From: Aaron McBride (amcbride@jps.net)
Date: Tue Apr 30 2002 - 10:10:46 MDT
At 10:47 AM 4/30/2002 -0400, you wrote:
>Ne: It is obviously possible that a significant bottleneck may be discovered
>here at some point, for example, many of the planets that have been
>discovered thus far are large and in close orbits to their suns suggesting
>that it might be difficult for earth-sized e planets to establish themselves
>in the appropriate orbital radius. However, nothing so far says that we
>should expect that fp is zero, indeed, quite the opposite.
>
>Mark
>
>Mark Walker
>Research Associate (Philosophy), Trinity College, University of Toronto,
>Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Evolution and Technology
>(http://www.transhumanist.com)
>Editor-in-Chief, Transhumanity (http://www.transhumanism.com)
>Home Page: http://www.markalanwalker.com
The reason that the only thing we've discovered so far is large planets in
close orbits is that that's all we can see with the tools we're using
(detecting planets by the wobble they cause on their sun). It does not
suggest anything about the number of earth-like planets.
-Aaron
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