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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (7965)	3/7/2001 6:41:39 PM
From: thames_sider	Respond to of 82486

Hmm. Yep. Slash-and-burn on a stellar scale... like cosmic locusts. Or, at best, refugees. Which does sometimes appear to me one of the more likely models for humanity, should it survive long enough to reach other planets <sigh> Veering briefly back from SF to the now, did you see this from the AAAS last month? We may not have the means to detect them yet but there must be billions of Earth-like planets out there in our galaxy. This striking suggestion emerges from a new statistical analysis of the light coming from nearby stars. ... [the] study looked at more than 450 middle-aged stars like our Sun and about 20 that were entering old age. All were within about 325 light-years of Earth. The analysis indicated most had high iron content in their photospheres, or on their "surfaces". ... "Something like 50% or higher of these stars have accreted more than an Earth-mass of terrestrial material [the Earth is about 30% iron]. ... "Now, the implication here is that there must be something going on around those stars in order to accrete that amount of material, and we know from our own Solar System that this accretion process is not 100% efficient. Therefore, it's likely these stars still have material in orbit around them in the form of terrestrial-type bodies. There are planets there." news.bbc.co.uk Certainly boosts the odds of there being other life in the galaxy... sentient or not.