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Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

news.bbc.co.uk

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Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#21

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

andr wrote: post #4
swombat wrote: post #2

Slightly misleading headline from BBC there... it should really be "Galaxy may have 'billions of Earths'". There's no proof of it, it's just an estimate/guess. It may well be true, but there's no proof yet. Billions of earth-like planets. Makes you want to live forever to get to explore all that stuff, doesn't it?

I suggest adopting RFC 2119 or something similar to avoid misleading titles on HN.

It would be great, but it's unenforceable, and newbies wouldn't know about it. Besides, in this case the inaccuracy is in the referenced article.

We could probably do something, but it would require a lot of hacking, and wouldn't necessarily be worth it. Perhaps it's currently good enough.

Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#22

Post by gravitycop »

swombat wrote: post #2

Slightly misleading headline from BBC there... it should really be "Galaxy may have 'billions of Earths'". There's no proof of it, it's just an estimate/guess. It may well be true, but there's no proof yet. Billions of earth-like planets. Makes you want to live forever to get to explore all that stuff, doesn't it?

There's no proof of it

Proof is here: http://images.google.com/images?q=bible

Science is somewhere else: http://www.google.com/search?q=science+proof

Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#23

Post by gravitycop »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #21
andr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest adopting RFC 2119 or something similar to avoid misleading titles on HN.

It would be great, but it's unenforceable, and newbies wouldn't know about it. Besides, in this case the inaccuracy is in the referenced article. We could probably do something, but it would require a lot of hacking, and wouldn't necessarily be worth it. Perhaps it's currently good enough.

in this case the inaccuracy is in the referenced article.

The article title is not inaccurate.

Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#24

Post by ensignavenger »

matt1 wrote: post #5

Not to derail the conversation, but, question: What impact would the undeniable discovery of alien life have on organized religion? Would theists abandon their beliefs en masse or would they find a way of explaining the new discoveries with their existing doctrine?

While it is not a "core doctrine", my religion (LDS.org) teaches that God has populated other planets- a discovery of life on other planets would only affirm our faith.

Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#25

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

gravitycop wrote: post #23
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great, but it's unenforceable, and newbies wouldn't know about it. Besides, in this case the inaccuracy is in the referenced article. We could probably do something, but it would require a lot of hacking, and wouldn't necessarily be worth it. Perhaps it's currently good enough.

in this case the inaccuracy is in the referenced article. The article title is not inaccurate.

> The article title is not inaccurate.

So, the article itself says:

There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, ...

The title says:

Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

In the title we don't have any of the words "could", "might", "may", "possibly", or any other words indicating the uncertainty. To me, that means the title is inaccurate.

Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#26

Post by ReverendBayes »

gibsonf1 wrote: post #13
ReverendBayes wrote: post #6

How many of those are getting warmer, gibsonf1? :), couldn't resist.

Most likely only those planets exposed to our sun would have had any warming similar to us (or cooling as is happening now), but I would need some help mounting an expedition to find out for sure. :)

I'm with you. Just warm up the starcraft!

Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#27

Post by jodrellblank »

tigerthink wrote: post #18

I doubt any have intelligent life though... http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/04/aliens-dont-exist.... Apologies for Richard Kulisz's more asinine qualities, but I've never seen a convincing refutation of the argument he presents there.

He claims to start with one assumption, but actually starts with many. For instance he implies "any species which could colonize the galaxy, will". I don't accept that all possible intelligence would try to take over the galaxy.

He also says that it's not in an alien's interest to leave one planet (Earth) just in case we develop - but he doesn't consider that they might have colonized the galaxy but left Earth precisely because they did find life on it. Even the slightly unimaginative at times Star Trek had the idea of humans only colonizing 'empty' areas and leaving anything with existing life on it alone.

Also, he states that colonizing the galaxy takes ~110,000 years because humans took 10,000 years to evolve + 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. He completely ignores that humans actually took many tens of millions of years to evolve from scratch not from existing life forms.

Also, he assumes zero chance of catastrophic accident leading to exctinction as an explanation for why aliens might not exist. Maybe they did exist but wiped themselves out.

Also, he assumes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy, but that means traveling pretty much at the speed of light, which is currently not possible/forseeably practical. Yet he doesn't consider how aliens would stay as a coherent civilization when a light speed ping response starts taking years, let alone tens of thousands of years.

Also, he doesn't consider any kinds of future technology, IT, AI, singularity or similar. Maybe any culture which gets a thousand years past where we are now does not become a galactic conquerer, but a Matrix-style virtual reality.

Lastly, what if aliens decided the best way to colonize the galaxy was to spray terraforming machines and life seeds, and we are the 'alien' intelligence colonies? Who says alien ideas of 'colonize' have to be like human Earth colonies of the last thousand years?

Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#28

Post by gravitycop »

tigerthink wrote: post #18

I doubt any have intelligent life though... http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/04/aliens-dont-exist.... Apologies for Richard Kulisz's more asinine qualities, but I've never seen a convincing refutation of the argument he presents there.

I've never seen a convincing refutation of the argument [Richard Kulisz] presents there.

He seems to simply be restating a typical resolution of the Fermi paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Explaining_the_pa...

Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#29

Post by Silentio »

trekker7 wrote: post #17

Do they believe that only Earth-like planets can support life? Or is it that Earth-like planets are one type of planet that supports life, with many other possibilities? I would think the first assertion to be short-sighted.

I agree with you. We know that our planet and the qualities that it possesses are appropriate for sustaining life. Who's to say a form of life couldn't arise on a planet incapable of sustaining life as we know it. Would that life, then, view our planet as incapable of sustaining life? If it did bump into us, would an intelligence arising on a planet "incapable" of supporting life even see us as life forms?

Re: Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

#30

Post by JulianMorrison »

swombat wrote: post #2

Slightly misleading headline from BBC there... it should really be "Galaxy may have 'billions of Earths'". There's no proof of it, it's just an estimate/guess. It may well be true, but there's no proof yet. Billions of earth-like planets. Makes you want to live forever to get to explore all that stuff, doesn't it?

I think a more interesting way of phrasing it would be "the rare earth hypothesis, as a candidate solution to the Fermi paradox, appears to be false". Which ought to worry anyone who wonders what else is keeping intelligent life down.
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