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| ▲ | gizmo686 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | And our ability to detect exoplanets is both highly limited, and biased to large planets orbiting close to their sun. Using our current technology to look at our solar system, we probably wouldn't see a habitable planet either. Looking at https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/discoveries-dashboard/ , a planet with one earth mass and a 300 day year is simply outside of our ability to detect. Not to say that those are requirements for habitability; but they are requirements to detect the one habitable planet we know about. | | |
| ▲ | chickenzzzzu 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | In this context, it's sad how long it takes light to travel. Even if we invented some magical microcraft that can travel at 25% of the speed of light so that it can go make observations up close of other solar systems, it would still take hundreds or thousands of years for the data to make it back. | | |
| ▲ | gizmo686 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's not quite that bad. There are about 100 known stars within 20 light years; with the nearest only about 5 away. https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars.php?offset=100 Actually getting a spacecraft to them in a reasonable amount of time is still well beyond us. But if we could get a probe up to relativistic speads, that would put missions to nearby stars on a similar timescale to existing space missions. Our ability to actually get | | |
| ▲ | chickenzzzzu 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree and appreciate that, but I would venture a guess that most of the nearest ones to us likely don't have "earth-like" planets, even accounting for the bias in our viewing capabilities you described. The moons, however! Maybe that bumps the chance of having a habitable celestial body to 0.00001% per solar system? That's my current rough guess. It would be remarkable if "actually life is very easy to form in the universe, it turns out Earth was just first". |
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