Nobody Calls

[billroper]

Via Instapundit, this article that points out that our solar system is a pretty rare bird.

Of course, I've suspected that for a while.

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

And they wonder why people go off science. Talk about not letting you have your cake *or* eat it. No, you can't think that the human race is special, because look at all these biiillions and biiillions of stars and planets. Oh, but wait--they're probably all going to be empty. And we can't get to them anyway.

No gods, no aliens, no FTL drive. What did we do to get banged up in here? I wanna lawyer!

*starts rattling celestial tin cup along bars of universal cage*

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I'm not qualified to critique the new model, but I imagine that the computational complexity of a developing solar system is roughly comparable to that of the earth's climate, and we definitely don't have the last word on the latter, even though we certainly have a lot more data to work from.

I've been concerned with the general logic of looking at the planets we've found so far and concluding that we have a very unusual system for a long time. We only see a lot of big planets close to their stars because those big planets close to their stars are at the limits of what we can detect. By being very clever and very lucky, we've found evidence of a few smaller planets, but we can only pick them up when we catch them lined up just right. When we don't see something that we couldn't see if it was there, we can't conclude that it's not there.

I may just be guilty of wishful thinking, but I expect that in another few decades (assuming of course that civilization doesn't collapse) we'll have definitely found extrasolar planets that are as much worth checking for life (both in the sense of native life and the sense of humans going to live there) as Mars is now. I'm hoping we'll also have learned some new physics that allows us to do it.

[starmalachite.livejournal.com]

It'll be very interesting to hear what Frank Drake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Drake/) makes of this.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

I find myself wondering about the possibility that WE are the "elder Ghodz" - that is, the oldest civilization there is. SOMEbody has to be, don't they? And that if there ARE others, they're just all behind us (as in pre-radio)?