
Faster than light travel is not possible, or is so expensive that it is not worth coming to this backwater planet.
They came 10,000 years ago and left -- Oog the caveman did not seem like a good trading partner.
Panspermia seeded the earth long, long ago and we are somewhat like them.
Intelligent life seeded the earth long, long ago will someday come back to round up their cattle.
They have been here and they are us.
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