One in Five Stars Has Earth-sized Planet in Habitable Zone

[brooklynite]

Source: W. M . Keck Observatory

Waimea, Hawaii – Scientists from University of California, Berkeley, and University of Hawaii, Manoa, have statistically determined that twenty percent of Sun-like stars in our galaxy have Earth-sized planets that could host life. The findings, gleaned from data collected from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft and the W. M. Keck Observatory, now satisfy Kepler's primary mission: to determine how many of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets. The results are being published November 4 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"What this means is, when you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing," said UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who led the analysis of the Kepler and Keck Observatory data.

"For NASA, this number – that every fifth star has a planet somewhat like Earth – is really important, because successor missions to Kepler will try to take an actual picture of a planet, and the size of the telescope they have to build depends on how close the nearest Earth-size planets are," said Andrew Howard, astronomer with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. "An abundance of planets orbiting nearby stars simplifies such follow-up missions."

The team, which also included planet hunter Geoffrey Marcy, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy, cautioned that Earth-size planets in Earth-size orbits are not necessarily hospitable to life, even if they orbit in the habitable zone of a star where the temperature is not too hot and not too cold.

Read more: http://www.keckobservatory.org/recent/entry/one_in_five_stars_has_earth_sized_planet_in_habitable_zone

---

But which one is the Planet Kolob?

[maxsolomon]

1. good, because we've got to get out of this place

i mean, eventually...

[olddad56]

5. Well, if the nearest possible inhabitable planet is only 12 light years away..

once we figure out how to travel at the at 186,000 miles per second, we could be there in 12 years. I think it might be wise to purchase a piece of real estate on that planet now.

[Crunchy Frog]

12. I sure as hell don't wish that on the inhabitants of other worlds.

[maxsolomon]

39. Our sun will eventually go supernova

and destroy the earth. a few billion years from now.

i have some faith that doctrinaire conservatives and selfish capitalists will be gone by then. hell, homo sapiens will probably be gone by then. so it's possible that there would be justification in continuing our planet's knowledge and culture to some degree.

if the inhabitants of other worlds are plankton, i'm ok with invading and conquering them. if they're bronze age cultures, we'll keep movin' on. the prime directive and all...

[arcane1]

28. Never gonna happen. Besides, if we wreck this place, we don't deserve a second chance.

And the destination planet most definitely did nothing to deserve US.

[olddad56]

34. If ?

[arcane1]

48. Indeed!

[Peace Patriot]

50. "...we don't deserve a second chance." ???

This sounds like Koch Brothers' shills talking about the unemployed, the homeless, the mortgage-drowned, the hungry, the sick, the poor, the tens of thousands in prison for non-violent crimes, the lazy, the "good for nothing," the "welfare queens," the broken soldiers, the disabled, the elderly, and others who oughtn't to get Food Stamps or medical care or free education or any kind of help, who are "non-productive' or "failed human beings" who ought to be kicked off the island!

WHY don't we "deserve" a "second chance," hm?

It's that kind of thinking--cliche thinking, Old Testament-style condemnation--that will ensure that we don't summon the creativity, intelligence and determination--creativity, intelligence and determination that we are certainly capable of--to solve our planetary environmental problem.

Do you really want to consign all of humanity to eternal oblivion, like some Bible-thumping preacher? The whole human enterprise from beginning to end--with all of its effort, all of its beauty--is dismissible as not deserving of a second chance?

People who say "never gonna happen" are often proved wrong.

Will women be allowed to vote? Never gonna happen.
Will blacks be allowed to vote? Never gonna happen.
Will all workers pay into a common pension system to ensure an income for the elderly? Never gonna happen.
Can people fly in the sky? Never gonna happen.
Can electricity be harnessed and provided to every household? Never gonna happen.
Can an exploited colony successfully rebel against an empire? Never gonna happen.
Can a pathogen be used to inoculate people against the disease that the pathogen causes? Never gonna happen.
Will people ever walk on the moon? Never gonna happen.

On and on and on goes the list of things that somebody said are "never gonna happen" that, in fact, happened. Millions of "impossibilities" have been made possible; millions and millions of problems solved by human creativity, intelligence and determination.

I think you may be suffering from being inside of a dying democracy that, like Rome, has become an overstretched and rapacious empire, with extreme propaganda aimed at us every day about our "inability" to change anything. You have a jaded view. But looking just at our own history as a country and a people--let alone the history of other countries and peoples, and all that is happening in other places right now, and things that are happening here as well--and I mean ALL that is happening, not just what you get from the corporate propaganda media--there is much reason for hope. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity for innovation, and are amazingly adaptable. We also, as a characteristic, have a tremendous desire to cooperate, to help, to contribute to the common good. Who is to say that these positive qualities will not win out, or that, facing catastrophe, we will not rally to the crisis and find solutions that ensure human survival? We are very adept at creating second chances for ourselves!

