Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'
Found on BBC News on Saturday, 14 February 2009
There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, a US conference has heard.
"Not only are they probably habitable but they probably are also going to be inhabited," Dr Boss told BBC News. "But I think that most likely the nearby 'Earths' are going to be inhabited with things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago." That means bacterial lifeforms.
Recent work at Edinburgh University tried to quantify how many intelligent civilisations might be out there. The research suggested there could be thousands of them.
And unless the Warp drive is invented, we probably will never ever have contact with any of them, considering that even the speed of light is too slow to allow any sort of communication or at least a view of the current state. Every image we will see from those planets will be hundreds of thousands of years old. Time enough for numerous civilizations to arise from the dust and to vanish again in it.