Tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in our galaxy

Post by samoht » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 2:29 AM UTC

re: my previous post - I realize that 1/5 is for "potentially habitable" ... but I was thinking too far ahead. What I was trying to get at is what factor would we then need to multiply it (ie., this 1/5th) with to make intelligent life a mathematical/chemical/biological certainty - as we know it here on earth, for example.

Was what happened on earth - us - a unique fluke - would intelligent life still come about if reran the whole thing 1000 times, even here on earth, where it was almost an after-thought?

Are there other pathways - sliding doors - that would still have brought about intelligent life here on earth?

What if we didn't have a magnetic field or if there was no Ozone? - that was another thing I left out before.

We may be a fluke - the end result of a set of rare and unrepeatable circumstances?

Post by w_t_payne » Sun, Nov 10, 2013, 9:18 PM UTC

repnescasb wrote: post #63

patmcc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes think the answer is both boring and sad: everybody is just really, really, unimaginably, far away. Even if we manage to continue for another 10,000 years without causing our own extinction, will we come up with anything capable of moving people even 10% of the speed of light? If we do, will we bother to go to the stars?

That. Why did I have to scroll down so far to find exactly what I was thinking all the time? I mean, I absolutely love Asimov and Mass Effect but they are entertainment stuff. The distances we are talking about here seem to be completely beyond everyone's mental reach. Even if we could upload ourselves into spacepods like Kurzweil suggests (or for that matter could just UDP our souls out into space) we would not brea…

I think we just have to modify our brains to think a little bit longer term than we do right now.

Re: Tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in our galaxy

Re: Tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in our galaxy