Don't worry. I'm most certain the population on my planet will look like this:
Posted on 02/17/2009 12:15:35 PM PST by LibWhacker
Alan Boss, whose new book The Crowded Universe will soon be on my shelves (and reviewed here), has driven the extrasolar planet story to the top of the news with a single statement. Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Chicago, Boss (Carnegie Institution, Washington) said that the number of Earth-like planets in the universe might be the same as the number of stars, a figure he pegged at one hundred billion trillion.
A universe teeming with life? Inevitably. The Telegraph quoted Boss on the matter in an early report on his presentation:
“If you have a habitable world and let it evolve for a few billion years then inevitably some sort of life will form on it,” said Dr Boss.
“It is sort of running an experiment in your refrigerator - turn it off and something will grow in there.
“It would be impossible to stop life growing on these habitable planets.”
Few Centauri Dreams readers would disagree with the notion that life may be common in the universe, but what about intelligent life leading to technology? That’s a far greater challenge, and Boss notes that our own civilization will be unlikely to exist in another 100,000 years. The odds on our running into another civilization at roughly the same stage of development are vanishingly small. Let’s see what Kepler finds. The planet-hunter lifts off in a scant three weeks on a mission Boss believes will find a habitable terrestrial planet within four years. How we would accomplish the unmanned mission to study this world that Boss refers to is something we continue to speculate about on Centauri Dreams.
Apropos of Boss’ comments, our man in the maritime antipodes, Paul Titze, sends along this memorable quotation from Christiaan Huygens, who wrote of these matters in 1695:
What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be increased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars?
Fermi's Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Where are they?
One hundred billion trillion habitable planets...and the left had to pick THIS one!
Don't worry. I'm most certain the population on my planet will look like this:
Not enough data to come to a conclusion.....
No one is out there.
I thought Fermi’s Paradox, or at least part of it, was about why the night sky was dark.
That looks pretty good.
That number assumes that the universe is finite
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.
Well come on lets get out and settle a few of them. I call Geidi Prime.
I would assume it is finite. Beyond the crest of ever-expanding matter is nothing (i.e., darkness).
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.
Or the outer boundary of the neighboring oscillating universe
“Yeah, well, on one of them, the Denuvian Slime World...insectoid people...even they think Dennis Kucinich is weird.”
Lol at that!
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.
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.
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