There is potentially over 8 [b]billion[/b] planets capable of life in [b][i]our galaxy.[/i][/b]
[quote] By extrapolating Kepler’s findings, astronomers have come up with some not-altogether-unfounded estimates for these values. For instance, they concluded that about 22% of Sun-like stars has at least one planet we class as potentially habitable. Doing the math based on the latest estimates for the total number of stars in the Milky Way, that gives us a rough figure of 8.8 billion potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way. That’s a lot of rolls of the dice, assuming you believe life has any chance at all of starting spontaneously. [/quote]
That's just our galaxy people. There's hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe. That's a lot of potential for life. We're not special snowflakes.
[url=http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/170404-kepler-20-of-sun-like-stars-have-habitable-planets-alien-life-drake-equation-finally-has-a-leg-to-stand-on]source[/url]
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Edited by Mr Mulberry: 4/23/2015 1:49:41 AM[quote]Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. -Carl Sagan[/quote] This photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU) away from earth. Earths apparent size is less than a pixel. Your thread reminded me of this quote.