A HUGEE blow to skeptics: 100 million earths..

reply to post by xxcalbier


LOL caught typing without coffee ... thanks for pointing that out!

I ~meant~ galaxy

Skeptic - noun - from Latin Scepticus, from Greek Skeptikoi, from skeptesthai - to examine, consider.

Etymologically, the term is a flat out misnomer for those who blankly refuse to believe something without even looking at the facts.

For these types, I prefer the label ignoramus.

Originally posted by ATSZOMBIE
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com...

"A leader of the Kepler planet-hunting team has created a slow-moving scientific stir by telling an audience at a high-tech conference that our galaxy could harbor 100 million Earths, based on the space mission's raw data. The resulting buzz focuses not only on the findings, but also on the means by which they came to light."


What does this mean? It means yet again, that those who proclaim 'the world is flat' days are numbered. That not only is life common, that they have & are here already. Studying, watching & even interacting with us in some way that we cant understand.
Any number of species out there who have a million years of evolution on us has the technology to traverse space, not using rocket engines or breaking the impossible speed of light barrier but in some other fashion we cant even imagine. It seems anything is possible in this amazing universe and those who will not open their eyes will be laughed at in the upcoming revolution!

As i have always perceived to be true is the fact that this universe is so vast that those that held the perceptions that we are alone were doing so out of one or more of the following;

1.Religious beliefs or conditioning;
2.Fear of admitting that science does not know all there is to know about everything and that we as a species are relativity new in the grand scale of the evolutionary chain in this universe.
3.Fear that one day we could be invaded for malevolent causes.
4.Fear of historians having to think again about possible visits in the human past but put down to just speculations.
5 Fear from the ridiculer's perceptions that the tide has turned and their game is up and now its their turn to feel the insults.

[edit on 15/07/2010 by K-PAX-PROT]

reply to post by ATSZOMBIE


How is this a HUGE blow to skeptics?
I think most people will agree even skeptics that there is life on other planets...
but as a skeptic I DOUBT that we are PRESENTLY being visited by any other worldly being.

So I don't speak for most skeptics, but I believe that when people say Aliens don't exist they mean all of these sightings are falser than tammy fay baker's eye lashes!
We are not being visited by any of these beings at this time.

I know this was pointed out already in this thread, (I think by Kristobal), but they keep referring to these planets as "earths"; which is incredibly annoying. They are earth sized - so for that matter Venus could be seen as an "earth" by the same definition. They might as well be a 100 million 'Venuses'. This finding comes as no real surprise other than their ability to detect this size now, which is surprising. It seemed hardly likely that the cosmos is filled up with only Jupiter sized 'exo'planets. (Cant we just call them planets again? Nobody who was into sci fi ever got confused with just the term 'planet', just ask them....) It does completely strengthen the case for extra-terrestrial life, since the only life we know of is of course here on an earth sized planet. By the same token the chance of extra-terrestrial sentient alien life is concomittently improved as well for what I hope are obvious reasons (evolution etc, little things like that).

I doubt the goldilocks zone is necessarily the sole arbiter of potential life however - my suspicion is that the real problem with alien life will be recognizing it.

I also want to note here that Skepticism is the art of doubting and questioning pretty much everything - and is in the main an attitude, and an attitude that only certian people actually have. Not everyone is a skeptic nor should they be (Nor really should they want to be; but I probably should,t say that). Skepticism has both a positive and a negative polarity, such that investigation is the the positive and suspicion is the negative. It seems lately that everyone wants to be a skeptic, but the thing that is really important is whether they are investigating or just casting aspersions - so it is not the label but the work that should be looked at.

reply to post by ATSZOMBIE


I have no doubt life exist out there in space, what I do doubt is that its visiting earth. I think the idea that any alien would be interested in us is the height of arrogance, not only are we a primitive do nothing species, we also occupy the B.F.E. section of our galaxy.

IF they happen to stumble upon us, it would probably be as a rest stop oddity, much like visiting the worlds largest ball of twine.

reply to post by Sablicious



There once was an article that i came across about sceptics and their motives, it went on to explain another form of scepticism, that is the term ,"selective scepticism". Selective sceptics are selective in the parts of evidence they choose to pick from and use this to either ignore or debunk all the evidence from that which they are being sceptical about.This form of scepticism is used most notably on the UFO enigma and abductions.

F.C.S. Schiller remarked on the same subject:

"A mind unwilling to believe or even undesirous to be instructed, our weightiest evidence must ever fail to impress. It will insist on taking that evidence in bits and rejecting item by item. As all the facts come singly, anyone who dismisses them one by one is destroying the condition under which the conviction of a new truth could ever arise in the mind."

Of course i am not implying that all scepticism or to be sceptical is wrong, indeed scepticism and being sceptic about something can and has exposed frauds and hoaxers, its the ultra scepticism used by selective sceptics that uses tunnel vision in its debate, investigations and examination of evidence.