Our beautiful planet evolved us. It is not a matter of "deserving" anything. The Old Testament is FICTION. There is no "Garden of Eden" that we got banned from, no "sin" that we are guilty of, no God pointing a finger at us and saying "You don't deserve this." What is happening now, on earth, is the development of consciousness of our planetary environment and of our place in the huge, huge, HUGE universe. We DON'T KNOW what will happen to us, nor what we may, collectively do, as this new consciousness develops. It is NOT predictable. It is open-ended. That is the human story--NOT predictable.

[arcane1]

54. I'm an atheist, I don't need you to tell me the old testament is fiction.

And yes, if we manage to render our own home uninhabitable, we have no right to do the same to someone else's home.

[Peace Patriot]

60. You say you're an atheist yet you doom humanity...

...to extinction just like that punitive "god" did in the Noah story after banning humanity from the Garden of Eden.

Atheist as Old Testament prophet but with no belief in God? Weird.

[arcane1]

61. What an absurd statement. I'm not dooming anyone, nor am I capable of doing so.

Humanity is dooming itself just fine without any help from me.

[Arugula Latte]

58. Sorry, each dominant species only gets one planet to destroy.

[olddad56]

2. wonder how much longer Earth will be habitable.

[indepat]

13. At the rate corporations are despoiling the environment for financial gain, aided and abetted by

governments like ours, probably only a few moments in geological time.

[Humanist_Activist]

19. About another billion years or so...

The goldilocks zone for our solar system is expanding outward as the Sun gets hotter over the years.

NOTE: This is not an argument against anthropogenic climate change, the current climate is changing far too rapidly for the Sun's increase in radiation to account for.

[jberryhill]

3. "Only 12 light years away"

And your ticket costs three easy payments of 100 trillion dollars.

Take along a snack, you might get hungry.

[bananas]

4. So where is everybody?

Are we really the first in the neighborhood?

[olddad56]

8. No, I think many of the tea partiers might be from another planet.

[OnlinePoker]

11. Just because they're in the habitable zone doesn't mean they're habitable.

Mars may be liveable, but only in modules. Venus is just nasty.

[Xithras]

57. Yep. "Habitable" has a different meaning for scientists than for "normal people".

The planet can have a sulfuric acid atmosphere, be tide locked to its star and have 500 degree summer days, and scientists will call it "habitable" if its the right size, type, and in the right location.

"Earth-like" simply means that it's habitable AND has liquid water. Again, that doesn't mean much. The Earths atmosphere was almost exclusively Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide until a couple billion years ago, and would have stayed that way if not for the evolution of cyanobacteria. Those cyanobacteria, an evolved life form unique to our own planet, created all of the oxygen that we breathe today and sequestered much of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. If they hadn't existed, our planet would look like Mars with oceans, and would probably lack any life more advanced than simple algae.

The evolution of cyanobacteria, and the fact that their photosynthesis resulted in the creation of free oxygen, were the result of evolutionary processes on our own planet. The odds of those exact evolutionary processes being duplicated on another planet, and of a planet having a human-breathable oxygen atmosphere as a result, are incredibly small. There probably aren't more than a handful of them in our entire galaxy, and there's a substantial possibility that we are standing on the ONLY one.

[progressoid]

14. Neil deGrasse Tyson Is Worried That Humans Are Too Stupid For Aliens

[YOHABLO]

21. I tend to think that is the problem .. It would be nice if they could help us out.. we need it.

[Scootaloo]

29. The opposite is also possible

Given our on evident drive for self-extinction, and the very short, flimsy lifespans of other human species, and ht fact that 4 billion years passed without it... it's very possible that brains like ours are uncommon, that lots of other worlds ARE inhatited... but only by what we would consider animals and plants

[arcane1]

30. Indeed, our combination of intelligence, curiosity, and tool innovation are probably quite rare.

It was a very specific sequence of environmental pressures that led to humans. I would wager that the intelligence we see in other creatures (dolphins, for one example) is probably abundant, but no dolphin will ever build a telescope.

[penultimate]

16. They moved out when we moved in...

[paleotn]

23. Depends on what you mean by everybody....

...there probably is life out there, but not what we would consider "intelligent" life and that's just fine. I think we've pretty well proven that "intelligence" may not be a successful, long term survival strategy. The plant did just fine for several billion years without us.

