NASA: There are 17 BEEELLION Earth-sized worlds in Milky Way
Scientists scrubbing up data about starlight from NASA's Kepler telescope have used it to estimate that there are 17 billion other Earths in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Artist's impression of the the variety of planets being detected by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, Credit: C. Pulliam & D. Aguilar (CfA) Artist's impression of the …
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Re: 17 billion Earth-like planets!?!
up vote for the futurama quote
Must be time to renew budgets...
Every now and then NASA blows a socket in the effort to get funding and funding support. "look, we found an rock from Mars" - really, then explain the process of how it escaped Mars gravity, assumed a perfect decaying solar orbit and hit here considering there are no active Mars vocanoes and we have never retrieved a rock from Mars to actually compare it to???
Last week was... "look, we foud a rock from Mars with water in it" - really, again no supporting evidence.
Today there and billions and billions of earth type planets - really? Show me a picture, show me a spectrograph that includes only that planet, show me evidence for just one... oh, and while you're at it publish your 'earth like' criteria because I would be fewer that two could support human life.
NASA has wasted billions of dollars in faux science to get funding on more faux science. Why not do some real science like mining the moon? Why not work on a real L1 space station? Why not work on a real strategy and infrastructiure for 2036? Nope, this NASA generation is bean counters and sesame street graduates with a 20 second attention span.
Move along, nothing to see here....
Re: Must be time to renew budgets...
Ever hear of asteroids???? Chunks thrown up by a big hit can easily reach escape velocity. And since Mars is only about 50 million miles at closest approach some of those chunks could easily get here.
Re: Must be time to renew budgets...
Actually, no. Yes asteroids do hit ocassionally but the odds of ejecta breaking eascape velocity, rising past the gravitation fields of the Martian moons, navigating the asteroid fields without being captured but any of the debris gravitational fields, escaping the gravity sweep of earth's moon then impacting earth, are well, astronomical( as in totaly impossible). Even more amazing is that somhow we 'know' that this rock is from Mars while having no samples to compare it too. If you believe all of that can happen then you will have disappointments in this life. Remember, NASA still can't find all of their moon rocks - so how can you trust them to use proper dillegence in classifing a rock from space? Heck, they even deleted the original moon landing telemetry( video) so they could reuse the tapes. No, they chose the classification that gave the best chance at renewed funding.
Re: Must be time to renew budgets...
"rising past the gravitation fields of the Martian moons"
Only two things to say: WTF LOL
Sorry, my bullshitometer just exploded.
Tightens up some of the numbers on the Drake equation
Thumbs up for that.
Being selfish ba**ards the human race could work the problem in reverse.
Concentrate only on suns that are stable enough to allow Earth like planets to form in the liquid water zone of their orbits with a surface gravity <5g (at least one is known to exist already)
There has to be be something worth visiting when you get there to make the journey (and to justify it in the first place). Forget distance. Just how many Earths are there in this galaxy?
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