Allen Hynek wrote about this pseudoskeptical fallacy:

Probabilities, of course, can never prove a thing. When, however, in the course of UFO investigations one encounters many cases, each having a fairly high probability that "a genuinely new empirical observation" was involved, the probability that a new phenomenon was not observed becomes very small, and it gets smaller still as the number of cases increases.

The chances, then, that something really new is involved are very great, and any gambler given such odds would not hesitate for a moment to place a large bet... Any one UFO case, if taken by itself without regard to the accumulated worldwide data [..] can almost always be dismissed by assuming that in that particular case a very unusual set of circumstances occurred, of low probability [...]

But when cases of this sort accumulate in noticeable numbers, it no longer is scientifically correct to apply the reasoning one applies to a single isolated case."

[edit on 15/07/2010 by K-PAX-PROT]

Originally posted by packinupngoin

How is this a HUGE blow to skeptics?

We are not being visited by any of these beings at this time.

You make a statement like that as if it's fact but the fact of the matter is you don't really know. This is what makes you a skeptic.

I think ATSzombie is exactly correct. It's all falling into place as the Kepler team (which is not yet fully controlled by the PTB) are releasing their findings. My only hope is that proof is discovered that not only is the galaxy teaming with other civilizations but that they have been visiting Earth before my life is over. I think it's only a matter of time. This revelation does not upset my view of reality as it does to the skeptics.

One other interesting aspect of this episode is Nasa trying their damnedest to throw a wet blanket onto the Kepler team. This is also to be expected. The heads of Nasa know exactly the state of things and have their marching orders.

Originally posted by Arken
Thanks for share this.

An official confirm that Life is everywhere in our galaxy and so different from how we can immagine.
S&F

Nowhere in the article does it state that the discovery of these planets is confirmation that life is everywhere in the galaxy. These are the sort of completely out of context posts that make me want to stop reading ATS and bang my head against a wall instead.

I had posted this another thread; however, it was closed by the MODS, so I will repost it here:

I always figured that there were many "earth-like" planets out there; we just couldn't see them with the technology we had. I have been waiting for some results to come in from Kepler. Before Kepler, we had not identified a single earth-like planet. Now, they seem to rule the galaxy. Here is a nice graphic showing the approximate number of planets discovered and their approximate size.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/b6e2db3e7976.jpg[/atsimg]
Image courtesy of Discovery.com

Originally posted by oxbow
Nowhere in the article does it state that the discovery of these planets is confirmation that life is everywhere in the galaxy. These are the sort of completely out of context posts that make me want to stop reading ATS and bang my head against a wall instead.

Like this? :bnghd:

Even reading the title of the thread feels like banging my head, where is there even one skeptic who would be surprised at 100 million Earth-like planets? I consider myself somewhat skeptical but I'm not surprised by this at all.

The main thing I see skeptics skeptical about are claims that there's proof alien life has visited Earth. I've never heard a single skeptic say there aren't other Earth-like planets in the universe.

I don’t see proof of aliens, I only see a hint of proof that somewhat earth-sized exoplanets exist.

from the op's article
So far, planetary candidates "like Earth" - those that are no more than twice as wide as our own planet - make up the largest category in Kepler's database, according to a chart Sasselov used to illustrate his talk.

This new info doesn’t even come close of disproving the rare earth hypothesis. A theory I want to see shattered before jumping on the “OMG the universe is full of intel life!!” bandwagon.

from the op's article
Update for 8:55 p.m. ET July 27: Sasselov tries to dispel the "confusion" over Earth-sized planetary candidates in a posting to NASA's Kepler mission blog. During his 18-minute TEDGlobal talk, "the expected number of planets, size and Earth-like chemistry got confused, and created a misunderstanding," he said. [

from the op's article
In the blog posting, he emphasizes that the Kepler telescope can measure the size of objects as they pass over a star's disk, but can't say much about their climate or chemistry - let alone whether they have water or rocks. In fact, he notes that the Earth-scale planets detected by Kepler so far couldn't be Earthlike in the water-and-trees sense because they circle their parent stars in such hellishly close orbits. They're nowhere near the "habitable zone" within which life as we know it can exist.

from the op's article
Another co-investigator for the Kepler mission, William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center, provided yet another follow-up in a telephone interview after Sasselov's blog posting was published. He said Sasselov's TEDGlobal lecture "was a little bit disturbing" because the discussion focused on "Earthlike" planets rather than "Earth-size" planets. "Earthlike is not Earth-size," Borucki said, for the reasons we've already mentioned.

Nope, not feeling any blow.


Once kepler starts finding earth-sized planets with moon-sized moons in gl zones, I’ll faint though.

It is all useless information unless they now use these facts to develop a means to travel between the stars. That is what they should spend the money on now else it does nothing for humanity. If we cant get there, cant talk to it then its nothing but useless information.

If we can "never" get there then we should spend the money colonizing our solar system and possibly building generation ships to move to other stars.

reply to post by ATSZOMBIE


Its more like billions of planets with humaniods in this galaxy alone, and within a few billion years andromeda will join us.

What do diapers have to do with planetary searches?

Oh.... you meant "HUGE", not HUGEE.

