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Chance of finding young Earth-like planets higher than previously thought
- bitcharmer 6y agoGiven the vastness of cosmos and the richness of star systems it's just ludicrous to assume earth-like planets are somehow special and rare. At these scales nothing is rare.
- tsherr 6y agoActually, they are possibly rare. Rareness is a percentage, so as long as only 1% or less of planets are earth like, that's rare, even if there are millions of them.
- ubertoop 6y agoIsn't that such an interesting thing to think about. They're "rare" as a percentage, but because of their abundance, they're not "rare" at all.
- kaesar14 6y agoAnyone know of a language that has vocabulary that distinguishes these two meanings of rarity?
- gibolt 6y agoFeels similar to the distinction between accurate and precise
- runawaybottle 6y agoCountably and uncountably rare?
- nondave 6y agoI think English could work here with terms like "sparse" vs "low in number".
- keenmaster 6y agoThat seems like a great way to mitigate the availability bias.
- pavlov 6y agoMaybe “uncommon” vs “scarce”?
- darepublic 6y agoTheir rarity might mean that its impossible to travel to one, despite positing millions in existence
- nine_k 6y agoNo, in my book, these are different things. Rare: if we take a sample of N random planets, only n << N of them will be Earth-like. E.g. 0.1% is "rare". Scarce / few: if we take all the planets in the Universe, only a small absolute number of them will be Earth-like. E.g. 100 Earth-like planets is "scarce" or "few". That is, Earth-like planets can be not scarce at all, but still rare. Much like while all water in Earth oceans contains 20 megatons of dissolved gold, molecules of gold are rare among molecules of water, which makes extraction of them impractical.
- jacobush 6y agoThere is also the angle, rare as in practically relevant to us. Too low percentage, a human will never come into contact with a not even single photon originating in these worlds.
- riskneutral 6y agoThat’s not true. A large universe does not mean “nothing is rare.” An infinite universe would have an infinity of “rare” phenomena.
- qroshan 6y agoIf vastness is One Quadrillion and earth-like planets are one in Quadrillion, it is still rare. E.g: Given All things equal till the point of your parents birth, the probability of you existing is still astronomical -- 1 x 10^25 or something like that and that is just a 30 year event.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- imtringued 6y agoThe milky way is pretty small in comparison to the rest of the cosmos.
- nine_k 6y agoAt this scale, and with the speed of light being so ludicrously low, you can't benefit from that much. If there are billions of Earth-like worlds, but distances between most of them are all in millions of light years range, we are still effectively alone in the region of the Universe which we can reach in the duration of existence of our species. Any communication even to the closest Earth-like planet, even if it builds a civilization like ours and we have something to talk about, becomes impossible, too; only one-way broadcasting could reach us (or them). So no, Earth-like planets abundance has a lot of implications for our species (or our close descendant species) to be able to ever settle in another star system.
- nobrains 6y agoRelated: I have always considered that the chance of finding life (or intelligent life) is unknown, because unless we don't find a second data point (first being us) it is not possible to estimate how common or rare it is. We can talk all we want about filters and stages to intelligent life, but it doesn't really mean anything until a 2nd case is observed.
- hliyan 6y agoOutputs of the Drake Equation are looking better and better, but I'm starting to worry that detecting intelligent life is going to be much harder that we previously thought. Even if a million radio-capable civilizations arose within the Milky Way, what are the chances of two such civilizations within a distance of say 100 light years having that capability at the same time? Even then, the chances of contact seem slim. The other day, I was doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see what's needed for a near-Earth colony (say at about 5 light years) to send data back to Earth. Even with the tightest possible beam, even after pumping a massive amount of power into the transmitter, even after using square-kilometers worth of receivers, very little signal seemed to get through. I'm starting to feel like there might be a lot of needles out there in a cosmic haystack that we'll never be able to sort out in our civilization's lifetime...
- ponker 6y agoI’m pessimistic on the Drake equation because the single data point we have, ourselves, makes it look like after a civilization reaches radio capability it might quickly turn to over-harvesting of resources and in a few thousand years eliminate its advanced civilizations and return to a primitive state.
- c3534l 6y agoIntelligent life seems rare on Earth. We all seem to like it a lot, but we're the only ones in the entire history of Earth, we've not been around for very long, and we seem to be slowly sabotaging our existence. How far could someone with our technology actually pick up the signals we sent out? How many planets are realistically in that range? Then again, our existence on Earth is so brief and recent, for how long have we been looking? Less than a hundred years. That's barely anything when you talk about planets and galaxies.