“PlanetQuest – Exoplanet Exploration
Excerpt:
CURRENT PLANET COUNT: 430
stars with planets: 363
Earthlike planets: 0
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/

Not a good batting average thus far creek;”

From a little deeper in your own citation: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.go....._index.cfm

“If planets like Earth exist, with smaller masses and longer orbital periods, their discovery will require more sensitive instruments and years of precise, sustained observations.”

1. Phil Skell
2. Michael Lynch
3. Masotoshi Nei

At least 4 Nobel Prize Winners:

1. Richard Smalley (Chemistry)
2. Ernst Chain (Medicine)
3. Christian Anfinsen (Medicine)
4. Eugene Wigner (Physics)

High time we drop BELIEF in evolution as a metric for science literacy. Polling for knowledge is ok, but polling for belief is inappropriate.

My apologies, your comment appeared after I replied.

Did you all not read what I wrote? If there are any more comments about this I will delete them, this thread of yours has nothing to do with the actual post under which you are posting.

for example Vanadium must be present at the right quantity for life:

to little no life:

Vanadium
essential to plant and animal life

Discovered in: 1801

Discovered by: Andreas del Rio of Mexico

Description: Named after the Scandinavian goddess Vanadis, vanadium is a soft, shiny, bright silvery-white metal. It is corrosion-resistant, except to most acids, and despite being a soft metal in pure form, it hardens and strengthens other metals in alloys by a tremendous degree. Vanadium-steel alloys are used in armor plating, piston rods, crankshafts and other uses where a very strong metal is needed, such as frames in high-rise buildings and oil drilling platforms. Vanadium is also used in ceramics, glass and dyes as well as a chemical catalyst.

Biological Rating: Necessary for full health of plants and animals.

Biological Benefits: Vanadium is an essential trace element for most species. Vanadium is believed to be important in bone development. Deficiencies in Vanadium reduce growth and impair reproduction in rats and chickens.
http://www.mii.org/periodic/V.htm

Yet Too much we are poisoned

Vanadium poisoning
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/...../intro.htm

you can check each element here if you want:

Periodic Table – Interactive web page for each element
http://www.mii.org/periodic/MIIperiodicChart.html

This also plays into the terraforming of early microbial life:

Sulfate-reducing bacteria helped prepare the earth for advanced life by detoxifying the primeval earth and oceans of poisonous levels of heavy metals while depositing them as relatively inert metal ores. Metal ores which are very useful for modern man, as well as fairly easy for man to extract today (mercury, cadmium, zinc, cobalt, arsenic, chromate, tellurium and copper to name a few). To this day, sulfate-reducing bacteria maintain an essential minimal level of these heavy metals in the ecosystem which are high enough so as to be available to the biological systems of the higher life forms that need them yet low enough so as not to be poisonous to those very same higher life forms.

Bacterial Heavy Metal Detoxification and Resistance Systems:
Excerpt: Bacterial plasmids contain genetic determinants for resistance systems for Hg2+ (and organomercurials), Cd2+, AsO2, AsO43-, CrO4 2-, TeO3 2-, Cu2+, Ag+, Co2+, Pb2+, and other metals of environmental concern.
http://www.springerlink.com/co.....04577v8t3/
http://www.int-res.com/article.....26p203.pdf

The role of bacteria in hydrogeochemistry, metal cycling and ore deposit formation:
Textures of sulfide minerals formed by SRB (sulfate-reducing bacteria) during bioremediation (most notably pyrite and sphalerite) have textures reminiscent of those in certain sediment-hosted ores, supporting the concept that SRB may have been directly involved in forming ore minerals. http://www.goldschmidt2009.org...../A1161.pdf

shoot Creek the level of fine tuning for microbial life is extraordinary:

Engineering and Science Magazine – Caltech – March 2010
Excerpt: “Without these microbes, the planet would run out of biologically available nitrogen in less than a month,” Realizations like this are stimulating a flourishing field of “geobiology” – the study of relationships between life and the earth. One member of the Caltech team commented, “If all bacteria and archaea just stopped functioning, life on Earth would come to an abrupt halt.” Microbes are key players in earth’s nutrient cycles. Dr. Orphan added, “…every fifth breath you take, thank a microbe.”
http://www.creationsafaris.com.....#20100316a

Planet’s Nitrogen Cycle Overturned – Oct. 2009
Excerpt: “Ammonia is a waste product that can be toxic to animals.,,, archaea can scavenge nitrogen-containing ammonia in the most barren environments of the deep sea, solving a long-running mystery of how the microorganisms can survive in that environment. Archaea therefore not only play a role, but are central to the planetary nitrogen cycles on which all life depends.,,,the organism can survive on a mere whiff of ammonia – 10 nanomolar concentration, equivalent to a teaspoon of ammonia salt in 10 million gallons of water.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....132656.htm

Microbial life can easily live without us; we, however, cannot survive without the global catalysis and environmental transformations it provides. – Paul G. Falkowski – Professor Geological Sciences – Rutgers

Not a good batting average thus far creek;

My point was rather on relying on back of the envelope calculations, we actually try and look for these things so we can have some sort of Feldman-Cousins upper bound on the local density of earth-like planets.

