Up to 60 BILLION Planets in Our Galaxy May Be Habitable!

And that's actually the low estimate!

Holy shit.

Even if only 1 in a 1000 of those was Earth-like enough to sustain human life, there'd be 60 million Earths in the galaxy. And that's only for star systems with a red dwarf star.

In a million years, our descendents will populate the entire galaxy.

Unless we're the latecomers and someone else has gotten there first.

Well, except that our manned space program has actually almost completely reversed itself and now we're basically using the technology that put the first man in orbit.

Our descendants will populate none of them as long as there is a continuing train of blind fools like Obama in charge. And this procession of idiots may well continue for centuries to come. Western society is in danger of descending into Idiocracy.

Russia and China may be the only hope for mankind now.

Techforge, guys. Let's leave the political baiting out.

But what if use robots for political baiting? Gotcha!

Some percentage of these Class M worlds would actually be moons, either of large(r) terrestrial planets, or gas giants.

So, I decided to plug this data into the Drake Equation

The first three terms I fudged just to get the 60 billion habitable zone planets into the mix...

R = 60000000000
Fp = 1
Ne = 1

These terms combined yield 60 billion planets with liquid water.

Then I plugged in the other factors...

Fl = 0.0001 (1 in 10,000 habitable planets develops life)
Fi = 0.0001 (1 in 10,000 of those develops intelligent life)
Fc = 0.0001 (1 in 10,000 of those develops life that can communicate)
L = 1000 years (average lifespace of technological civilization, 1000 years is a VERY pessimistic number)

And I get a result of 60(!!!) technological civilizations in our galaxy right now.

Enrico Fermi disagree's...

True.

But there could still be quite a few technological civilizations out there and we just aren't YET able to detect them. Even 60 civilizations would put us all, on average, hundreds or even thousands of light years apart. Any signal we did receive would likely be very, very weak.

If technological civilizations only last a short time on average, then it may be that none of them ever develop interstellar travel. Without interstellar travel, you don't need interstellar communications. Without interstellar communications, the only radio/optical/subspace() emissions your civilization gives off are incidental, weak, and unfocused.

I dunno, maybe 1-in-a-billion odds of a habitable planet sprouting technological life is too optimistic. Maybe it's more like 1-in-a-trillion or 1-in-a-quadrillion, where you'll find a civilization once in every thousand galaxies. But the higher those odds get, the more they make life on Earth seem "special" somehow, and I have a hard time accepting that's the case.

Well, Fi is based on their already being suitable conditions for it to arise. If there are suitable conditions, how likely is it?

I'm guessing 1-in-10000. But there's nothing that says it can't be 1-in-1000000000.

Or 1-in-10000000000000000000000000etc. But no matter what, it's still 1-in-infinity. But not really - it's infinity-in-infinity, since new planets are forming every day in all directions, and will continue for billions of years at least. It obviously happened at least once. It would be arrogant to think that we are the only game in town.

Oh yes, I agree with that. I don't think intelligent life is common by any means. Sucks nobody can figure out a way to traverse these great distances....nobody on our planet that is.

The experiments being done at NASA now give one a faint sliver of hope. I would've given the probability of something like "warp drive" becoming real--at ANY point in the future--as 1%. But that someone with more knowledge of physics than me thinks there's enough to pursue it, makes me slightly more optimistic: 5%.

We're pretty certain space can expand at rates greater than the speed of light; the universe has done this before and will do so again. The question is: can we duplicate the process in a highly localized way?

Alcubierre's solutions to general relativity say this should be physically possible. What we now need to determine is whether it's practical or not.

Similar to the Kepler scope discovery.

I'm confident we'll fuck everything up on Earth long before we get anything fast enough to travel to other star systems.

New estimate puts the number at a "mere" 25 billion." I'm not really sure what differentiates the two different conclusions by the two groups, but its still a boatload of planets.

Whose to say all these habitable planets won't have germs that will kill us when we get there.

Who's

I am. Germs evolved on this planet alongside us and some of them are adapted to attack our immune systems. Alien germs could not possibly have that ability.

It really depends upon the ways in which life can evolve. It may be that life requires DNA that works basically the same as it does here on Earth (you'd end up with different life forms, of course), in order to exist. If that's the case, then its possible that there would be diseases which we're vulnerable to on other planets, or that they could mutate (after some point in time) to be able to infect us. Now, if it turns out that its possible for life to work using molecules like TNA, then its unlikely the stuff will be able to infect us ever. Its probably something we won't be certain of until we find life somewhere else.

Always a bridesmaid.....

DNA, TNA, none of it applies to me, because.....
I'm TNT - I'm dynamite! TNT - and I'll win the fight.

I think that the mechanisms involved would match so closely is vanishingly unlikely.

Well, its probably more likely than the laws of chemistry and physics varying throughout the universe.