The Galaxy May Have 100 Billion Earth-like Planets

Is life on Earth special? Not according to Carnegie Institution's astronomer Alan Boss. The author of the new book The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets predicted that there may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way:

[Boss] made the prediction based on the number of "super-Earths" -- planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter -- discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.

Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.

"Now that's not saying that they're all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs," he said.

"But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."

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The title of the thread is wrong. It's not the "galaxy," but the "universe." [Even then, the title probably would be wrong, as there probably are NO other "Earth-like planets."]
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I suspect there are 9 bazillion kooks writing books about earth-like planets and or extra terrestrial life using extremely limited data with a margin of error 100's of times larger then their data sample, wishful thinking, and pure "what will sell books" speculation.
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