February 23, 2016
MAKES YOU WISH WE COULD BURN HIM AT THE STAKE ALL OVER AGAIN:
Exoplanet Census Suggests Earth Is Special after All : A new tally proposes that roughly 700 quintillion terrestrial exoplanets are likely to exist across the observable universe--most vastly different from Earth (Shannon Hall, February 19, 2016, Scientific American)
We are all Designist now....More than 400 years ago Renaissance scientist Nicolaus Copernicus reduced us to near nothingness by showing that our planet is not the center of the solar system. With every subsequent scientific revolution, most other privileged positions in the universe humans might have held dear have been further degraded, revealing the cold truth that our species is the smallest of specks on a speck of a planet, cosmologically speaking. A new calculation of exoplanets suggests that Earth is just one out of a likely 700 million trillion terrestrial planets in the entire observable universe. But the average age of these planets--well above Earth's age--and their typical locations--in galaxies vastly unlike the Milky Way--just might turn the Copernican principle on its head.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 23, 2016 6:17 PM