[ExI] kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-11-05 01:06, spike wrote:
>
> OK now I am more puzzled than ever.
>

I share in the puzzlement.

And remember, this is just earth-like planets - if life can function in 
Europa-like oceans, ammonia, methane, liquid nitrogen, sulphuric acid, 
or supercritical carbon dioxide solvents the number of potential 
life-bearing worlds pushes up enormously.

Say we assign only 1% chance to Europa-like reducing water biospheres 
being possible, and given that Europa-like places look slightly more 
common in the solar system than earthlike places, we should expect a 
distribution with 99% probability of 8.8 potential biospheres and 1% 
probability with up to 20 billion potential biospheres. Now we can 
repeat for the other biospheres (with weighting for the ranges of 
liquidity). The end result is that our prior distribution of the number 
of potential biospheres likely should look like an exponential 
distribution, with a mean significantly higher than just 8.8 billion 
worlds.


-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20131105/760d23c3/attachment.html>