Our Planet Is Among the First of Many, Many Earths
Throughout the universe, trapped in the halos of dark matter, there is enough planet-making material to create at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 more Earth-like planets. A billion trillion of them. In the Milky Way alone, that would mean another 5 billion Earth-like planets over time.
That’s according to new research by astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, whose findings suggest that Earth, and the life it supports, is only among the first in a massive sprawl of potentially habitable planets that will eventually form in the universe.
“We show that this would imply at least a 92 percent chance that we are not the only civilization the universe will ever have,” wrote Peter Behroozi and Molly Peeples, whose conclusions are drawn from a mix of Hubble and Kepler data.
*For those of us who are alive and living on Earth at this moment, these findings represent a new sort of contextualization for humanity’s place in the universe. They suggest we are, or will be, an ancient civilization.
“If you’re aware of the golden records that Carl Sagan had attached to the Voyager missions,” Behroozi said, “it’s amazing to think that it may not be any current civilization that discovers them, but instead one that hasn’t even been born and won’t be born for another trillion years!”
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/all-the-future-earths/413017/
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