Friday, February 04, 2011

Do we stutter alone in the universe?

Today, I want to talk about life on other planets.

The Kepler telescope has made a huge step in understanding the likelihood of extra-terrestrial lifeforms. The telescope is fine-tuned to look at the light-emission of stars, and detect fluctuations due to the passing of a planet in the foreground. They found 5 passings of Earth-size planets with acceptable temperature while observing 156'000 stars. So roughly at least 1/3 * 10^(-4) of all stars have one habitable planet.

The universe contains about 3*10^32 stars, so roughly 300'000'000'000'000'000'000'000'000'000'000 stars.

So we have about 10^28, i.e. 1'000'000'000'000'000'000'000, habitable stars in the universe.
All of theses are candidates for life.

Assume that only in 1:1'000'000 life develops, so 10^22 planets.

Assume that only in 1:1'000'000 multi-cellular life develops, so 10^14 planets.

Assume that only in 1:1'000'000 human-like intelligence develops, so 10^8 planets.

I further assume that ALL these human-like intelligence civilisations need a form of communication similar to human speech. And in some of those beings this functionality will be disturbed but not completely broken, and they will also react to this dysfunction.

So there should roughly be 100 million planets with stutterers!! WOW!

But there is only ONE TheStutteringBrain blog in the WHOLE universe. Keep on reading this blog! ;-)

2 comments:

Tal said...

But what is the probability that this is the best blog on stuttering among those 100 million planets with stutterers? Assume 1% of those planets have blogs and 10% of those planets have blogs about stuttering. Without specific knowledge about their blogs we shouldn't assume that the best stuttering blog on one of these planets is either better or worse than yours.

So the probability that yours is the best stuttering blog in the universe is only 1 in 10,000. I think I will start trying to find some of these superior stuttering blogs.

Tom Weidig said...

Absolutely, I only claim uniqueness!