One Hundred Billion Trillion Habitable Planets

Centauri Dreams ^ | 2/17/09

[SolidRedState]

Planet 51

[Captain Rhino]

In 1950, while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the physicist Enrico Fermi had a casual conversation while walking to lunch with colleagues Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller and Herbert York. The men lightly discussed a recent spate of UFO reports and an Alan Dunn cartoon facetiously blaming the disappearance of municipal trashcans on marauding aliens. They then had a more serious discussion regarding the chances of humans observing faster-than-light travel of some material object within the next ten years, which Teller put at one in a million, but Fermi put closer to one in ten. The conversation shifted to other subjects, until during lunch Fermi suddenly exclaimed, "Where are they?" (alternatively, "Where is everybody?") One participant recollects that Fermi then made a series of rapid calculations using estimated figures (Fermi was known for his ability to make good estimates from first principles and minimal data...) According to this account, he then concluded that Earth should have been visited long ago and many times over.

Fermi's Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Where are they?

[agere_contra]

I don't want one of my refrigerators punished with life.

[Oldpuppymax]

One hundred billion trillion habitable planets...and the left had to pick THIS one!

[Retired Greyhound]

How did I know someone was going to post old Helen?

Don't worry. I'm most certain the population on my planet will look like this:

[Brett66]

Not enough data to come to a conclusion.....

[Norman Bates]

No one is out there.

[Snickering Hound]

[SampleMan]

The Dimocrats will immediately start a plan to begin taxing these planets. They will begin by promising that the tax will only be $1 per planet and WILL NEVER effect the poor.

[Norman Bates]

I thought Fermi’s Paradox, or at least part of it, was about why the night sky was dark.

[wolfcreek]

That looks pretty good.

[clamper1797]

One Hundred Billion Trillion

That number assumes that the universe is finite

[Norman Bates]

If there are that many inhabitable planets then even if only a tiny fraction developed intelligent life that would still be a great deal of planets. Where are all the signals of intelligent civilization then? We should be bombarded with radio waves shot off from long extinct, not so long extint, and even perhaps a few still extant civilizations. The silence is deafening.

[utherdoul]

Well come on lets get out and settle a few of them. I call Geidi Prime.

[Norman Bates]

I would assume it is finite. Beyond the crest of ever-expanding matter is nothing (i.e., darkness).

[Billthedrill]

Yeah, well, on one of them, the Denuvian Slime World, where is is forever twilight, bobbing in an irregular orbit in a three-star system, there are insectoid people who reproduce by binary fission, amuse themselves by playing croquet with cast-off body parts, and stand on their heads for centuries at a time. And even they think Dennis Kucinich is weird.

[clamper1797]

Beyond the crest of ever-expanding matter is nothing

Or the outer boundary of the neighboring oscillating universe

[Texan Tory]

“Yeah, well, on one of them, the Denuvian Slime World...insectoid people...even they think Dennis Kucinich is weird.”

Lol at that!

[Grut]

We should be bombarded with radio waves shot off from long extinct, not so long extint, and even perhaps a few still extant civilizations. The silence is deafening.

I had a little idea about that: if you were on the moon, and pointed a sufficiently sensitive antenna towards the Earth, and tuned to Channel Two on the TV... you'd get random noise, because you'd be getting all the separate Channel Twos in the hemisphere facing you at once. So maybe the alien signals are there but in such quantity that they're interfering with each other and mutually masking their non-random nature.

[NTHockey]

If my math is correct, one hunded billion trillion = 10 to the 23rd power. Or 1 followed by 23 zeros. With an estimate this imprecise, I’m wondering if it’s based on Avogadro’s number (6.022 x 10 to the 23rd) = number of atoms in a mole.