[backwoods-engineer]

Bullcrap. ‘Habitable’ doesn’t mean a bunch of hot Jupiters or pitiful little rocks orbiting flare stars, like we’ve seen of extrasolar planets thus far. There have been NO terrestrial extrasolar planets found, and certainly none in the circumstellar habitable zone of a stable yellow G2 star. ZIP, ZERO, NADA. Perhaps one will be detected, but if you believe astronomers Ward and Brownlee (and I do, read their book “Rare Earth”), Earth is the ONLY planet of its kind in the galaxy, or even the Local Group, or maybe in the entire universe.

[The Magical Mischief Tour]

Earth is the ONLY planet of its kind in the galaxy, or even the Local Group, or maybe in the entire universe.

Yeah, I have some hope and change to sell you...

[KevinDavis]

People like you have been proven wrong...

[gore_sux]

"Earth is the ONLY planet of its kind in the galaxy, or even the Local Group, or maybe in the entire universe."

I'm sorry, that's a hard one to swallow. The galaxy is a very big place (100 billion stars), and it is less than a spec of sand in the Sahara compared to the known universe. The only reason we aren't finding more earthlike planets is because we don't have the technology to see them yet.

[marktwain]

I find the “rare earth” hypothesis rather persuasive, combined with the reasons that intelligent life may be rare. Still, it is interesting that of the stars sampled, about 14 percent were found to have planets that were near earth sized, though all found so far are in very fast orbits compared to earth, just by the nature of the small sample of observations collected.

It will be quite interesting to see what the results are after 10 years of observations instead of only six weeks.

[GraceG]

The best place to live in the universe in my opinion would be on the moon of a Gas Giant orbiting a red dwarf star. The Gas giant would have a strong enough magnetic field to shield from solar flares from the red dwarf, and the red dwarf would be able to shine on for not Billions of years, but TRILLIONS of years. Plus multiple moons could habitable.

Our system isn’t too bad either of course.

[onedoug]

Well met.

Gonzalez & Richards, ¨The Privileged Planet: How Our Place In The Cosmos Is Designed For Discovery¨