The Possibility of Alien Life is Now Extraordinarily High, Gee Who Could Have Guessed =P: An International Team of Astronomers Have Reached The Most Definitive Conclusion

The Possibility of Alien Life Is Now (Almost) Impossible to Deny 

""One with profound implications: our galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets. Of those, most are small planets like ours. Statistically, every star would have at least one planet.

This means that the chances of life and habitable planets in our galaxy alone is overwhelmingly high. So high that it's impossible to deny that it's out there. The only question is how much of that is little dumb critters* and how much is civilized.

According to Stephen Kane—at NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at CalTech in Pasadena and one of the authors of the study—"not only are planets common in the galaxy, but there are more small planets than large ones. This is encouraging news for investigations into habitable planets."

Kane is being too conservative when he says that this is "encouraging news". This is amazingly great news! The number of Earth-like planets is much higher than Jupiter-sized giants. The rough estimate is that there are at least 10 billion terrestrial planets across our galaxy alone.

That is a mind-blowing number.

Couple this number with the latest calculations that have extended the goldilocks zone, the area where life could happen around stars. And then add the fact that life happens spontaneously, even under the most extreme conditions, and the idea of a Milky Way thriving with life is impossible to deny.

There's no doubt that, statistically, there's life out there (and let's not even talk about the other 500 billion galaxies in the Universe).""

http://gizmodo.com/5875481/the-possibility-of-alien-life-is-now-extraordinarily-high