Just How Many Habitable Planets — Really?
Still more press problems that get evolutionists excited, thinking they have a smoking gun to blow away all of creation science. They get going with a "take that!" attitude when they get (yet again) misleading information from the press based in incomplete information from scientists. But if they bothered to do a bit more reading (and thinking), these fans of evolutionism might be a bit slower to be full of glee and have their joy turn into embarrassment. Again.
One absurd estimate for "habitable" planets in the universe reached forty billion. This "science" is based on luck and odds, not observations. It is also based on evolutionary presuppositions and assumptions. Remember, the press wants to make money on sensational claims, such as saying a planet is very much like Earth if we lived on a molten blob. The scientific community does not help much, since they want to make money and give sensational information themselves. One thing to always remember is that terms need to be defined. In this case, what does "habitable" really mean?
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech |
You can read about the errors and important factors they did not tell you if you fire your jets over to "Cosmic Lottery: How Many Habitable Planets?"News media ran with a suggestion that one in five stars has a habitable planet, but they didn’t read the fine print.Here’s how it came out in the mainstream media:
- “One in five suns has habitable world: Astronomers have estimated how many of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy hosts a potentially habitable planet.” (BBC News)
- “One in Five Stars has Earth-Sized Planet in Habitable Zone: Scientists from University of California, Berkeley, and University of Hawaii, Manoa,have statistically determined that twenty percent of Sun-like stars in our galaxy have Earth-sized planets that could host life.” (NASA Astrobiology magazine)
- “How Common Are Habitable Planets? One in Five Sun-Like Stars May HaveEarth-Size, Potentially Habitable Planets.” (Science Daily)
At least Science Daily’s headline was worded slightly less conclusively. PNAS just issued a correction to the paper on which the claim was based. That correction points out the huge error bars in making such estimates: