30 Billion Trillion Stars

According to the 'an atlas of the universe' there are an estimated 30 billion trillion stars in the visible universe. How many zeroes is that? What a number!

If anyone says there is no life out there, just say four words: 30 billion trillion stars!

 

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I intend to visit every single one of them

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How many zeroes is that?
Twenty two.

Shame it's not forty two, actually. That would have been the ultimate answer...

You could also call this number 30 sextillion stars.

 

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deleted

 

30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars

 

Most of those stars are in locations where life cannot survive. The conditions suitable for life only exist in the outer parts of a galaxy. As you move toward the center, there is too much radiation, gravitation conditions making stable solar systems impossible, and other problems.

From what we know about the history of the earth, life seems likely to occur whenever the conditions are suitable. On earth, life came into existence at just about the earliest time it was possible.

Intelligent life is another story. There is good reason to believe that intelligent life is a lucky (unlucky?) fluke rather than an evolutionary necessity. Note that dinosaurs were very successful and survived for 150 millions years or so without ever developing intelligence.

 

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Speculation of course. Though it definitely has grounds in logic. Remember: Try not to be confined to our ideas of life. Though there are some molecular groundlines as to what radiation can destroy and what not, we are still very naive in the possibilites of life.

Who said they weren't intelligent? From what ive heard, most people now aggree that they were extremely intelligent (at least not some of them).... not to the point of creating computers and stuff but ya know....

Later
T

 

After just a few major extinctions, intelligent life arose. It's not a convincing argument to say intelligent life is as rare as what most people make out. If there were thousands of major extinctions before us and we could prove we were the first intelligence on the planet. THEN you could say that intelligent life could be pretty rare. But we've came on the scene within a few hundred million years of advanced life coming into existence which I think is pretty quick.

 

Consider the history of our planet, which contains the only evidence we have for the existence of life in general and for intelligent life in particular. Imagine compressing the history of the Earth into 1000 days. This is easier than comparing billions, hundreds of millions, et cetera.

Solar system formed 1000 days ago (4.6 billion years)
First life appears 804 days ago (3.7 billion years)
Dinosaurs appear 54 days ago (250 million years)
Dinosaurs disappear 14 days ago (65 million years)
First man-like ape 10 hours ago (2 million years, Homo Erectus)
Early Homo Sapiens 2 hours ago (500,000 years)
Modern man appears 40 minutes ago (130,000 years)
Start of civilization 3 minutes ago (10,000 years)
Modern technology 2 seconds ago (100 years)

I do not claim that the above are precise values, but they are fair approximations. There is controversy over most of these numbers, so precision is not possible.

What are the implications of the above?

Life seemed to appear as soon as it was possible. This suggests that life is likely to be a common occurrence,

The evolution of intelligent life seems to occur a long time after the first occurrence of life. Furthermore, it does not seem to be a necessary consequence of evolution. All sorts of creatures have been evolutionarily successful without developing intelligence. I disagree with a previous post which claimed that dinosaurs were intelligent.

Note that elements other than hydrogen & helium are created at the end of the life cycle of various types of stars. No type of life was possible until at least 2-3 (maybe more) generations of stars created heavy elements usable as raw materials for life forms. Some very massive stars have short life cycles, but even making allowances for this, it is reasonable to believe that life itself was not possible for perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 of the history of the universe, putting intelligent very late in its history.

Much as I would like to believe in a universe teeming with high tech civilizations, I think it is likely that we are the only one in our galaxy. It is even possible that we are unique in the universe, although I suspect that there are at least a few others.

 

Again, I find that pretty egotistical. Are we really kings of the galaxy we live in?

I suppose there is some evidence to show you may be right. Fermi Paradox for instance. If intelligence is common in the galaxy, why don't we see or hear them? For example if we become really advanced and hi tech, we might start to colonize the galaxy over a period of a few millions years. Which in the history of the milky way is little time at all, which goes to show that it doesn't appear to have happened yet, as far as we can see.

 

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In Australia and the UK a billion is a Million Million and a trillion is a Million Million Million, a billion (bi meaning two) has twice as many zeros as a million, and a trillion (tri meaning three) has three times as many zeros as a million. So depending on who made the original quote the numbers can be very different.
30 Billion Trillion. 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 31 zeros

I still don't know if the earth is 4,500,000,000,000 or 4,500,000,000 years old. All I know is it is 4.5Billion years old.

So which is it????

 

Interesting thead, Good discussion, every one dont agree, but all the posts mostly follow the lines of logic. So far no cracpots has shown up. Personally I tend to vote for Dinosaur's point of veiw. There are possibly (likely) many planets out there with living organisms on them. but if we ever travel to one of these planets we may find only ants and spiders or maybe frogs and crayfish. I'm only gussing of course, but my estimate is one in a million planets is located in a zone where life is possible (e.i. distance from its sun, the right size of the sun, the planet has to have a magnetic field to shield against deadly radiation etc.etc.) and of those one in a million planets, possibly one in a trillion may have inteligent life. if my guessing is correct
we will obviously never be able to reach or make contact with annother civilization.So why dont we just forget about it. I'm of the opinion that the current search for radio signals from annother civilization out there is a total waste of time. I may be wrong but....

REGARDS APOLLO

 

One thing that you might be forgetting is that a civilisation might last a long time; it is entirely possible that Human civilisation will last for billions of years; if not then some other species might work the trick. No doubt there will be many changes in a long lived civilisation, but at least a fraction of civilisations should last longer. There is no thermodynamic or philosophical reason why this should not happen.

In that case almost every civilised species outside of the Earth should be incredibly ancient, and there could be many of them. There are thirty sextillion possibilities for such a civilisation; even if such a civilisation occurs in one galaxy out of a thousand, that would still mean a hundred million long-lived civilisations within the visible universe.

 

In the "visable" universe?

Is that like, with or with out a telescope?

 

LOL!!

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As far as I'm aware it's how far we can see were light has had a chance to reach us... with or without telescopes.

Good point. Even if civilisations are extremely rare, there would still be merely millions of them... surely...

And I think if humans don't last for millions of years then that's definetly an own goal. Even if a global disaster wreaks havock, there is always the underground approach? Where hundreds of thousands of the smartest humans can be taken to underground chambers (a la deep impact). We really should stick around, even if it means terraforming Mars to help double our odds of surviving on two planets. Then there are extra solar planets if we can reach them...

 

Blindman, thats interesting.... I never knew that. Anyone have any idea?

 

i just read a cnn article from 2003 http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/07/22/stars.survey/

Maybe that will help