Love the numbers

[Mav359]

I was reading the sky news website about another exo-planet they have recently discovered, Kepler-78b. 

I was doing a quick google & it reckons there are 300billion (ish) stars in the milky way, currently they have found around 700 exo-plants which is roughly 0.5% of the 150000 stars surveyed. That means that at that rate there are 1.5billion (ish) planets out there....

if at 0.5% of that supported life & only 0.5% of that supported intelligent life that would mean there would be 37500 (ish) intelligent races out there.....   

Sorry my morning coffee is kicking in

[Pig]

We still haven't found intelligent life on planet earth as yet  

[ronin]

Didn't think the Milky Way had 300 billion stars, everything I have heard is between 100 billion and 150 billion.

Concerning life supporting possibilities they have identified just over 1000 and I think 1 is reported as possibly being in the right zone.

Life supporting is more then a straight percentage, do double stars influence it - most stars are actually doubles, can we ignore the core stars - radiation levels are likely to be too high. Is a large moon required - our earth-moon sysytem could well be rare, Planetary magnetic fields will be essential, neither Venus or Mars have any significant magnetic field, Earth is a bit odd in this respect. Highly variable stars should probably be dropped and also those that are "bright", white and blue stars, again too much radiation.

So if we throw away half the stars and use 150 billion, throw away the core stars - too high radiation, throw away close doubles, throw away O, B and A class stars, then this reduces the potential number of stars quite horrendously. The process has to be more selective then N stars in the Milky way then multiplying a set of probabilities P1xP2xP3x........

[crashtestdummy]

But by that we could also argue on what constitutes life.lots of organisms on earth can survive what was once classed as lethal radiation so life may have developed massively different elsewhere.

I have seen written that there are approx 400billion stars in the milkyway but every source i see quotes a different amount.i think its likely that a massive percentage of stars have/have had planets and what we currently class as habitable may change radically as we get more info

[baggywrinkle]

'if at 0.5% of that supported life & only 0.5% of that supported intelligent life that would mean there would be 37500 (ish) intelligent races out there.....  :shocked:'

Does this mean they are coming over here and taking our jobs....

;-)

[StuartJPP]

There are probably millions of different forms of life on earth, how many do we communicate with on a daily basis?

Oh and getting your dog to "sit" doesn't count...don't even mention cats...

[baggywrinkle]

/\ A dog says ' They provide me with food...they are Gods..'

A cat says 'I am a God, give me food..'

[GeoffE]

I agree with crashtestdummy.  The discovery of extremophiles on Earth and the pace at which new exoplanets (some of which may be Earthlike and within the Goldilocks zone) are being identified makes me confident that there are extraterrestrial beings in our galaxy who might consider human beings intelligent if they were willing to stretch the point.

My cats have commanded me to protest the sarky comments about cats.

Geoff

[Kropster]

Then there is the problem of intelligent beings evolving at the same time as us.

Earth is about 4.5 (?) billion years old and humans have been around for about 2 million, with civilisations about 10k max... technologically advanced for less then 200.

What are the chances of us having anyone to talk to at any one moment?

[tenbyfifty]

 humans have been around for about 2 million

modern humans are only  about 200,000+ years old - the 'homo' genus is over 2 million years old however.

if i was a betting man i would say the galaxy has a lot of planets harbouring some form of life but not a lot of technologically advanced life - even our technology makes us rock pool dwellers in galactic terms.

[Pig]

And the speed of light = 669,600,000 miles per hour   its all crazy numbers