[Prophet 451]

24. That's the Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox is an answer to teh Drake Equation. Drake says that, assuming certain variables, the universe is probably teeming with life. Fermi counters by saying "so where are they then?". There's several possible answers to that.

The first is that their existence may not overlap with ours. Modern humans have only existed for about 100,000 years and we've only had powered flight for a little over a century. The universe is about 14 billion years old. It's entirely possible that intelligent life has blossomed and died out before we even stopped hitting each other with rocks. Conversely, it's also possible that the intelligent life is still living in caves.

The other major issue is time. The closest habitable planet is 12 light years away. That means it takes light 12 years to reach us. And light is the fastest thing there is, nothing travels faster than light (barring a few strange developments in quantum physics). There's really no way for the human mind to understand the distances involved but it is entirely possible that our attempts at communication and theirs simply haven't had time to reach one another yet.

Finally, there's the Galactus problem. Marvel Comics solution to teh Fermi Paradox was to posit that something destroys the civilization before it establishes communication. In the comics, that was Galactus but it could be a global pandemic, asteroid strike, war (either among themselves or with another alien species) or something we've never even thjought of.

[GliderGuider]

32. My closure of the Fermi Paradox is quite simple.

This possibility for the closure came to me during some rumination about how the operation of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics (specifically the operation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in open systems) creates life, with the result that the operation and imperatives of those same laws are embedded in the genetic code. Enter evolutionary psychology to explain how human behavior arises from our evolutionary history, and you get a continuous connection from human culture all the way back to the Second Law.

In effect culture (in general, not in detail) is a direct consequence of NET, and aggregate human behavior - i.e. culture - is shaped and constrained by the Second Law. It goes a long way toward explaining our utter inability to address the risk of fossil-fuel-driven climate change, even though it will probably result in our extinction. I realized that if this thermodynamic influence on life is generally true, then our experience is probably very common among life forms, and the extinction at the end of it explains the "eerie silence".

I've written it up and published it on my web site as A Thermodynamic Answer to Fermi's Paradox. The Cliff's Notes version is this:

• Carbon is ubiquitous in the universe, as is oxygen. That means the carbon/oxygen reaction is the most likely foundation for life.
  
• In the presence of suitable solar energy gradients and planetary conditions, life probably arises very commonly (per Schneider and Kay: Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics).
  
• Therefore life is likely quite common in the universe. This new calculation increases the certainty of this conclusion.
  
• Intelligent life will be less common, but still arising with a non-trivial frequency because of the evolutionary development guaranteed by the Second Law.
  
• Arguing from the Mediocrity Principle, human life is probably fairly representative of carbon-based life.
  
• While we can get energy from other sources, all those processes are more complex than burning carbon.
  
• Most of the other sources that are easily accessible, such as solar, wind and water power exhibit lower energy gradients than burning carbon.
  
• This means that carbon combustion would almost certainly have been the first high-quality energy source exploited by an intelligent carbon-based life form.
  
• Other energy sources would achieve prominence only after being kick-started by processes using carbon combustion.
  
• Carbon combustion will continue to be an important energy source even after others are kick-started, because of its convenience and steep energy gradient.
  
• Carbon combustion can be accomplished in the absence of scientific knowledge of the properties of CO2.
  
• In the absence of that scientific knowledge the dangers of CO2 in the atmosphere go unrecognized.
  
• CO2-driven climate change takes many decades to recognize, and many more to become apparent.
  
• Until the carbon/climate link is broadly accepted, the species will continue to burn carbon.
  
• By the time the danger is fully accepted, and the risk of planetary risk climate change is understood to be greater than the social risk of eliminating carbon combustion, it may well be too late to avoid having the planetary climate risk materialize.
  
• Climate disruption damages the planetary biosphere and disrupts the organization of the intelligent specie's civilization within a small number of decades after the first signals of rising radiative forcing are detected. While this disruption may or may not cause the specie's extinction, the disruption would probably be enough to reduce its technical capability below the threshold required to send radio waves strong enough to be detected at interstellar distances.
  
• Eerie silence...

Have a nice infinity...

[Prophet 451]

33. It's a good solution

"Good" as in fitting, rather than desirable. I'm a little too drunk right now to read the full explanation (I've only had four shots but they react with my medication to deliver a much bigger effect) but I've bookmarked it for later.

I would suggest that both of us may be in danger of anthromorphism. But leaving that aside, it's an elegant solution to the problem, albeit a depressing one.

