Wowa! Dat's alotta planets!
It could easily be that most of the habitable planets in the universe are in the neighborhood of dwarf stars and in fact inside the plasma sheath/heliosphere of such stars and, thus, in fact totally undetectable from the outside. Habitable zone would be a meaningless concept for such a situation.
And none of it is my fault.
I suspect either there are no or too few planets with intelligent life to have made contact with us, or they have deemed humans as too stupid and worthless to make contact with.
If there was even ONE other planet with intelligent life, one would have expected that civilization to have eventually expanded outwards to other systems...
That number is nothing. Compare it to the $17 trillion debt that the U.S. has!
Wowa! Dat's alotta planets!
Mars had plenty of water yet it is a sterile wasteland.
I predict many with life
I further predict few or none with life over the single cell stage.
When I get to heaven .... I’ll ask God
There are many many other galaxies, and according to some, there are other “universes” of galaxies—different space-times that are inaccessible from the one we live in. Some say there are a infinite number of such space-times. That is a lot of planets in deed.
Or not.
For the ones outside the Goldilocks zone women, children, and minorities are hurt the most.
I bet it is more like 103.5 billion.
That's just one of around 50 very finely tuned variables necessary to make a planet "habitable" like earth. The probabililtiy of even 10 of these variables being present on any given planet is astronomical.
There may be a Goldilocks zone on a vastly greater scale than within a stellar system. A Galactic Goldilocks zone would be posited as residing on the surfaces of galactic arms, clear of choking with dust and gas inimical to the development of life. If this is valid, it would vastly reduce the incidence of, within a larger ring, the development of life, within a narrower ring, the development of intelligent life. This distinction is frequently disregarded in excited announcements of statistical evidence of the presence of possibly life-bearing planets. So far SETI with its myriads of enthusiastic volunteers has not been able to announce any significant, reproducible findings. If it had, we’d be the first to know, through these rather optimistic news items. We are assured by the daily catechism of sci-fi shows that this is a highly likely outcome, and that the residents of other civilizations must surely have an enlightened, secular, hook-up culture. This despite the fact that our own civilization shows signs of decay, as it were, as described by Bubba’s favorite Georgetown Professor, Carroll Quigly of “Tragedy & Hope” and “The Evolution of Civilizations”, demonstrating such civilizational end-stage signs as routine, regularized practice of sexual perversions. Any alien civilization which practices murder of its own children would be unlikely to have survived long enough for SETI to detect it.
The guesstimate is seriously questionable; the 18th century Titius-Bode Law doesn't even work completely in our solar system with our size of a sun. Furthermore there are many, many other factors necessary for life to be able to exist on a planet.
The article sounds like someone's research grant is up for renewal.
The earth is the center of the universe.
Of course, if there's intelligent life on those planet, maybe they don't want Liberals on their planet...
In one little galaxy out of hundreds of trillion trillions...
And we cannot even approach half the speed of light:
A paper published in Natural Science brings some boring common sense to the speed-of-light-travel table. In order to travel huge distances in next to no time, people need to travel close to the speed of light. In so doing, travelers cover extremely large distances very quickly and, thanks to the quirks of relativity, would feel like it took mere minutes because of an effect known as time dilation, which squashes perceived time.
Trouble is, traveling close to the speed of light brings about other effects, too. In Natural Science, Edelstein and Edelstein point out that hydrogen in any craft cable of traveling at the speed of light would also prevent it from traveling at the speed of light. They explain:
Unfortunately, as spaceship velocities approach the speed of light, interstellar hydrogen H, although only present at a density of approximately 1.8 atoms/cm3, turns into intense radiation that would quickly kill passengers and destroy electronic instrumentation. In addition, the energy loss of ionizing radiation passing through the ship's hull represents an increasing heat load that necessitates large expenditures of energy to cool the ship.
In other words, travel close to the speed of light and you'll be bombarded with so much radiation that you kick the bucket. The knock-on effect is that even if it's possible to create a craft capable of traveling close the speed of light, it wouldn't be able to transport people.
Instead, there's a natural speed limit imposed by safe levels of radiation due to hydrogen, which means humans couldn't travel faster than half the speed of light unless they were willing to die almost immediately. - http://gizmodo.com/5957697/super-fast-space-travel-would-kill-you-in-minutes
As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises precipitously. If an object tries to travel 186,000 miles per second, its mass becomes infinite, and so does the energy required to move it. For this reason, no normal object can travel as fast or faster than the speed of light. - http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/what-if/what-if-faster-than-speed-of-light.htm