Planets that can potentially support life... - Page 33

On February 27 2013 07:32 Hitch-22 wrote:
There are an estimated 10 trillion planets just in our galaxy alone...

On March 04 2013 22:43 Tadatomo wrote:
Those Drake derived equations say nothing about life or biology (or sociology). All they say is about how many stars there are and more recently about how many planets there are. Just by the fact that it has a total blank in it for everything related to biology or life must mean it cannot help you to gain any insights in biology or life.

As for the universe being big enough for everything extremely rare to happen at least twice. Say you have a universe where life emerges once. Then say one doubles the size. Now life emerges twice. But who is to say that by doubling the size of that universe you don't get some phenomenon that happened less than once in the normal size universe but now once and just once in the double size universe?

Even in a universe that is extremely big, very unlikely phenomenons are going to happen only a very few times. Maybe the universe is filled with many different kinds of extremely rare phenomenons and life is just one of those.
Just the fact that the universe is big means very little.

Also, what is much more relevant is the likelihood of life in our galaxy. Life on the other side of the visible universe for all practical purposes changes nothing. Some of those galaxies in some sense are transitioning outside of our reality anyway(since transfer of information between us and them is now impossible).

I am happy to accept that life is something relatively common when given the right conditions. But I don't see any reason why I have to abandon the idea of life being an extreme unlikelihood. I see no argument for it.
And who is to say that were won't find 2000 planets with liquid water containing blue/green/brown/red goo but nothing else? Earth was like that for 1.2 billion years. Life didn't have a need, or ran into an impossibility, to evolve further. Then something odd and unexplained happened.

Gaymon, why should we care about anything you say when you have nothing to contribute yourself? Your posts are now merely waste of space, worse than those uninformed posts.
Your argument that you eiter only complain or address every singe point seems obviously false yet you asses it as if it were a truism to all of us.

On March 04 2013 18:34 Simberto wrote:


This is blatantly false.

The faster you go, the more does it matter when something gets in your way. If you look at the collision between two objects, the force of the impact is based on relative velocity. So if you are faster, stuff hits you harder. Which also makes it harder to deflect away from you without taking damage.

But people also underestimate just how empty space really is. If you look at SciFi movies or games, space is full of stuff. It is not. In fact, basically the most crowded area of space by some orders of magnitude at the moment is in earth orbit, because of all the shit we shoot up there and just leave lying around when it breaks.

Also, since our current probes and satellites appear to be able to deal with the problem at the speeds they are travelling at, i am confident that we will find ways to deal with it in case we ever reach speeds where the density of objects in space becomes a real problem

On March 04 2013 22:37 sc4k wrote:


sorry but where did you get this bizarrely high figure? It's estimated there are between 200-400 billion stars in the milky way. Even if it were 400 billion, each star would need to have over 20 planets in orbit :/.

On March 04 2013 22:37 sc4k wrote:


sorry but where did you get this bizarrely high figure? It's estimated there are between 200-400 billion stars in the milky way. Even if it were 400 billion, each star would need to have over 20 planets in orbit :/.

On March 05 2013 01:49 Hitch-22 wrote:


My apologies, as I said I could be false I just made the assumption (like, for instance, a bull running through a wall) force > small force, or rather small rocks just get taken out.

On March 05 2013 02:02 SheaR619 wrote:


Simberto was correct. Your assumption is wrong because you were thinking of wall which by using a bigger force, they will shatter but that doesnt mean the object that you hit it with will take less force. A good real life example is bullet traveling through water or meteor traveling through the atmosphere. The more force you exert in water, the more it resist your movement and slows you down.

On March 05 2013 02:02 SheaR619 wrote:


Simberto was correct. Your assumption is wrong because you were thinking of wall which by using a bigger force, they will shatter but that doesnt mean the object that you hit it with will take less force. A good real life example is bullet traveling through water or meteor traveling through the atmosphere. The more force you exert in water, the more it resist your movement and slows you down.

On March 04 2013 18:58 arb wrote:
Something ive always wondered about colonizing other planets, wouldnt you need a pretty big amount of people to do it? Cause chances are theres gonna be Disease we have NO immunity to, that would prolly wipe out alot of people pretty quickly wouldn't there?

A team of astronomers has combined new observations of Gliese 667C with existing data from HARPS at ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope in Chile, to reveal a system with at least six planets. A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths lying in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist, making them possible candidates for the presence of life. This is the first system found with a fully packed habitable zone.

Gliese 667C is a very well-studied star. Just over one third of the mass of the Sun, it is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667 (also referred to as GJ 667), 22 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). This is quite close to us — within the Sun’s neighbourhood — and much closer than the star systems investigated using telescopes such as the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope.

Previous studies of Gliese 667C had found that the star hosts three planets (eso0939, eso1214) with one of them in the habitable zone. Now, a team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the University of Göttingen, Germany and Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, has reexamined the system. They have added new HARPS observations, along with data from ESO's Very Large Telescope, the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Magellan Telescopes, to the already existing picture [1]. The team has found evidence for up to seven planets around the star [2].

These planets orbit the third fainter star of a triple star system. Viewed from one of these newly found planets the two other suns would look like a pair of very bright stars visible in the daytime and at night they would provide as much illumination as the full Moon. The new planets completely fill up the habitable zone of Gliese 667C, as there are no more stable orbits in which a planet could exist at the right distance to it.

“We knew that the star had three planets from previous studies, so we wanted to see whether there were any more,” says Tuomi. “By adding some new observations and revisiting existing data we were able to confirm these three and confidently reveal several more. Finding three low-mass planets in the star’s habitable zone is very exciting!”

Three of these planets are confirmed to be super-Earths — planets more massive than Earth, but less massive than planets like Uranus or Neptune — that are within their star’s habitable zone, a thin shell around a star in which water may be present in liquid form if conditions are right. This is the first time that three such planets have been spotted orbiting in this zone in the same system.

WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON (AP) — Space is vast, but it may not be so lonely after all: A study finds the Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets that are about the size of Earth, orbit stars just like our sun, and exist in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot and not too cold for life.

Astronomers using NASA data have calculated for the first time that in our galaxy alone, there are at least 8.8 billion stars with Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone.

On March 04 2013 22:37 sc4k wrote:


sorry but where did you get this bizarrely high figure? It's estimated there are between 200-400 billion stars in the milky way. Even if it were 400 billion, each star would need to have over 20 planets in orbit :/.

On November 05 2013 20:07 ThePhan2m wrote:
This is all just fantasy and dreaming. We can all hope for life out there, even if there is there is no where near any technology that can get us there for the next imaginable future. There are enough stuff to do on this planet! Lets focus on fixing it rather than spend time, money and energy on something that is out of reach. My two cents

On November 05 2013 20:21 Lombard wrote:


That bolded part is what we're spending on it right now. With that attitude we'll all still be sitting in our gravity well when the next killer asteroid enters the earths atmosphere, which could happen at any time.