[troutman]

Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction

That's like finding a penny on the ground in your driveway, then walking a few feet away, finding another, and then jumping to the conclusion that there must be millions of dollars all over the city.

There is no reason assume it is typical.

http://www.planetary.org/news/2010/1...covery_of.html

How many habitable planets are there in our galaxy, worlds that can sustain liquid water and support life? A great many suggests Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy at the University of California Santa Cruz and co-leader of the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey. According to Vogt, 10 to 20 percent of planetary systems in our galaxy could contain at least one habitable planet. “When you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that’s a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy,” he mused.

And yet, despite monitoring such a small fraction of the stars that could potentially host a habitable planet, we have already found 2 -- Gliese 581g and, of course, the Sun. “If these are rare, we shouldn’t have found one so quickly and so nearby” said Vogt. The only reasonable conclusion is that habitable planets are, in fact, common in the galaxy. “The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 to 20 percent” he estimated.

If Vogt and his colleagues are correct, the coming years should bring a flood of new discoveries of habitable planets around nearby stars. Given sufficient observing time, astronomers using existing technology with current levels of sensitivity should be able to detect a host of new habitable planets. “Our ability to find potentially habitable worlds is now limited only by our telescope time” said Paul Butler of the Carnegie institution, co-leader (with Vogt) of the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey.