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Hundreds of billions of Earth-like planets may host alien life

A team of scientists estimates that there may be hundreds of billions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy that can support alien life.

New studies and new projections are frequently published by researchers because incredible space tools, like NASA’s Kepler space telescope, are providing scientists with more data than has ever been available. For example, in 2012, astronomers analyzed data from the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) planet-hunting telescope, and concluded that there could be tens of billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy. And, in 2014, a research team evaluated the list of confirmed exoplanets, leading to the conclusion that the Milky Way is home to one hundred million planets that could support complex alien life.

Artist's illustration of Kepler. (Credit: NASA Ames/ W Stenzel)
Artist’s illustration of Kepler. (Credit: NASA Ames/ W Stenzel)

For this recent study, scientists applied an idea known as the Titius-Bode hypothesis to the exoplanets detected by Kepler. Science World Report explains, “The Titius-Bode relation is a hypothesis that the bodies in some orbital systems, including the sun’s, orbit at semi-major axes in a function of planetary sequence.”

Kepler’s observation method makes it biased towards detecting planets that are very close to their stars. So scientists applied the 200-year-old Titius-Bode idea to Kepler’s data. “We used the Titius-Bode relation and Kepler data to predict the positions of planets that Kepler is unable to see,” says Associate Professor Charley Lineweaver from The Australian National University.

The results lead researchers to conclude that “the standard star has about two planets in the so-called goldilocks zone, the distance from the star where liquid water, crucial for life, can exist.”

Habitable zone predictions. (Credit: ANU)
Habitable zone predictions. (Credit: ANU)

Lineweaver states, “The ingredients for life are plentiful, and we now know that habitable environments are plentiful.”

But he speculates, “However, the universe is not teeming with aliens with human-like intelligence that can build radio telescopes and space ships. Otherwise we would have seen or heard from them. It could be that there is some other bottleneck for the emergence of life that we haven’t worked out yet. Or intelligent civilisations evolve, but then self-destruct.”

The team’s findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Jason McClellan

Jason McClellan is a UFO journalist and the producer/co-host of the web series Spacing Out! He is also the web content manager and staff writer for OpenMinds.tv, and a co-organizer and technical producer of the International UFO Congress. As a founding member of Open Minds, Jason served as a writer and editor for the now defunct Open Minds magazine. He has appeared on Syfy, NatGeo, and, most recently, he co-starred on H2's Hangar 1: The UFO Files. ------ Follow Jason on Twitter @acecentric and subscribe to Jason's updates on Facebook.

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2 Comments

  1. “However, the universe is not teeming with aliens with human-like intelligence that can build radio telescopes and space ships. Otherwise we would have seen or heard from them.”

    Unfortunately, the scientific community continually refuses to acknowledge that we have already seen and heard from extraterrestrials for decades. Extraterrestrials have already engaged in communicating with humanity, not through radio, but through our own biology, which is the most efficient natural receiver of information ever created. They have shown us their ships in many well documented factual encounters, which the scientific community still dismisses as nothing more than fantasy, myth, superstition, and nonsense. In the next few years, the world will finally KNOW that extraterrestrial life exists. It will no longer be speculation or conjecture, but a real bonified FACT. This will finally begin to change the mind set of the scientific community away from their years of denials. In the preceding years after, it will become apparent that ET’s are already in contact with us, and they are already here, and “not out there somewhere”. This will eventually lead to the beginning stages of full open public contact in the decades to come. The very first groups to have open contact with us, will be our closest genetic relatives.

  2. I, too, am very dismayed that sentences like the one you quoted are so frequent in all “official” discussions of ET life.
    That, to me, takes a lot away from an otherwise thoughtful article.
    I wonder what all these “know-it-alls” will have to say for themselves when the real truth comes out.

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