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Permalink Reply by Professor Tanhauser on February 20, 2011 at 12:41am

The funniest thing in the article was this:

 

Life support conditions are calculated to be absurdly rare in our universe. Even with the existing hundred billion trillion stars out to the limits of the universe the possibility of finding even one planet with the right conditions for life is less than one in one hundred quintillion.

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Permalink Reply by Wesley on April 13, 2011 at 2:16am

Yes... and haven't they just revised the estimate that they not think there could be approximately 2 billion planets in OUR galaxy alone that fall into the 'habitable zone'?  (This is up from the 500 million they previously estimated)

 

and what are there... 100 million galaxies?  Oh... someone do the math... 

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Permalink Reply by Dave G on April 13, 2011 at 9:10pm

Actually, think we are in the billions of galaxies now, and that is just in the observable universe. (Which is estimated to be less than 2% of the total universe.)

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Permalink Reply by Nathan Palo on June 3, 2011 at 6:00pm

The probability of finding even one planet with the right conditions for life is one.

 

I found it. We call it Earth, it doesn't make sense as two thirds of the surface is covered with water, but that's OK.

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Permalink Reply by Steve on June 5, 2011 at 7:48pm

ZING! I would said the same

 

That figure discounts the tremendous advances in exo-planet research in the last few years. We are now at the point where we can discover exo-planets optically instead of just through gravitational interactions with stars. We have the Kepler telescope dedicated to that task alone. There are currently 54 candidates that are thought to lie within their stars' habitable zones. The Kepler team estimates that 6% of all stars have Earth-size planets

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