In the scientific paper (released in early February 2011) the figure for the percentage of stars with planets is listed as 34% which is closer to 1 in 3 than it is to 1 in 2. Where then is the “1 in 2 stars with a planet” estimate that Borucki mentions coming from? Is it an extrapolation to what the final numbers will be once Kepler is totally finished observing, or, more conservatively, is it what Kepler has seen up until, say, early 2011?

How easy your lives must be…

If you believe that, then join us. Don’t you want your life to be easier?

Fifth, if you are going to play odds, it has been hypothesized that the odds of the chemicals for the first cell to have been in the same area at the same time is along the lines of 10 raised to the 40,000th power.

That has _never_, to my knowledge, been hypothesized in biology. It is a religious argument, that you can familiarize yourself with on Talk Origins, as creationist standard claim CB010.1: “Even the simplest, most primitive forms of life — bacteria — are incredibly complex, much too complex to have arisen by chance.”

This claim is irrelevant to evolution, such as the evolution of cells. It is also irrelevant to abiogenesis because nobody claims that chemical to biological evolution arose purely by random chance anymore than evolution in general is purely random chance. It is also irrelevant to chemistry and physics, since using the same argument a protein could never fold into a working enzyme, the number of conformations are larger than the number of atoms in the universe and it would take too long to work through them all.

The article is correct, we do believe for good reasons, such as the speed and ease of life arising on Earth and the overwhelming number of habitable planets (already known to be more than 50!), that we will observe inhabited planets elsewhere. Spectroscopy can reveal many indicators of life (such as oxygen on cool planets).

How easy your lives must be…

Easy and illuminating. Step out of your cave and discover the world with the rest of us, the light of Enlightenment (science) will in general make you happier.

That exoplanets are more frequent for larger orbits means that Earth analogs aren’t rare! The estimate was ~ 1/50 – 1/200 of stars having habitable Earth sized planets with ~ 1 year orbit.

You said “…the more planets we add with no life…”. They are now finding new planets all the time but we don’t know for sure if they have life or not…so your argument is just babble. We know that many of them probably don’t have life but we are not even sure that Mars is totally dead and it’s right next door. So we are pretty sure that life does not exist on 6 planets… Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. If there are 50 billion or so in the galaxy, then we have a long way to go before any statements like yours have any validity at all.

I also hope that I am still alive when we finally do pick up signals from some other civilization. It will be fun to watch all these brain-dead anti-science people have to eat their words.

I’m no astrophysicist and doubt some scientific theories… but I’m at least open-minded enough to read about what we are discovering and what the scientists say.

The chance of life springing up can never be more than the total amount of planets in our universe in any case.

This rests on the assumption that life can only arise on planets, which may or may not turn out to be true.

Its not surprising with a few hundred millions years simple cells were created by the Earth.

As to the probability the figure you quote is unreal and comes from a comic book or something. You cant put a probability on something which you cannot at least test the hypothesis’ .

Scientists are presently trying to ascertain these factors which range from 1 in 1 in the case of our planet to 1 in 50 billion (The current amount of exoplanets). The chance of life springing up can never be more than the total amount of planets in our universe in any case.

At no point can you ever get 10 to the 40000th power as the probability unless as i said youre reading a comic book.