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Newly Discovered Planet Orbits "Backward"

Does the debris of supernovas "quickly" coalesce to form several new suns and solar systems? Would not most large suns disappear over time as they explode to be replaced by mini-suns that simply eventually burn out without exploding? What would be the mechanism for creating new giant stars? The older the galaxy the fewer the giant stars?
 
Ah hell while I'm pondering I'll throw in one more ponderfication: Could galaxies be the remnants/ debris of super super big novas?
 
As I understand it there are lots of galaxies with relatively little gas and dust (giant ellipticals for example); gas and dust clouds are what we think is required for a galaxy to have generations of stars being born. The oldest galaxies have used up a great deal of their star-making material...
 
makaya325 said:
While it is probable that life exists out there, it is not inconcievable to cherry-pick 30000 stars out of 100 billion that don't have planets.
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You still have not provided any plausible criteria for such "cherry-picking", other than "Population I stars" -- which are majority of stars in Galactic disk, rather than "1 in 100" as you earlier claimed.
 
makaya325 said:
While it is probable that life exists out there, it is not inconcievable to cherry-pick 30000 stars out of 100 billion that don't have planets.
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Yes it is inconceivable---that's how statistical sampling works. Imagine you had a bucket containing 100 billion marbles, of which only 30,000 were (say) black and the rest white. Imagine reaching into that bucket and pulling out 100 marbles. The odds of drawing even one "lucky" black marble, in this world where black marbles are rare, is 1/30,000. The odds of drawing mostly black marbles is infinitesimally small. (You might say, "I didn't mean 100 billion so literally." That's good, that's how this works. What numbers could you plug in, such that it does become vaguely plausible that we'd draw 50-50 black and white marbles? Answer: this only becomes plausible if the overall black/white mixture is in the ballpark of 50-50. For example, if the real proportion is 36-74, then we'd have about a 5% chance of making a 50-50 draw.)

Sorry, Makaya, you are incorrect. Astronomers have looked for planets around a very common type of star---isolated Pop I stars---and the evidence tells us that this entire class of stars tends to have planets. That's tens of billions of planets. There is no evidence whatsoever for the sort of ultra-freak-statistical occurrence that you are invoking for your "we got lucky" hypothesis.
 
Tumbleweed said:
And the direction the whole schmere rotates is random? Or do all the solar systems/ stars rotate in the same direction, as looked at from "above". If so , why? And our galaxy "picked" a direction to rotate. More randomness? Or is there a kind of right hand rule for motors going on here
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The birth of the solar system goes something like this:

1) Giant blob shaped cloud of matter.

2) Gravity starts to condense the cloud.

3) As it condenses, it will almost certainly start to spin. In order for a collapsing cloud to NOT spin, every particle would have to fall directly towards the center without any momentum in any other direction. Needless to say, that's unlikely.

4) As it spins it flattens into a disk like a lump of pizza dough flattens when you spin it over head.

5) The center becomes the Sun the disk becomes the planets.

6) The direction of the sun's rotation matches the revolution of the planets.


A planet orbiting "backwards" is one that revolves in the opposite direction of the sun and the other planets. The retrograde planet is probably the result of a collosion or is a captured rogue planet.
 
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There is no evidence whatsoever for the sort of ultra-freak-statistical occurrence that you are invoking for your "we got lucky" hypothesis.
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Yes there is: Absence of Alien life :D
 
makaya325 said:
Yes there is: Absence of Alien life :D
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Once again, you have been claiming repeatedly that "planets must not be common" and taking the point "aliens have not contacted us" as evidence.

Given that we have no evidence whatsoever regarding (a) what fraction of planets have life, (b) what fraction of that life is intelligent, or (c) what fraction the the time an intelligent civilization spends beaming ultra-powerful radio signals towards the Earth ...

Given the evidence "we see lots of planets but we don't see aliens", which fact is easier to believe:

1) Our planet observations are a one-in-a-gazillion fluke, so incredibly lucky as to make Guildenstern's run of coin-flipping look like an everyday occurrence.

2) Few intelligent civilizations would devote terawatts of power, for millions of years on end, to the completely fruitless task of broadcasting narrow-band radio signals into the sky.

I find the latter very, very, very easy to believe. You must realize---that's what it would takes for an alien civilization to be detected on Earth. We're not going to pick up, e.g., the equivalent of terrestrial radio stations.
 
