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What we do know know is that the Kepler mission has accomplished the following: Candidate exoplanets: 4,034 Confirmed exoplanets: 2,335 Confirmed exoplanets le

What we do know know is that the Kepler mission has accomplished the following: Candidate exoplanets: 4,034 Confirmed exoplanets: 2,335 Confirmed exoplanets less than twice Earth-size in the habitable zone: 30 K2 mission: Candidate exoplanets: 520 Confirmed exoplanets: 148 https://www.nasa.gov/kepler/discoveries https://www.nasa.gov/kepler/discoveries These are anemic numbers; even those in the "habitable zone are either tidal locked, their solar year are weeks or days long and we don't really know what their surface is. The James Webb Telescope will help a lot but if you look at all the species and forms of life that lived on this planet in last 4-billion years (billions and trillions) only one has evolved intelligence to the degree that it can contemplate the universe and investigate it. I think it is plausible that we could be it...or at best so far and so few in between. Link to explanet archive: https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/TblView/nph-tblView?app=ExoTbls&config=planets https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/TblView/np...

InclinedPlane 9y ago
Only about one in a hundred planetary systems would be properly aligned to be detected by Kepler. The purpose of Kepler is to gather statistics on the frequency of occurrence of different kinds of planets. 2700 confirmed planets out of 145k monitored stars indicates that planets are very common, around most stars, since there are an estimated 270,000 planets of similar type in that sample that just have inconveniently aligned orbits. Similarly, 30 confirmed near-Earth mass planets translates to 3000 per 145k stars (nearly 2%!), and thus literally billions in our galaxy alone.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  In our own solar system most of the liquid water is outside the frost line; most of the "possibly habitable places" are not terrestrial such as several moons of Jupiter, Saturn and beyond as well as possibly Kuiper Belt Objects. If life that evolved in that sort of environment managed to work its way up to the surface it could keep its lifestyle living on Kuiper Belt Objects and probably other lumps of rock and ice between the stars and possibly not have that much interest in anything that happens on our side of the frost line.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Only about one in a hundred planetary systems would be properly aligned to be detected by Kepler. The purpose of Kepler is to gather statistics on the frequency of occurrence of different kinds of planets. 2700 confirmed planets out of 145k monitored stars indicates that planets are very common, around most stars, since there are an estimated 270,000 planets of similar type in that sample that just have inconveniently aligned orbits. Similarly, 30 confirmed near-Earth mass planets translates to 3000 per 145k stars (nearly 2%!), and thus literally billions in our galaxy alone.

PaulHoule 9y ago
In our own solar system most of the liquid water is outside the frost line; most of the "possibly habitable places" are not terrestrial such as several moons of Jupiter, Saturn and beyond as well as possibly Kuiper Belt Objects. If life that evolved in that sort of environment managed to work its way up to the surface it could keep its lifestyle living on Kuiper Belt Objects and probably other lumps of rock and ice between the stars and possibly not have that much interest in anything that happens on our side of the frost line.