
Galaxy has 'billions of Earths' - gibsonf1
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7891132.stm
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swombat
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?

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

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
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.

~~~
gravitycop
_in this case the inaccuracy is in the referenced article._

The article title is not inaccurate.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
> _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.

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andr
This has been "known" since the 60s. The Drake equation estimates the number
of habitable planets in the universe.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation>

~~~
omarchowdhury
The Drake equation is just a guess based on other guesses.

~~~
andr
True, but a more educated guess than "billions".

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matt1
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?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Creationism -- the belief that some deity created all we see -- wouldn't have
a problem with life on other planets. We see them. What kind of creation would
only involve certain planets or creatures?

ID -- the belief that our perceptions can either be of completely natural
artifacts or artifacts created as a result of an external intelligent agent --
also not implicated. Interestingly enough, there may be a counter-movement
here: if intelligent life were discovered, arguments could then begin to be
made that some sort of intelligent agent had some play in our
cultural/geological history. That would be new.

This religion-vs-alien life question has been going around since the 1950s, at
least. What a lot of people forget is that most major organized religions have
been adapting to situations like this since their beginnings. Christianity,
for instance, thought of the "world" as basically Eurasia for hundreds of
years. People in Africa and the Americas were not considered fully "human"
until fairly recently. That meant, for all intents and purposes, that places
like the New World were 1) far away and almost impossible to reach, and 2) not
part of the normal world, and 3) inhabited by creatures that were somewhat
intelligent but not completely human.

Religions, especially successful ones, adapt. I would be extremely surprised
to see any impact at all. The more you study it, the more of a non-issue it
is.

~~~
kaptainlange
My early childhood religion always taught me that man was special, so I think
there would be an impact if we were to find intelligent life elsewhere. In
fact, I feel like that idea that man is so special is used as an argument
against evolution. They use the 'disgust' of hearing that humans could be
related to modern day apes, and thus is not so special.

As you said, religion would have to adapt, but that is an impact. I'm more
curious what path they would take. As you said, they could deny them full
privileges of being sentient...that is they are less than human. Or they could
accept them as being on the same level, but that would require a small
alteration to their beliefs.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Worst-case for religion, I guess, would be the discovery of obviously super-
intelligent beings who claim that belief in God is an evolutionary defect.

Seems to me that Judaism is a major world religion that applies for Jewish
people, although there are many kinds of people in the world.

Christianity is a religion of mankind, hence the need to dehumanize native
peoples. The logical progression would be that Christianity would simply
follow the lead of Judaism, i.e., Christianity is just for men.

Of course, that's a big-picture, long-range guess. One of the reasons
Christianity is so resilient is that there are so many versions. What would
happen would be a thousand different possible ways forward. Most wouldn't last
200 years. A few would succeed.

The "man is special" disgust with coming from monkeys thing is just a limited
reaction to Darwinism. It's already dying off. Within another 300-500 years
it'll be completely gone. There were similar reactions against Copernicus.

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tigerthink
I doubt any have intelligent life though...

[http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/04/aliens-dont-
exist....](http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/04/aliens-dont-exist.html)

Apologies for Richard Kulisz's more asinine qualities, but I've never seen a
convincing refutation of the argument he presents there.

~~~
jodrellblank
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?

~~~
gravitycop
Many of your concerns were addressed by the author in the comments section:
[http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/04/aliens-dont-
exist....](http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/04/aliens-dont-
exist.html#c1380930991729913672)

 _He completely ignores that humans actually took many tens of millions of
years to evolve from scratch not from existing life forms._

Kulisz responded:

 _The point is that it didn't have to. Nothing in the universe prevented a
technological civilization from arising 8 billion years ago. And certainly not
65 million years ago back when the dinosaurs ruled._

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trekker7
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.

~~~
Silentio
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?

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

~~~
gibsonf1
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. :)

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

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vlisivka
Earth is complex product. Tides, created by the Moon, are important to mix
water and to clean coasts. Metal core of the Earth is producing magnetic
shield. All that is created due to collision of Earth with large object, which
is comparable to Earth, and capturing it.

It is unlikely, that our Galaxy will contain too many systems created by two
objects with comparable mass, because such systems are unstable. We can
calculate this number by comparing number of star systems with two comparable
stars in the system to number of regular stars.

