M Thomas Apple Author Page

According to NASA estimates there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, of which about 4 billion are sunlike. If only 7 percent of those stars have habitable planets — a seriously conservative estimate — there could be as many as 300 million potentially habitable Earths out there in the whole Milky Way alone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/science/astronomy-exoplanets-kepler.html

It takes a while to collect, sort through, analyze, write up, endure peer review, and publish data from scientific projects.

That’s why finally we’re seeing this, 11 years after Kepler was launched to scour the galaxy for exoplanets.

Now the real challenge will be figuring out how to get there…

It’s time to move on the next factor in the Drake equation for extraterrestrial civilizations: the fraction of these worlds on which life emerges. The search for even a single slime mold on some alien rock would revolutionize biology, and it is a worthy agenda for the next half-century as humans continue the climb out of ourselves and into the universe in the endless quest to end our cosmic loneliness.