Posted on 01/23/2011 9:38:58 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at Harvard, made the claim that we are alone in the universe after an analysis of the 500 planets discovered so far showed all were hostile to life.
Dr Smith said the extreme conditions found so far on planets discovered outside out Solar System are likely to be the norm, and that the hospitable conditions on Earth could be unique.
“We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different from our own. They are very hostile to life as we know it,” he said.
He pointed to stars such as HD10180, which sparked great excitement when it was found to be orbited by a planet of similar size and appearance to Earth.
But the similarities turned out to be superficial. The planet lies less than two million miles from its sun, meaning it is roasting hot, stripped of its atmosphere and blasted by radiation.
Many of the other planets have highly elliptical orbits which cause huge variations in temperature which prevent water remaining liquid, thus making it impossible for life to develop.
A separate team of scientists recently declared the chance of aliens existing on a newly discovered Earth-like planet “100 per cent”.
Professor Steven Vogt , of the Carnegie institution in Washington, said he had “no doubt” extraterrestrial life would be found on a small, rocky planet found orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581 last September.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
"And finally, did you know that only a miraculous set of
circumstances makes life here on Earth possible? For instance,
the planet's size is just exactly right to hold our atmosphere.
The atmosphere contains just enough oxygen to support life.
And our distance from the sun is just perfect for the right
temperature. Should there be even a trivial change in any of
these conditions, all life here on Earth would certainly be
obliterated in a matter of milliseconds. This is Les Nessman
saying good day, and may the good news be yours.
Apparently, the Harvard guy doesn't think any other planet can meet
and sustain these conditions.
Bad, bad logic and science.
The technology so far MIGHT detect Jupiter, if it were in a highly elliptical orbit, but completely miss Earth.
This is the equivalent of saying your car keys are not nearby on the ground, because it is night and you only looked in the area under the street lamp.
Hubble Deep Field images are a tiny dot of sky in the Orion Nebula magnified millions of times. 
Those aren't stars, those are galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars.
And that's just one dot of sky.
Just imagine how big the universe really is.
Exactly. Hence my confidence that there's a planet out there shaped just like Alfred E. Newman's head. I mean, there are so many planets out there that it's a virtual certainty. Only a pinhead would deny it.
Agreed. Like null and void said upthread, our current technology can just barely detect super-massive planets that orbit close to their parent star. By definition, none of those are earthlike.
Our sensing technology has to evolve to a higher level before we can easily detect small rocky planets like ours in other solar systems.
Even sending a probe to the nearest star system would require a huge investment using current propulsion methods and the results might only be seen by our great-great-grandchildren.The data could be beamed back to us at the speed of light,getting the dat-gathering platform there will take a long time.And it would almost certainly have to incorporate a foolproof nuclear power reactor .Someone care to calculate the transmitter power required and antenna size to send the probe's data back at even "dial-up" rates?
“Let’s see, we have found earth like life on one out of 501 planets (earth itself). That is a success rate of 0.2%. Now how many planets are there? Multiply that by 0.2% and the number of potential life supporting planets is very, very large.”
So, let’s carry this logic further...you exist on planet earth where life itself exists. So, there is a great chance that you exist on another planet as well, do you like it there I wonder?
Is this guy serious? He must have a credibility ‘death-wish’.
Scientists are still up in the air about life on local planets. Fossil evidence seems to point to at the very least, former life on one local planet. I don’t buy into it, but some scientists do.
If we can’t be positively certain concerning life on local planets, how can we be so bold as to make a blanket statement about 500 other planets?
What may seem like an inhospitable climate on other planets, may in fact be a fantastic climate for life of another form there.
Again, we find ourselves in a situation where we just don’t know, cannot know, and yet definitive statements are being made.
I expect a number of hilarious pronouncements to be aired over the next few decades, as fools feel compelled to turn their brains inside out for public observation.
There are several important variables. The most discriminatory of these is the location of the Sun, about 3/4ths of the way to the edge from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Much further in could be too violent, and further out too exposed to tidal forces.
The second discriminator is time. The galaxy is about 15 billion years old. The Earth has existed about one third of that time, or 4.5 billion years. 3.8 billion of simple celled life. Only 200 million years of mammals.
Only 2.5 million years of the genus Homo. 200,000 years of looking more like we do today. Only perhaps 10,000 of mankind being intelligent.
So how many inhabited planets could have come and gone in that time? Remember that Earth’s life form clock has been reset several times, wiping out hundreds of millions of years in evolution.
People once believed that if you traveled too far out to sea, that you'd fall off the edge of the world, and that the sun revolved around the earth.
The mind-boggling numbers involved with this question argue in favor of a universe that is teeming with life. The Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the universe, each possessing billions of stars, and trillions of planets.
We don't yet have the technology to fully see all of the planetary systems in our own galaxy, let alone the billions of others out there.
The comment argues that being B+1 in a string is much more unlikely than being 1+B+1, somewhere in the middle. The larger the string the more likely this is true.
Global Warming mania is a symptom of a collapsed rational thought ethos.
This sort of over-reaching generalization with no data to back it up from someone who should bloody well know better is worse than embarrassing, it's terrifying.
Note the title says life is impossible, but Smith didn't say that, only that conditions on Earth might be unique (which we knew all along).
sort of like running a national opinion poll and drawing a conclusion after only calling 1 person somewhere in East LA.
TAU, Thousands of Astronomical Units, was intended to fly -wait for it- thousands of astronomical units up out of the dusty galactic plain to give us a clear view of the core and extent of our home galaxy and a very good baseline for a stereo view of local stars and systems.
This would not only provide us accurate distances to all the visible stars but a superb dust-free view of our own galaxy as well.
If you think the Hubble images are grand, you ain't seen nuthin'!
As long as we're using our current technology which can only infer the presence of super-massive giants that are tugging on their parent planets, then yes, what you say is correct.
Give our technology a couple of generations to improve, and we'll be directly sensing small rocky planets like our own.
The chances of finding earthlike planets will then increase exponentially, as will the chances of discovering evidence for life on them.
Dibs on the Virgo supercluster!
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