RE: If Aliens Exist, Where Are They?
July 14, 2017 at 9:19 am
(This post was last modified: July 14, 2017 at 9:25 am by Anomalocaris.)
(July 14, 2017 at 8:59 am)vorlon13 Wrote: Amazing how many more ways a planet can "go wrong" regarding the development of life. Yeah, were finding many more planets, but it's bewildering how many more ways they can turn out unpleasant than may have been appreciated in the early 80s when Sagan (and others) were discussing odds and probabilities of all this.
When Sagan was discussing odds and probability of life, he probably seriously overestimate how typical our solat system is amongst all planetary systems. But be probably also seriously underestimated how common planetary systems were amongst all stars. So it may not all that far off in the end.
At the last count, we've found around 4,000 exoplanets. If on average only 1 in 100,000 planets in the milky way is hospitable to our mode of life, meaning the chances of us having found such a planet amongst the 4,000 we discovered so far is very slim indeed, there would still be on the order 40,000,000 planets hospitable to,our mode of life in the Milky Way.
At the same time, we also found life fundamentally related to us don't need to be in the Goldilocks zone to survive, nor maybe even to arise. This implies planets like ours may be few and far in between, but life may not be.