Few intelligent civilizations would devote terawatts of power, for millions of years on end, to the completely fruitless task of broadcasting narrow-band radio signals into the sky.
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If this is true, then why does the Fermi Paradox even exist?
 
makaya325 said:
If this is true, then why does the Fermi Paradox even exist?
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It doesn't exist.

It's only a paradox if "intelligent life" automatically equals "interstellar contact". It doesn't. There are laws of physics (speed of light, 1/r^2, etc.) that make contact harder than Fermi anticipated.
 
ben m said:
It doesn't exist.

It's only a paradox if "intelligent life" automatically equals "interstellar contact". It doesn't. There are laws of physics (speed of light, 1/r^2, etc.) that make contact harder than Fermi anticipated.
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So intelligent life does'nt automatically equate to technological wielding civilizations?
 
makaya325 said:
So intelligent life does'nt automatically equate to technological wielding civilizations?
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I have no idea about that. I'm willing to bet that "technological wielding civilization" does not equate to "absurdly powerful narrow-band radio broadcasts into space", though.

Heck, humans here on Earth are (in many fields) decreasing their narrowband output. The US just switched from analog TV broadcasts to digital, with (I think) a distinct broadening of the signal which makes it much less detectable from afar. In thirty years, it's very plausible to imagine that almost all Earth content either (a) comes over a fiber or (b) comes over some local broadband cellular sort of thing with almost no leakage to space. If that happens (and ignoring, e.g., miltary radar)---aliens would look at Earth and say that it went through one 100-year radio loud phase in its 4.3 billion year history. And not all that loud, either---not, for example, loud enough for SETI to have heard had it come from the nearest stars.
 
ben m said:
In thirty years, it's very plausible to imagine that almost all Earth content either (a) comes over a fiber or (b) comes over some local broadband cellular sort of thing with almost no leakage to space.
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re "almost no leakage into space" - I've seen interesting concepts for V-band (~60 GHz) local wireless networks. 60 GHz is absorbed fairly quickly by our atmosphere. It's not too tough to make a network that works over a few dozen meters, but beyond that, the signal drops off pretty quickly. For an observer above our atmosphere, the signal would be attenuated at least 120db. For non-RFers, that's a factor of 1,000,000,000,000.

That's "almost no leakage to space" in my book.

AFAIK, nobody can build V-band hardware cheaply enough for home use yet (by 3+ orders of magnitude), but RF technology marches on . . . and it would have some real advantages for cellular networks in densely populated areas.
 
ben m said:
I have no idea about that. I'm willing to bet that "technological wielding civilization" does not equate to "absurdly powerful narrow-band radio broadcasts into space", though.

Heck, humans here on Earth are (in many fields) decreasing their narrowband output. The US just switched from analog TV broadcasts to digital, with (I think) a distinct broadening of the signal which makes it much less detectable from afar. In thirty years, it's very plausible to imagine that almost all Earth content either (a) comes over a fiber or (b) comes over some local broadband cellular sort of thing with almost no leakage to space. If that happens (and ignoring, e.g., miltary radar)---aliens would look at Earth and say that it went through one 100-year radio loud phase in its 4.3 billion year history. And not all that loud, either---not, for example, loud enough for SETI to have heard had it come from the nearest stars.
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I agree. Also, it is a pretty bad assumption that aliens use Radio-waves to communicate, heck, they may see us, but are not responding.

Earth: come in et!

Aliens: Sheesh, look at those pathetic earthlings. Cant they realize that they are the runt of the litter of this galaxy? Now, back to my massage
 
Well, if life exists elsewhere -and the statistics say there are certainly oodles of earth like planets out there - the question becomes: did intelligent life and logic arising there figure out how to travel between the stars using relativity as their guide. If 'wormholes' exist, then statistics dictate that one of those intelligent life forms must have figured it out
 
makaya325 said:
I agree. Also, it is a pretty bad assumption that aliens use Radio-waves to communicate...
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Radio waves are probably the best way to communicate with other stars that we know of. They are fairly easy to generate and travel long distances without too much trouble.
 
KingMerv00 said:
Radio waves are probably the best way to communicate with other stars that we know of. They are fairly easy to generate and travel long distances without too much trouble.
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What if the aliens use a large light beacon to capture our attention?
 
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