How many planets/exoplanets...

[ShaunyC]

Just found a link giving a slight guide to how many habital planets found buy the kepler telescope..

Good little read giving a insight to the vastness out there, with little visual aides which always help!

http://exoplanets.newscientistapps.com/

[ronin]

As it says:

We can't determine a planet's composition from Kepler's data,

That means it has found none. It has found planets, whether or not they are habital cannot be specified from Kepler.

The number of stars seems to be a simple idea of N stars in the Milky Way, forget the bright ones, too much radiation, forget all the core stars again too much radiation as a background. That makes a big reduction. Suspect variable stars should be ignored, maybe gravitationally bound doubles.

I read and see a lot of articals where guesswork and supposition magically change to fact. Last night How the Universe Works was doing it. They said they could see planets collide in other solar systems. They cannot, they presume that like out solar system proto-planets collide but they cannot see them doing it. A made up cgi of colliding planets is not proof.

[ShaunyC]

Of corse it can not be confirmed they've found life and alot is guess work through assumption until facts are found..

This just gives a represensation of the possible chances out there of the dimming from the star! And i just thought it might be interesting for others to read..

[laowho]

Current conservative estimates are 2 planets, on average, for every star in the universe, and why wouldn't it be the case? Especially given the cosmogeny of stars and star systems. What gets me is the knee-jerk reactionary demand for proof, as though life, and even science, has transmogrified into some Kafka-esque courtroom turned on its head. It'd be an interesting study, to discern when/how/why we began to think that we were it and somehow then managed to assume that anything more needed "proof." Like Arthur Clarke said, the propositions, that we are alone and that we are not alone, are equally remarkable. People used to also wonder whether the universe was infinite or finite--but has anyone explained how it could be either if it's expanding?

[Stargazer_00]

The problem that exists is simple.  The distances involved to travel to just one of these suspected oasis of life is unfathomable, or perhaps not the distance but the time required to get there with current technology.

Until we develop AI capable of self repair, no form of conciousness will ever travel from earth to another life bearing planet.  In reality biological entities are by their very evolution tied to their base planet.  The envonrmental variables are very unlikely to be equal from one planet to the next and much like finger prints I'd suggest our planet, with it's lunar influences, solar influcense, orbital frequency, axis tilt, gravity field and magnetic protection are unique, like a finger print.  Our evolution has developed our biology to perfectly suit all of the variable in play in our environment and we are hopelessly over specialised for this environment alone.

We, as a species, have only three choices the way I see it. 

1.  We are a feeder species for a soon to be preeminent machine race.  A race largely uneffected by time, capable of self repair, able to manufatcurer life sustaining resources from base mineral deposits in seemingly every object in the universe bar suns and black holes.  Most importantly able to sustain longevity over significantly larger time frames than biological entities.

2. We intergrate machines capable of overcoming the short comings of our evolutionary biology into our bodies.  I suspect this would not be achievable as our brains have evolved to live a certain number of years and extending the life of the more machine like parts of our bodies would probably be simpler than wiring our brains to be able to cope with massively longer lives and the inherent neurological diseases the become present with old age.  Perhaps I'm just being shortsighted..

3.  We accept that although plausable, we will never have proof of life from another planetary body.  Which is tragic.  Worse still we do find some evidence of life and are unable to do anything about it.

I for one believe, without a shadow of doubt, that life exists elsewhere.  Not only exists but flourishes in the extreme.  It appears to be the nature of matter to find a way to create life looking ath the myriad ways in which life has found a way to evolve on our own planet.  

[laowho]

Dunno how we could be "hopelessly overspecialized for this environment alone" when, for all that we know, we are strictly a product of this environment. Must be the excess baggage of logic in my failure to understand how it is that a fish (of the non-flying variety) can complain that water is wet. Oh well...guess my notions of what I think I know have to go. But as long as I'm at it, may as well throw the baby out with the bathwater...and while I'm at it, that goes for ALL of my limiting projections on so-called reality, including the short-lived and ever-changing authority of "science," including of course the Einsteinian limit on travel. Either that, or there's a good bit of (currently) "non-scientific" reality, and most (if not all) of our language, that has to be discarded until "reality" succumbs and conforms to our poor limits on it.

[Cath]

We first need to start to grow up before we stand any chance of finding/contacting any other life forms that may be willing to talk to us.

From looking at what we are now getting up to and the way we have chosen to live on planet Earth, the chances of us now growing up are zero to non existent, which you could very easily call universal justice.