Anywhoo, I guess the skeptics should just give up then? We've confirmed aliens exist, or did I miss something?

sigh - another thread which owes more to the creators delusions than the facts of the matter

PS - just to ad , any potential extra terrestrial biosphere would have to contend with the conditions existant .

the goldilocks zone is a falacy that only applies to the terrestrial biosphere .

the terresrtial bioshpere is the way it is today - in response to the conditions it encountered in its evolution - and all other permutations failed to take hold

and extra terestrial biosphere will do the same - and if based on a diferent chemistry - will potentially flourish in environs that not terrestrial life could withstand

Originally posted by Spike360
Sounds like he was refering to the drake equation. It also sounds like more and more scientists are jumping on the bandwagon for disclosure.

Just about all scientists already believe (and have believed for a while) that life most likely exists elsewhere in the vast universe. Scientist well understand the size of the universe and the idea that there are probably many planets that are able to harbor life -- including intelligent life. I don't really understand how this finding -- however interesting it is -- would affect that scientific opinion.

This estimate of 100 million -- if true -- would be more of a confirmation of already accepted ideas about life among most scientists than a new revelation.

Even most Alien visitation skeptics don't dispute that idea that life probably exists out there somewhere -- they only dispute the idea that they are visiting the Earth.

[edit on 7/29/2010 by Soylent Green Is People]

Originally posted by A boy in a dress
This is great and sceptics that frequent here in the Alien
and Ufo forum will have to eat their words, when you wheel
out:
The Grays
The Reptilians
The Mantis-like leader
The broken debris from Roswell
and all the guys who come here talking about their
membership of The Galactic Federation.

Unless all those 'I am an alien' or 'Here's absolute proof' threads
are rubbish... and THIS one is the true information.

I await with anticipation.

I do not see anything new here with a guess of 100 million planets within our galaxy that just may be in the right position around a G type star, and it is an easy guess to do when we say that 200 billion stars are in our galaxy. All one needs to do is estimate how many would be a G type star and then figure how many might have planets with at least one in the Kuiper belt range.

So we have that and 100 million is not a bad guess, but how do we go from this to a Star Trek Federation scenario of aliens around us? As a Skeptic what mostly bothers me are the huge leaps that many seem to make to get to their little Star Trek style utopia.

To add in a few other discriminators we would start with 100 million planets by assuming every one of them has life but we would still need to subtract the ones that are too young to let the slow process of evolution to actually evolve to very complex life forms. We also need to subtract planets that end up like Mars where their core solidifies too soon or Venus with the other extreme of an out of control greenhouse effect that makes that planet hotter than Mercury. Looking around us we can see that earth is an extremely delicate balance that would be a lot more uncommon than a Mars or Venus type planet.

Whatever that much smaller number is we also need to look at life in general. When we say life we are not saying space faring aliens, but just basic life, so to say “life” we can all say yep, but as we add in the stipulations of what that life would be, we once again cut the number down. Looking at earth we can say that trillions of different types of life forms have come and gone, but after 4.5 billion years we have had only one that “may” meet the restrictive capabilities of intelligence, desire and physical design to become space fairing. I can’t say we are very common can you? Also we started rather weak and if it wasn’t for the dinos getting wiped in what was most likely by an asteroid we would not be here and the dinos would still rule.

So with all this above we still have great distances to overcome when everything comes together perfectly. On one hand many easily say the possibilities are endless, but then they blow off that we are also dealing with endless distances to, and fall back to Star Trek with warp drives, singularities, wormholes etc to solve the distance dilemma. In the end we are still very alone unless aliens have always been here around us in some fashion, but in any case I don’t see that believers are a single step closer to anything that may lean towards making their beliefs factual.

[edit on 29-7-2010 by Xtrozero]

Originally posted by ATSZOMBIE
What does this mean? It means yet again, that those who proclaim 'the world is flat' days are numbered. That not only is life common, that they have & are here already.

Oh, really? Show me the number of these Earth-like planets they've absolutely confirmed life to be on. Go ahead.

That's what I thought.

reply to post by D.Wolf


thanks for posting those quotes from the article. Its nice to see someone correct this douchebag who used the term "earth-like"

ive been into exoplanets since 1995. Its a young science and terminology can change but this is how exoplanet hunters describe other planets.

Gas giants = jupiter etc everyone knows what these are
super earth= between 2 -10 earth mass, nothing like earth just a name given to planets becuase evryone got excited when we awere able to detect them and gave them a nice name.
terrestrial planets = less than 2 earth mass, small rocky planets. Earth, mars, venus, mercury
even if we found one of these in the HZ of a a G type star it would be classed as a terrestrial planet in the HZ. Until we get spectral analysis of the atmosphere.

Earth-Like= this is a very specific description. Its used to describe an earth analogue which is a planet 0.75-2 earth mass in the HZ of a G type star with oxygen, nitrogen , co2, ozone atmosphere.

It annoys me enough when the press use "earth-like" but to see a kepler scientist use it for these planets they have detected is very disturbing. When they are nowhere near earthlike.



[edit on 30-7-2010 by yeti101]