
Chance of finding young Earth-like planets higher than previously thought - lelf
https://phys.org/news/2020-06-chance-young-earth-like-planets-higher.html
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hliyan
Outputs 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...

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ponker
I’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.

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nobrains
Related: 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.

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bitcharmer
Given 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.

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tsherr
Actually, 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.

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ubertoop
Isn'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.

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kaesar14
Anyone know of a language that has vocabulary that distinguishes these two
meanings of rarity?

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gibolt
Feels similar to the distinction between accurate and precise

