super earth found in habitable zone

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/09/super-earth-found-in-habitable-z.html?ref=hp

pretty awesome! wonder if we will send something

 

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Send something where? We are talking about a planet 36 light years away, a distance that would take our fastest probes hundreds of thousands of years to reach.

 

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No problem when we figure out gravity warping.

Anyways...time to chuck Drake's equation isn't it? Told ya so.

 

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That is wonderful, not surprising, but wonderful nevertheless

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its funny how so many people think that we are the only life, moreso that there are no other habitable planets out there come to find out the small area we can scan we are finding hundreds of them.

stuff like this is what i love hearing! and why i liked stargate universe so much

 

Why?

It's just a series of questions that we still don't have answers for, but at least between HARPS and Kepler we are starting to get a feel for reasonable ranges for a few of the questions.

N = Ns fp ne fl fi fc fL

N = the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy

Derived by multiplying:

Ns = the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy (don't know, and I don't know if we have got a better estimate than some number number between 10 Billion and 400 Billion)
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/galaxy.html
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/MarissaWager.shtml
http://messier.obspm.fr/more/mw.html

fp = Percentage of stars that have planetary systems? Now we are starting to get a handle on this question and our very initial data make it appear to be low (Kepler in the first 4 months of data had looked at 150,000 stars and found ~1,200 candidates but it's still early in it's searching)

http://vimeo.com/19642643

ne = For each star that does have a planetary system, how many planets are capable of sustaining life (in Habitable zone and have water?) We are also starting to get a handle on this one, though we haven't yet found one, very initial estimates would again be low about the number of stars that have planetary systems are going to have one planet in the habitable zone. As to how many there are and are actually habitable, that will probably take a few more years to get an initial estimate.

fl = what percentage of the planets that are capable of sustaining life does life actually evolve? No closer to figuring this out

fI = on the planets where life does evolve, what percentage evolves intelligent life? No closer to figuring this out

fc = the percentage of intelligent life that have the means and the desire to communicate? No closer to figuring this out

fl = for each civilization that does communicate, for what fraction of the planet's life does the civilization survive? No closer to figuring this out (note if we were destroyed tomorrow the answer to this question would be 1/100,000,000, if we survive for 10,000 more years the answer will be 1/1,000,000).

 

So?

Try using the Drake equation.

http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/drake_equation.html#Try

Using what I think are optimistic numbers I come out to 0.0000033 planets with intelligent communicating life in our Galaxy.

Meaning the chance of another intelligent civilization in our Galaxy is vanishingly small.

Indeed, (if my optimistic numbers are at all reasonable) one would only expect one intelligent other civilization in 300,000 galaxies and there are only about 50 galaxies in a 11 million light year radius of our galaxy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies

Arthur

 

And it couldn't tell us what it found when it got there.

We couldn't send a signal one light year, let alone 36.

It takes quite a bit to still pick up Voyager and it has 400 watts of power (via an RTG using Pu with a HL of 87 years as it's heat source) and a 3.7 meter directional antenna and Voyager is only ~100 AU from earth.

A light year is over 63,000 AU.

 

Wow what a great equation...the earth isnt even supposed to exist? WTF do scientists listen to this shit?

 

That's not what it says at all.

Obviously we don't yet know the actual numbers to plug in to the equation but even using somewhat pessimistic numbers one gets

N* = the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy: 100 billion
fp = fraction of stars with planets around them: 10%
ne = number of planets per star ecologically able to sustain life: .33 .
fl = fraction of those planets where life actually evolves: .001% (1 of 100,000) .
fi = the fraction of fl that evolves intelligent life: .01% (1 of 10,000)
fc = the fraction of fi that communicates: .1% (1 of 1,000)
fL = the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations survives: 10,000,000th (1,000 years)

N = 0.00000000033

But given that there are ~ 80 Billion Galaxies in the Universe that means there would be 26 other intelligent communicating civilizations out there.

Arthur

 

lmao 10% of stars have planets...Ok what are your "Optimistic" numbers...

 

Why "lmao"?

Kepler is looking at ~136,000 stars and using just the first 4 months of data (meaning they will only find close in fast transiting planets) they have already found 1,235 planet candidates.

Sure a number of these will get tossed out, but then as the next years worth of data is looked at lots more slower moving planets (the ones in the habitable zone) are likely to be found

http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/candidates/

Also HARPS has found that ~40% of stars similar to the sun have at least one planet and about 10% of stars are rougly similar to our Yellow Dwarf.

http://img.ibtimes.com/www/articles...lanets-richest-haul-of-planets-ever-found.htm

So no, use of 10% doesn't seem at all unreasonable.

See previous post for the rest of the "optimistic" numbers.

 

adoucette,

First of all thanks for post 6

I would say fl could and most likely will be way off. I personally think anywhere that life can take hold it will. Given time life will evolve, fI is a bigger crapshoot however.

I just find .001% for a planet capable of sustaining life to have life evolving to be way to low considering what and where we have discovered life here on earth.

 

Thanks

You could be right but two things:

I said those were what I thought were somewhat pessimistic numbers but still I tend to think that that number isn't that high and that abiogenisis is not that likely of an occurance.

Consider, that in the 4 Billion years that the Earth has been here that still life only formed ONCE that we know of.

So while it's true that once life forms, it's both tenacious and aggressive as you suggest, it would appear (to me at least) that the period when life CAN form is likely to be relatively short and only during a short period when the conditions are conducive.

Which likely means a combinataion of high energy and lots of reactive Compounds.

As a planet gets older the reactive compounds get bound up and life no longer forms.

Arthur

 

Arthur, they still are not sure if there was some life on Mars in the past.

They think there might be some on the ice moons.

That's just our solar system.

 

Yes, well hopefully we will be able to get a better picture of it if we can find evidence of past microbial life or if we are really lucky, current life in the solar system on Mars, Europa etc. I'm not talking about about space faring ET's but it would show that life itself is able to get established in more extreme environments, what does that say about better conditions ?

Unfortunately there is much to speculate about, I certainly want to be here for at least another 20-30 years to see what we find.

 

There is absolutely no evidence that there ever was life on Mars though.

Who thinks that?
Again, there is no evidence of same.

The fact is that when life first forms, it is by definition the only life form on the entire planet and thus there are no predators and so one would expect that it would replicate until it was curtailed by lack of nutrients or that it's own waste became toxic or that finally evolution creates a version that lives off the waste of the first.

But in any case, that unrestrained growth of these first early organisms is highly likely to be obvious due to this unrestrained growth.

No such obvious case exists in our solar system.

Indeed, we have seen nothing in all our planetary probes to suggest that life exists elsewhere in our solar system.

Arthur

 

Unfortunately, not much because we don't know the conditions that allowed life to form.
I suspect life requires conditions to form that would not be conducive to most species that live on the planet today.

Same here, but then I'm pretty sure we won't find anything in our solar system.

 

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lpi/meteorites/life.html

your a bit wrong. this isnt 100% evidence because its a fossil.. yet if this was found on earth there would be no doubt its quite a double standard

 

No I'm not.

From your paper:

More importantly, if life formed on Mars and was in sufficient quantity that a random piece of Mars blasted off by a meteor and put in an orbital path that it then landed on Earth and then was found on Earth, then that implies that the life form would be common on Mars and that there should be evidence of it's existence on Mars, but no such evidence has been found.

Arthur