Do they have a big computer that just counts stars? Who counts to a billion?!?!?! Without repeating starts LOL. I always wondered how they came to thier numbers. . . Rocket River
Don't be afraid Ronny, it's ok and necessary for some people to be smart, it's not any reflection on you. (well sorta) Instead of hating them you should cherish them because who else is going to figure out the problems caused by the wealthy hyper-greedy and completly useless society draining horde?
In principle it's simple really. You look at all stars in some region of the sky (so that there are no selection effects) and count what fraction of stars have planets. It comes down to a question of how many stars there are. The simplest thing to do is to count the number of stars per some area of the sky and multiply by the total area. This will be quite off but this can be done with much more sophistication. A much bigger uncertainty lies in estimating the actual number of planets from the number we can detect in a limited parameter space.
It would be a gigantic discovery of human kind if we could find out what other intelligent species look like. But the really sad fact is that we will probably never know since they are so damn far away. If only could harness antimatter to create that warp drive in the next 100 yrs. But discovering a warp drive with antimatter would also mean creating a most dangerous weapon of mass destruction. But my more preferable preferences would be another peaceful intelligent species who are a million years advance technologically ahead of us make the first contact.
That is the story of many movies. The aliens usually arrive to form a colony and take over the world.
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There are many supercomputers that do nothing but count -- literally. This supercomputer in Japan has calculated pi to the 2.5 Trillionth decimal... link -- and that was back in 2009.
More info... "One of the most powerful supercomputers in the world has now been fully installed and tested at its remote, high altitude site in the Andes of northern Chile. It's a critical part of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the most elaborate ground-based astronomical telescope in history. The special-purpose ALMA correlator has over 134 million processors and performs up to 17 quadrillion operations per second, a speed comparable to the fastest general-purpose supercomputer in operation today." link
Actually, all this tell me is that it's a lot easier for planets to come into being than it is for animals.
Ronny would probably appreciate something like this. Honey Bear is too self-centered to see the immense power of being able to consider our existence in the scale of the multiverse.
