Warmly,
Karen

This is just more evidence that they’re out there. A quick google says that there are about a hundred billion stars in the galaxy. Didn’t take time to see how many of them are Main Sequence, which would give them a burn rate long enough for life to have a chance to happen on a suitable planet.

If we’re already finding planets like this, so early in the search, there must be millions, maybe billions of them in this galaxy alone.

It would be nice to actually start plugging some numbers into the variables in the Drake Equation, and resolving the Fermi Paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

The cold air entering the dayside at the west terminator is heated and rises, causing a permanent warm front on that side of the planet; rain occurs whenever the rising air cools below the precipitation point. A considerable amount of water vapour does not precipitate out of the atmosphere in this western habitable zone, but carries on over the hot side as transparent vapour until it cools on the eastern terminator; precipitation here is usually even more frequent than in the west. The warm winds cause the ice near the eastern terminator to melt, adding more water to the eastern habitable zone. A line of volcanoes associated with the planet’s unusual tectonic arrangements also breaks through the ice on the eastern half of the dark side. In the west, by contrast, the ice is much higher near the terminator, and only melts occasionally due to the libration effect of Dante’s rotation when the sun temporarily creeps above the horizon.

Dante’s aboriginal biology has developed quite differently in the two habitable zones, which are separated by dry regions of tundra/savanna at the poles. The West has dark brown and purple coloured rain forests, adapted to catch the infrequent thermal driven rainstorms; the east has low-lying moss-like scrub, adapted to exploit the near-constant drizzle and the glacier melt water. Animal-like sessile land anemones catch the numerous flying insect-like thirps, while larger ground thirps patrol the leaf litter layer.

Due to the distribution of wavelengths in the sunlight from the red dwarf sun, the vegetation seems dark, almost to the point of blackness; however in artificial white light the green tint of many of the plant-like species is apparent. In fact the biochemistry of Dante aboriginal life is quite similar to that of Earth; chlorophyll is assisted by a wide range of accessory pigments including phytocyanin and allophytocyanin to absorb red and infrared light; the genetic material of the biosphere is a mixture of zDNA and twin strand RNA, not far different from Earthly nucleic acids. This has allowed the human population of Dante to exploit the local biosphere for food with relatively little genetic modification to themselves and to their food crops, and giant thirp hunting is a favourite pastime on this world.

fictional planet Dante