{"id":2010,"date":"2015-09-09T07:43:06","date_gmt":"2015-09-09T12:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=2010"},"modified":"2015-09-09T07:43:06","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T12:43:06","slug":"please-take-a-number","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2015\/09\/09\/please-take-a-number\/","title":{"rendered":"Please Take a Number"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest in planetary number calculations<\/a> from NewScientist<\/strong><\/em>‘s Jacob Aron (29 August 2015, paywall):<\/p>\n

[Peter] Behroozi [of the Space Telescope Science Institute] and his colleague Molly Peeples have combined the latest exoplanet statistics with our understanding of how galaxies form stars. The result is a formula that tracks the growth in the number of planets in the universe over time (arxiv.org\/abs\/1508.01202<\/a>).<\/p>\n

It suggests there are currently 1020<\/sup>, or 100 billion billion, Earth-like planets in the universe, with an equivalent number of gas giants. \u201cEarth-like\u201d doesn\u2019t mean an exact replica of our planet, but rather a rocky world that, if blanketed by a suitable atmosphere, would hold liquid water on its surface. Applied to the solar system, this definition would include Mars and Venus but not Mercury or the moon.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just the start. Only a fraction of the gas within all the galaxies in the cosmos has cooled enough to start collapsing, so stars and planets will continue forming for billions of years. That means 92 per cent of the universe\u2019s Earth-like planets won\u2019t exist until long after the sun has died and taken the Earth with it.<\/p>\n

\u201cPhilosophically, if you want to know our place in the universe as a whole, then you also need to include what will happen in the future,\u201d says Behroozi. \u201cI didn\u2019t expect to find the Earth had formed so early.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And other civilizations?<\/p>\n

Figuring out where we fit in the grand cosmic timeline also gives us an idea of how many other civilisations might be out there. Suppose intelligent life is so rare that Earth is the first planet in the universe to evolve a civilisation \u2013 an almost ludicrously conservative assumption. Then the sheer number of future Earth-like planets means that the likelihood of us being the only civilisation the universe will ever have is at most 8 per cent.<\/p>\n

If we find just one other inhabited planet in the Milky Way, the number of other such worlds rockets up. Such a discovery, together with the unlikeliness of our galaxy being the only one to host life, would make Earth at least the 10 billionth civilisation in the universe at present.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Enough to make me blink.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest in planetary number calculations from NewScientist‘s Jacob Aron (29 August 2015, paywall): [Peter] Behroozi [of the Space Telescope Science Institute] and his colleague Molly Peeples have combined the latest exoplanet statistics with our understanding of how galaxies form stars. The result is a formula that tracks the growth \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2010"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2012,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2010\/revisions\/2012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}