New 'life in space' hope after billions of 'habitable planets' found in Milky Way

The Telegraph ^ | 03/26/12

[KevinDavis]

Billions of potentially habitable planets may exist within our galaxy, the Milky Way, raising new prospects that life could exist near Earth, a study has found.

Researchers discovered that at least 100 of the ''super-Earths'' may be on our galactic doorstep, at distances of less than 30 light years, or about 180 trillion miles, from the sun.

[wastedyears]

Well I should’ve specified that not being able to achieve light speed or FTL travel is only a theory.

Just because we can’t do it now, doesn’t mean we won’t be able to in the future, or that other species have already achieved FTL.

[Vaquero]

absolutely

[GOPJ]

These were small bombs - the art of designing now lost in the USA.

Maybe we could buy back the information from the Russians? Kidding. Did we really lose the ability to make tactical nukes?

[MeganC]

My very first FR cyberstalker! I’m flattered. (-:

[PIF]

Did we really lose the ability to make tactical nukes?

—

Not tactical per se, but the guy who was the genius designer quit (cancellation of Orion was one reason) and no one replaced him. The nukes for Orion were much smaller size, yield, and of a different design than those for warfare using tactical warheads. You cannot replace one with the other.

The Russians are also in the dark - thus the art was lost.

All current new design is theoretical - no actual tests, without which no one knows if a design will really work.

One can make modest changes to old designs known to work - for instance, but something totally new may not until one is exploded.

There is rocket science and then there is nuclear bomb design. Neither of which the USA spends much intellectual capital, political will, money or effort on any longer. There are just too many homeless to feed, you know.

[Moonman62]

And buried at the bottom of the article is why this is little more than attention grabbing hype:

'But red dwarfs are known to be subject to stellar eruptions or flares, which may bathe the planet in X-rays or ultraviolet radiation, and which may make life there less likely.''

Habitability of red dwarf systems

[dragnet2]

I want to populate my planet with miners, loggers, and farmers.

Well, this planet is jammed with government employees retiring in their 50s, with lottery style tax paid pensions while the private sector is choking from this harsh alien atmosphere.

Good luck.

[Mr. K]

"Physics is physics, there's not even a provable glimmer of a hint that can happen.........Just saying. "

I am guessing that back in the late 1800's, when they wanted to close the patent office because they had the steam engine and so everything was already invented, you would have been with them on that, hmm?

oh. and even CURRENT theoretical physics allows for FTL travel through 'wormholes' (no, wormholes are not a science fiction invention- the mathematics says they are possible)

And while I am at it, Bob Lazaar worked on FTL propulsion at Groom Lake (Area 51) where the UFO 'pulls' you through a gravity well to your destination instantly (seriously i believe him- I have heard him talk- he knows his physics and so do I - I have a degree in it)

[Excellence]

“In my Father’s house there are many mansions. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” [Jn. 14:2] (Rheims, A.D. 1582.)

[Secret Agent Man]

Orion would still take years to get to the closest star. And to say that their equipment would work as long as it needed to without repair or ability to repair....

If I remember the orion was the slowest of a bunch of different versions of spacecraft, that wouldn’t go above .02-.04c.

And if it was the version that used nuclear explosions to detonate behind it to push its driver plate, how many of those would they have, and how many could they carry before running out? The other thing was that it had to be very heavily shielded because of the nuclear explosions it used to propel it.

[PIF]

One could put a lot of spares on a 40MT spacecraft. Or to put it another way - how much stuff can be loaded on 256 supertankers?

Don’t remember any other craft proposed in 1963.

Water was the shielding - millions of tons of it. Same for cosmic ray shielding.

[William Tell]

hopespringseternal said: "How did the life get there? No one can explain scientifically how life got here."

I'm not qualified to opine on the non-scientific aspects of how life began. I certainly don't agree that every random combination of atoms must be considered when assessing the probability of life coming into existence.

Carbon is not equally likely to be involved in biochemistry as uranium. The covalent bonding of carbon and the benzene ring structure are going to contribute to the formation of organic materials no matter where in the universe the carbon is found. Uranium; not so much.

[hopespringseternal]

Even when you have the right elements (and there is no intrinsic reason I have heard as to why carbon is necessarily "the right element"), they have to be ordered and combined in extremely specific ways.

Life is much farther beyond "organic materials" than a 747 is aluminum stock.

Even when you cheat and pick any point in a supposed process there is no "magic" guiding the chemistry forward. Life is not simply one "trial" that went "right", but an entire, extremely long sequence of trials with the right outcome, all of them unlikely on a cosmic scale.

All this is blithely ignored by people repeating the Drake equation. They just put in a number that makes their argument plausible without any serious consideration as to how plausible that number itself is.