In regards to you links: as much as I would like to believe that our “vanadium quantity in crust” must be within 10% of the value on earth, I don’t. I don’t think the analysis is made in good faith, or presents honest knowledge of any of these probabilities (particularly correlations).

I’m gavelling this discussion of centrality. If you want to discuss it further, send each other private messages or discuss it on another blog.

There are better places to be relative to the celestial bodies you want to observe and study.

Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot
http://connect.tangle.com/view.....be92fe078e

“I’m looking forward to the results from Kepler, so maybe we have some idea what ‘N’ is. (Where N is the density of earth-like planets in our neighborhood.)”

,,,,and I found this NASA site:

PlanetQuest – Exoplanet Exploration
Excerpt:
CURRENT PLANET COUNT: 430
stars with planets: 363
Earthlike planets: 0
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/

Not a good batting average thus far creek;

The thing I wanted to bring to your attention is that Dr. Ross’s team made the most generous assumptions for suns that are able to host planets similar to Earth and still the probability turns out to be:

Probability for occurrence of all 322 parameters =10^388
Dependency factors estimate =10^96
Longevity requirements estimate =10^14
Probability for occurrence of all 322 parameters = 10^304
Maximum possible number of life support bodies in universe =10^22

Thus, less than 1 chance in 10^282 (million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion) exists that even one such life-support body would occur anywhere in the universe without invoking divine miracles.

http://www.reasons.org/probabi.....h-apr-2004
http://www.johnankerberg.com/A.....304RFT.pdf

But even if you had a earth capable of supporting life creek you would still run into the origin of life problem:

The probabilities against life “spontaneously” originating are simply overwhelming:

Signature in the Cell – Book Review – Ken Peterson
Excerpt: the “simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium — a tiny bacterium that inhabits the human urinary tract — requires ‘only’ 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions…(562,000 bases of DNA…to assemble those proteins).” ,,, amino acids have to congregate in a definite specified sequence in order to make something that “works.” First of all they have to form a “peptide” bond and this seems to only happen about half the time in experiments. Thus, the probability of building a chain of 150 amino acids containing only peptide links is about one chance in 10 to the 45th power.
In addition, another requirement for living things is that the amino acids must be the “left-handed” version. But in “abiotic amino-acid production” the right- and left-handed versions are equally created. Thus, to have only left-handed, only peptide bonds between amino acids in a chain of 150 would be about one chance in 10 to the 90th. Moreover, in order to create a functioning protein the “amino acids, like letters in a meaningful sentence, must link up in functionally specified sequential arrangements.” It turns out that the probability for this is about one in 10 to the 74th. Thus, the probability of one functional protein of 150 amino acids forming by random chance is (1 in) 10 to the 164th. If we assume some minimally complex cell requires 250 different proteins then the probability of this arrangement happening purely by chance is one in 10 to the 164th multiplied by itself 250 times or one in 10 to the 41,000th power.
http://www.spectrummagazine.or.....ature_cell

First-Ever Blueprint of ‘Minimal Cell’ Is More Complex Than Expected – Nov. 2009
Excerpt: A network of research groups,, approached the bacterium at three different levels. One team of scientists described M. pneumoniae’s transcriptome, identifying all the RNA molecules, or transcripts, produced from its DNA, under various environmental conditions. Another defined all the metabolic reactions that occurred in it, collectively known as its metabolome, under the same conditions. A third team identified every multi-protein complex the bacterium produced, thus characterising its proteome organisation.
“At all three levels, we found M. pneumoniae was more complex than we expected,”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....173027.htm

No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organism with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms’ genomes programmed?” – David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Three Subsets of Sequence Complexity and Their Relevance to Biopolymeric Information,” Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling, Vol. 2, 11 August 2005, page 8 http://www.biomedcentral.com/c.....2-2-29.pdf

Co creeky, I take it you believe all this happened on another planet somewhere despite these odds, I have one question for you,,, Do you want to play poker?