New 'life in space' hope after billions of 'habitable planets' found in Milky Way

The Telegraph ^ | 03/26/12

[KevinDavis]

Billions of potentially habitable planets may exist within our galaxy, the Milky Way, raising new prospects that life could exist near Earth, a study has found.

Researchers discovered that at least 100 of the ''super-Earths'' may be on our galactic doorstep, at distances of less than 30 light years, or about 180 trillion miles, from the sun.

[grey_whiskers]

Yoo-hoo, Quix.

Over here!

(Thanks, KevinDavis)

Cheers!

[Blood of Tyrants]

Yea, too bad that Star Trek is fictional (that means not real) and we are lucky to get to Warp 0.000006.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks KevinDavis.

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[dsrtsage]

“I sometimes wonder how broad the definition of “habitable” is. Aside from gravity and atmosphere, how many of these planets can support the agriculture necessary to maintain human life?”

Agriculture? Get with the 21st century man. Everybody knows that food comes from stores.

[mowowie]

Did you see L5?
http://www.l5-series.com/

The trip to Barnards Star was a waste of time.

[Las Vegas Dave]

Of possible interest to the ping list..

[Vaquero]

FTL technology, artificial gravity, and ways to protect to the passengers from radiation

we already have the artificial gravity(well spin a ship to make a 1 G centrifuge or with enough power, travel at a continuous 1 G, both accelerating and breaking, to simulate same...)

.....and with enough shielding radiation is no problem, as long as you have the power to push a heavily armored ship.

FTL.....ah. that's the problem. can we harness an Alcubierre bubble? or drill out a worm hole big enough to travel through??? Actually traveling FTL seems to be impossible...

[cripplecreek]

Actually Project Daedelus dropped Barnards Star as a target and settled on Alpha C as a target of a 38 year trip.

[PIF]

I want to populate my planet with miners, loggers, and farmers.

—

What about commercial fishermen?

[cripplecreek]

I actually thought about fishermen and decided that it might be better to wait to bring them in with a second wave of settlers after a little food production is built up.

[PIF]

No spaecraft will make it that far. Cosmic radiation bursts will kill off the crew, or low/no gravity will

—

No current craft. But a steerable version of Dyson’s Orion would easily overcome both problems. Was on drawing boards in the late 60s. Killed by Nixonian politics.

[GOPJ]

And yet, there’s not a peep out of any of ‘em...

[GOPJ]

Dyson’s Orion?... a spacecraft intended to be directly propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft (Nuclear pulse propulsion). Early versions of this vehicle were proposed to have taken off from the ground with significant associated nuclear fallout; later versions were presented for use only in space. - Wekipedia.

The ship would have to be large enough to accommodate many generations - and food for hundred - if not thousands of years.... Propulsion isn't the only problem here...

[wastedyears]

Considering there are that many planets in this galaxy, coupled by the same number of galaxies, I find it completely impossible that we’re not alone in the universe. There are simply far too many planets for none of them to be occupied.

[wastedyears]

You do realize that someday we will develop FTL technology, artificial gravity, and ways to protect to the passengers from radiation..

But there are theories that say those can't be done. /snark

[PIF]

Actually, the interstellar version was planned at 40 million tons (256 super tankers) with crew in the thousands. The smalller solar system versions were planned at 10 thousand tons with crew of 150.

Propulsion was never the problem - steering was.

As for size - the larger the ship, the better it worked,

Speed - time to Mars = 3 days.

All versions were planned to lift above the atmosphere before 1st nukes detonated. These were small bombs - the art of designing now lost in the USA.

Motto - Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970.

Small version cost - same or less than Apollo.

Use wikipedia at your own risk.

[wastedyears]

They’re only theories.

[PIF]

Fishermen produce food - quicker than farmers who have to wait months for crop to come in. Fishermen need only supple materials to make nets or weirs - time to food is days or less.

Bring the farmers in the second wave. Because we aren’t going to have the time at first to muck about with the clearing acreage needed for crops.

[Vaquero]

They’re only theories

the FTL stuff is only theories....that is a given.

not the artificial gravity simulation

nor the shielding..

[hopespringseternal]

If there are ten billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars, then there might be one-in-a-million that have life on them. Of those ten thousand, it would be almost a certainty that life on perhaps one hundred of those (and maybe as many as five thousand) would be MORE ADVANCED than we are.

How did the life get there? No one can explain scientifically how life got here.

If you buy random combination of chemicals, the odds of even the basic chemistry happening is something like 1 in 10⁴⁰. I think Carl Sagan said that for even the most basic life you are talking about 1 in 10 ^{2,000,000,000}. If we are a random accident, it is on the cosmic scale, never to be repeated.

And the Drake equation could be written as N= assumption1*assumption2*assumption3*assumption...*assumption7. And we only have decent guesses at the first three assumptions.