[arcane1]

36. This is a great and fascinating post, but the Mediocrity Principle sounds like bullshit to me.

For one thing, it was a giant leap from "intelligent" life to industrial civilization.

For another, if one were to take a random sample from the history of Earth, the "most numerous category" would be microbes. When you look at all of the species that have existed on this planet, our human industrial civilization is by far the least likely.

This Trekkie thinks we are much more rare than we give ourselves credit for

[GliderGuider]

37. "it was a giant leap from "intelligent" life to industrial civilization"

It was? All it took for us was the discovery of stored carbon. Once we had that, IndCiv was pretty much inevitable as far as I can tell.

[arcane1]

38. You made the leap, right there in your reply.

All it took was for us to exist, in order to discover stored carbon. The dolphins and whales will never discover it. The Neanderthals were around for thousands of centuries without ever discovering it. Our cousins the Chimps have been around even longer, and surely encountered fire, but never tamed it.

I suppose it depends on how one defines intelligence, but humans were an oddity, and not destined to appear. The "leap" is the assumption that if a certain level of "intelligence" is reached, industrial is sure to follow. The cetaceans would beg to differ.

[GliderGuider]

40. Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient.

If we hadn't appeared, there's no telling what sort of species would have arisen from other existing sentient life forms, given another few million years. Your position strikes me as springing from a sense of human exceptionalism, rather than from the feeling that we are standard, banal elements of a post-Copernican universe.

Try reading that Schneider and Kay paper I linked (the full PDF is free). It's a short and remarkably accessible thermodynamic explanation of how life appears, and the implication is that it appears with p?1.0 if the energy and resource circumstances are right. Once you have made that first step, the extension of self-organization from eukaryotes to intelligence and on to culture is actually pretty much a straight line. The details and the time frames will change from one circumstance to the next, but the self-organizing developmental path of life in the presence of free energy won't.

[arcane1]

41. Where did this free energy come from?

Look at it this way: if a plague had wiped out Europe in 1491, and the "new" world was left alone, would North Americans have rockets and nuclear power today? No. It's not that they were less intelligent, it's that their culture was not based on industrial growth.

Or, if modern humans, descended from around 500 individuals, had died in a flood, then the earth today would have Neanderthals doing pretty much the same thing they always did. Intelligence and self awareness, even to our extreme, doesn't guarantee iron smelting and space travel.

[GliderGuider]

43. Well, it comes from the sun.

If a plague had wiped out Europe, leaving the new world alone, then in a few thousand years Europe would no longer be hot, and normal human migration would have re-populated it. It would set back the emergence of industrial civilization back a few thousand years, but what's a few thousand years in the lifespan of a planet or its star?

Same thing with the Neanderthals. They'd have kept on evolving, and eventually we'd be back approximately "here" - just a bit later.

Intelligence, carbon and time - probably all it takes for a species to achieve high tech, and then grow itself to death. IMO there is nothing even remotely special or extraordinary about homo Sapiens.

[arcane1]

45. I have a feeling we agree more than we disagree.

One of us looks at what happened after humans appeared, the other looks at what happened before they appeared.

If we discussed this over drinks, we would be in 96.5% agreement

[GliderGuider]

46. Yes, I suspect so too!

[arcane1]

47. A toast, to whatever processes resulted in our good fortune to be here discussing said processes!

*wonders where the wine smiley is*

[muriel_volestrangler]

51. It wouldn't take much of a change for hydropower to have been the dominant power source

in human industrial history. Perhaps life does typically use solar energy to build carbon-containing bodies, that others consume. But water-powered mills were providing us significant power before effective steam engines were invented, and it wouldn't need a big change for something like that to be an even more convenient power source on another planet - just the lifeforms not living quite so much on plains. If electricity was understood just a little bit quicker than we did, you can move straight to an electrical age, with storage, without mining coal or oil on a large scale.

[hunter]

62. There is no intelligent life on those planets, just like Earth.

I figure the instant a species becomes intelligent it ascends into some kind of cosmic creators' club. Maybe industrialization reduces the odds that a species will become intelligent.

For all we know a mess of earth species have already achieved intelligence and taken the first train out of this universe; various avian/dinosaur species, various cetacean species, giant squids, Neanderthals, Fungi, could have been anything...

Maybe these giant fungi were intelligent and left the planet a long time ago:



http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/07/070423.fungus.shtml

It could be that our branch of Homo sapiens is never going to achieve intelligence and we'll be stuck here until we become extinct. That's the inevitable fate of most species. Every species and every individual being living today has ancestors going back all the way to the beginning of life on earth, but that's no guarantee they'll survive past tomorrow. It doesn't even change the odds.

