New study finds most earth-like planets are in the future.
Geege Schuman stashed this in Aliens
Stashed in: The Universe, Awesome, Aliens!, NASA, space, SETI
Someday I'd like to live on a future earth.
According to a new study, 92% of Earth-like planets (those most likely to contain alien life) haven’t been born yet.
Researchers Peter Behroozi and Molly S. Peeples used data from the Hubble telescope and the Kepler space observatory to conduct the theoretical study, which appears this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Behroozi said in a statement that they undertook the research to figure out “the Earth’s place in the context of the rest of the universe,” concluding that “compared to all the planets that will ever form in the universe, the Earth is actually quite early.”
Our solar system, NASA explains, was formed 4.6 billion years ago. Our planet is about 4.54 billion years old, and our sun will burn out in 6 billion years. The scientists’ projections show that from the time our solar system started until now, roughly 8% of all Earth-like (or habitable planets) that will ever exist in the universe have been formed. That’s because there’s a lot more of the gas needed to make planets now than there was billions of years ago, per NASA.
Hah, well they haven't been born yet with the light we're seeing them with now.
That's a little bit of an overwhelming thought, that we're sitting here stuck in a moment of time.
On Skype...
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Top Reddit comment:
This part was crazy to think about:
"A big advantage to our civilization arising early in the evolution of the universe is our being able to use powerful telescopes like Hubble to trace our lineage from the big bang through the early evolution of galaxies. The observational evidence for the big bang and cosmic evolution, encoded in light and other electromagnetic radiation, will be all but erased away 1 trillion years from now due to the runaway expansion of space. Any far-future civilizations that might arise will be largely clueless as to how or if the universe began and evolved."
What are the chances a continuous chain of civilizations across the universe will be able to not only survive, but also retain this information after it is no longer visible in a trillion years?
7:32 AM Oct 22 2015