[laowho]

Agreed Cath...which is why I've left myself some outs. Namely, that I don't have to identify myself strictly with Homo sapiens sapiens (man who knows that he knows--now there's a laugh), but rather with the universe(s) at large. After all, what DO we know other than that the cosmos peoples and trees and chipmunks and has tea? The only way to divest it of such is to continue to insist that we and it are somehow separate, a preposterous notion maintainable only by the most schizophrenic and vain imaginings (or unless you need to publish for hopeful tenure). I love science...am even familiar with a fair bit of it...but I want it to be bigger, even if the ego in it and narrowness of it have to become smaller. Most recently I listened to a lecture by Sean Carroll, a physicist I like a lot, on "Meaning in the Universe" and whether there was any. Rest assured, there isn't, else they'd have found the mechanism for it. Guess it's when it smacks of dogma or of being the arbiter of truth that I cringe and go scampering after better material, or smarter scientists. And why I love Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Feynman, Susskind, Bohm, Wheeler, Penrose, and all the other iconoclasts.

[tenbyfifty]

The problem that exists is simple.  The distances involved to travel to just one of these suspected oasis of life is unfathomable, or perhaps not the distance but the time required to get there with current technology....

I don't think your ideas are so implausible. who knows what knowledge and technologies will exist in the future. Here's another potential sci fi future: imagine if somehow you could store human experience and personality outside the brain and then transfer it back into a youthful clone of your own body; you would then have a recipe for immortality. Sounds crazy but what if u are given brain implants when u r young which are designed to store knowledge and experience.

Who is to stay the physical substrate of the brain will always be clouded in mystery and that we won't be able to manipulate it in this way. After a hundred years of enquiry maybe not, but would you bet against it after a thousand years of technological development?

The obvious question always comes up though, why haven't aliens with this sort of technology come to visit us already? Two possible answers:

1 its a pretty big galaxy and maybe there are only a handful of alien species with the advanced technology needed to get around it. On that basis it could take millions of years for one of them to find us and they may be stand offish about interfering with another civilization.

2 Maybe they visited the Earth before humans were even thought of, stayed for a while and moved on leaving no trace behind. For immortals a century would feel like a second so maybe they have an insatiable wander lust and take off after a few millennia of the the same old planet.

Trouble is we think history is about our journey through the space/time of the universe but maybe its really about the universe's journey through us.

[Stargazer_00]

Or maybe they are so far in advance of us they simply don't regard our little planet as worthy.  If you drive down a motorway and see an anthill you don't stop and get out and go and say hello do you. 

Depending on your personality you just might stop to kick the ant hill a bit, not everyone likes ants. 

I find it incredibly unlikely we'll ever come across another intelligent species not of this planet. It's more likely another species on this planet would evolve to a level we could converse with than us meeting another species from another planet in my opinion.

I don't think we'll ever seriously get off of this planet and out into our solar system to be honest.  It just isn't worth the economics.  For the same reason why we all still drive polluting cars when pollution free alternives exist and could be mass produced.  Economics.  Too much cost involved and no one wants to pay the bill.  We are too immature as a species to all pull in the same direction long enough to acheive anything quite that ambitious. 

We can't even all agree where we came from but I guess that is putting a toe in a pond that's not wanted.  It's difficult not to think in certain directions when you think of life on other planets though.

[tenbyfifty]

re "I don't think we'll ever seriously get off of this planet and out into our solar system to be honest. "

Never say never. Who is to say that there are not undiscovered physical phenomena waiting to be exploited.Ten years ago most of us had never heard of the Higgs particle , dark energy or dark matter

and we don't know what 2 of those are. If we grow up & recognise the critical value of our own planet's well being to our long term survival there's probably a lot more history to come than has already happened.Look what we've learnt in the last 2 centuries - what about another 2 thousand years of discovery, what about 20,000?

[Stargazer_00]

we'll all be gone in 20,000.  Honestly believe that!

[tenbyfifty]

we'll all be gone in 20,000.  Honestly believe that!

Nothing has happened on Earth in the last 20,000 years that we couldn't have survived - in fact we clearly did. It might seem a long time to us but it is not for the Earth which is a very stable environment between asteroid strikesand mega volcanoes. If we look after the Earth she'll look after us (sorry for cliched anthropomorphism).

Perhaps we will only survive for this long if we actually start thinking on these time scales.

When you do, the idea of maintaining the other great threat to our survival ie nuclear weapons  

seems dangerous and childish to say the least.

[Stargazer_00]

I believe we will suffer some self imposed extinctional level  catastrophy within the next 20,000 years.  Probably biological in nature.  We are just smart monkeys after all.

I don't care either way, I'll be long gone in 1-70 years anyway. 

[laowho]

All this talk of whether our species will survive is just another reason to open our options (for the clever sorts who think we know what we or reality are) and to begin to see more clearly (even "objectively" for the more hard-bitten of us/that part of us)...to know that there isn't any part or place in the universe that isn't also us, and vice versa. This subject/object distinction that at every turn wants to force us into arbitrary and narrowing identifications/values/meanings/judgments/limitations is what we do to our and everybody's detriment. Reagan once said that we'd all unite if some alien threat appeared...well, Dr. Johnson also said that a thief will have his mind concentrated greatly the night before he's hanged. Meteorites, super volcanoes, nuclear winter, the next ice age...what matter? But, if I identify not with "myself," whatever that is/isn't, and therefore neither with my species, then "what matter" indeed! At least I can be freed of all my loathesome projections and get back to communing when I observe.

[Cath]

The trouble is laowho, is that whatever we really are and whatever we really are apart of, for some unknown reason life has gone and disconnected each and everyone of us from what appears to be our surroundings .. We only appear to feel and experience what actually happens to the body we appear to inhabit.

Due to this apparent disconnection, it would appear that we are now longing for outside contact, outside contact as in we want to find and somehow communicate and become friends with whoever else is out there. Hence our deep longing to find other similar lifeforms by way of telescopes, radio and any other means we may discover in time to come.

Carl Sagen had some very insightful words about why we so dearly want Contact.

[laowho]

Aah, but Cath,

Life hasn't done any such thing...better science does show that there is no real separation, biological or otherwise. And Even Sagan was wont to restrict himself to his own eyes for what his heart expressed otherwise. It's these strange contradictions I'm referencing, these lines in the sand that we continue to draw even though every new wave has washed them away (science) and even though we let these war within us. Once I managed to convince someone that rocks were alive, by asking whence came the minerals in his body? Another time I told a biology major that I could prove reincarnation, and showed that he was composed of the atoms of previous lives..."Well, that doesn't count...it's not the same" he said. In which case I give up, because if that isn't reincarnation then I don't know what is. Everybody has some bias, some arbitrary line...

Of the 4% of baryonic mass in the universe, more is constituted out of gas and dust than is out of stars. This interstellar medium is full of organic compounds, and when in a laboratory some of OUR essential amino acids are subjected to the same heat and pressure of a meteorite strike, these aren't destroyed...rather, they chain, build, as in the peptides that form the proteins of which we're made. And this is just the beginning. We can also clone, quite a feat for mere humans, no? Your reference to Sagan's Contact reminds me of another movie, a line from which is, "God said to Pascal, 'You wouldn't look for me if you hadn't already found me.'" And isn't this the point? Where do we get off feeling alone when the only real "evidence" we have, right under our very noses, is that we are what the universe does? In some ways we've gotten so smart that we've gotten stupid enough to forget this very obvious, unassailable and inevitable fact. There was an episode of Through the Wormhole that asked, "Is the universe Conscious?" That's how dumb we've become, and yeah, I'm sayin that to think that we could be alone, even if we tried, is equally preposterous, even if we never find our little green versions of ourselves. We ARE the universe, and if that isn't enough, then what is?

[laowho]

Put another way, let's look at what we do. We look at stars and all manner of other stuff. The trouble is, who are "we?" If we only identify ourselves as some unique entity that came into existence at some point in the spacetime continuum that we call birth, then we're already cut off from our grandparents. But we don't do that. Neither do we nail ourselves down at some cellular level, and good thing, because this changes completely every several years. If we're gonna talk about what or who "we" "are," we've gotta do better, both to comport with what science knows and with what we do. If what we also do is to long after the companionship of others beyond earth, as we do for those who "pass," are we wrong to find this communion in what we do in astronomy? After all, I know that I'm star debris, if I go back enough generations, and this must be true for every "separable" "aspect" of what it means to be me. Does the universe dream? You bet it does. Was it JBS Haldane(?) who said, "Something somewhere is doing we don't know what." Einstein had a similar complaint--an assumed but threatened classical separation between subject/object or observer/observed-- with the spooky action at a distance implication of quantum mechanics, the entangled fallout of a non-local universe. So be it.