Habitable Planets Overstated By News Media (Again)

There's an article in the Washington Post regarding a statement made by astronomers that the potential number of habitable Earthlike planets is 40 billion (in the whole universe), which is a very silly claim to make. What it actually says is how many planets so far detected, best case, are in the Goldilocks Zone, which is a certain range distance from a yellow sun like ours. Unfortunately, there's another 33 important feedback loops, most important being axial tilt, magnetic field, and a moon for tidal action which is why there are air breathing animals instead of merely sea life. If any of those 33 characteristics are wrong? No life. And certainly no intelligent life. So if you think of each feedback loop as an indexing exponential, and remember that even Earth itself has been deadlocked into ice ages a few times which ended due to either extreme volcanism or asteroid/comet impacts (very unlikely events but still necessary for life), the odds of those 40 billion having the rest are ridiculously small. Then throw in the fact that there's been some kind of detectable life on earth for 3.6 billion years, but we've only been modern for 133,000 of them, and only capable of radio broadcasts detectable from space since 1930, 80 years of that, the reality of the situation hits you compared to space being something on the order of 25 billion light years across and you've got maybe 20 potentially habitable worlds capable of supporting human life and might have evolved some able to send and receive radio signals. And there's no FTL travel, no warp. Its just the cold hard vastness.

Good thing we're still childish enough to think aliens would like us. The other upshot is its a great reason to train people into thinking hard about terraforming and the biological singularity so people can live in space on lower resource demands, with no bone loss and no issues with dizziness or gamma radiation. Larry Niven's article from CalTech in 1977 called "Bigger Than Worlds" really makes you think. Niven is a hard scifi author who hasn't had his books made into movies yet but probably will when the current batch of idiots in Hollywood die or they move the stories from LA to Vancouver and get outside the Hollywood ecosystem. Canadians like real scifi more than Hollywood Smarmodons, and American nerds import a lot of it. Stargate and Eureka are both Canadian scifi. Those nerds go on to be mechanical, electrical, and structural engineers building dreams that Hollywood ignores for the sappy ending or product placement (from Taco Bell!).  Ahem. Niven's article is worth a read and it makes you think, hard, about the future. Its great that the new Enders Game movie finally came out after 20 years of threats, even if they gutted essential aspects of the story, including the value of Enders siblings and the two kids he murders and his personal anguish as he becomes a sociopath-monster to save humanity he has little connection to. Disappointing to strip those bits out. That's like making Fellowship of the Ring and leaving out the barrow wights, who provide the swords capable of killing the witch-king at the penultimate battle at Minas Tirith. Without those, everybody dies, and it was left out. They had to add it in later, years later, because of hue and cry by fans like me. It is likely someone years from now will add back the scenes of Ender's siblings and restore the film to what it should have been. Without context it fails.

And that's the case with the article as well. Without those rather important 33 other feedback loops which enable life, and the scale of the universe, the article is misleading at best, and grossly, childishly simplified at worst. Where's the point of writing stupid articles about science anyway? Are you trying to hurt your own reputation, Washington Post? Really? Smart people want the proper details and scale, otherwise we get annoyed and blog about all the ways you failed the public. Like this.