Bummer for humans that we may never experience any kind of true intelligence, but while we live we can keep striving for it.

[Politicalboi]

31. I hope so

We certainly don't want those "immigrants" taking whats ours. Palin/Bachmann 2016.......

[Comrade Grumpy]

56. Fermi's paradox. n/t

[dipsydoodle]

6. They may already have life but not as we know it

Jim.

[olddad56]

9. we still have life, but not as we knew it before 2000.

[YOHABLO]

22. I'd go back as far as 1980 and the "election" of Ronald Reagan.

[denbot]

7. And no one calls..

I guess we are the unpopular kids..

[dipsydoodle]

10. Would you call

with the NSA listening in?

[greiner3]

15. Our system has 3 plants in the;

Goldilocks Zone!

[longship]

20. It's kind of a blurry definition.

Could Venus be within the Goldilocks zone? Not our Venus. Could Mars? Maybe earlier, but Mars is too small and now has insufficient atmosphere, mainly due to its small mass. Being in the zone is necessary, but insufficient.

What the Kepler Space Telescope is telling us is very important. There are Goldilocks zones everywhere. Certainly some will have liquid water -- an almost certain indication for possible life. That's the goal of SETI. Search for water.

There may be life in our solar system beyond earth. Four locations are prominent. Mars (death dealing robots from Hell!), Jupiter's moon Europa which likely has more ocean than Earth, and the Saturnian moons Titan (not water but lakes of methane, or something like that) and Enceledes (whose south pole geysers are salt water, in other words, water in contact with minerals -- an ideal mechanism for life giving energy).

I think that life is a general rule in the Universe. Where it can develop, it does develop. Such is nature.

[seveneyes]

17. If any within a few dozen light years have modern life on them

We likely would have picked up a broadcast or three by now. However, with all the other galaxies in this universe, it would be a miracle if there were not similar life on one or more planets.

[spin]

25. If their technology level was much higher than ours they may use a different method ...

of communication.

We once depended on telegraph communication but moved on to radio. We are currently searching for civilizations that use radio signals but in another century we may be using a far more advanced form of communication and may find another advanced civilizations exist when we search for their signals.

A truly advanced civilization may have developed the means to search near star systems for signs of intelligent life and may have discovered our planet. They would probably view us as a developing civilization verging on developing the technology to visit the stars. It is possible that they have sent missions to our planet to observe our progress and if we can develop the maturity to handle our technology without destroying ourselves. If so we might be weekly program on the media of some alien Discovery Channel.

[longship]

18. One more data point in the Drake equation.

Of course it's one close to the left hand side of the equation. Things get tougher as one proceeds to the right hand factors. Frank Drake is no doubt pleased.



N-sub-e just got nailed down a little more.

Of course, Kepler is also nailing down f-sub-e. the two kind of go together when one has the orbital parameters, size, and mass.

Kepler's dead now. But there are still over 3,000 planet candidates that need to be verified in its data. I'd say, Job well done, Kepler space telescope!

[Stuart G]

26. Yes, Indeed ...

indeed...they sure are. Many out there. Billions. Now here is something I definitely recall. Over 45 years ago, I took a course called "Introduction to Social Science" at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier..It is now called the Circle. But I remember reading a short intro book on astronomy and whatever was up to date then, and the author predicted, based on his calculations, that there would be billions of earth like planets out there, and some of them very likely had life on them, like ours. Some may have advanced life ...and we talked about it, and Star Trek was big then. I believe they have dropped by and decided to leave us alone. Too unknowing and uncaring for the rest of the galaxy...
(they may have hit Fox, so called news, and headed as far away as their warp drive could take them}

[liberal N proud]

27. Do you suppose any have a population hell bent on self destruction.

[Rebellious Republican]

35. Hope there is intellegent life on one of them.....

[gopiscrap]

42. interesting

[Ash_F]

44. 20% percent of SUN-LIKE stars.

But still pretty cool.

[Rosco T.]

49. My favorite TV show said it all

[Kablooie]

52. So maybe we CAN Cruise to the Galactic Federation on a DC 8.

[snooper2]

55. god is one busy motherfucker!

no wonder no prayers get answered...

He's given up and been busy creating BILLIONS of planets for his minions

[Arugula Latte]

59. But ... but ... Earth is the center of the universe and mankind is the sole focus of The Deity!

The Bible tells me so, and how could ancient mythological texts from a primitive desert-dwelling people of 2,000 years ago be wrong?