ummmm....I'd be careful with a general population lottery. Can you say, "Unibomber"? ...and millions of other 'fail's'.

Earth-sized worlds much more common than giant planets
By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

Kepler photometer in clean room The Kepler mission should find tens or even hundreds of Earth-sized planets

Nearly one in four stars like the Sun could have Earth-sized planets, according to a new estimate published in the journal Science.

A US team has found that on average small, so-called rocky planets are much more common in orbit close to their star than giant planets planets similar in size to Jupiter.

This estimate is based on observations from nearby stars taken by the the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii. These show that 22 of the stars had detectable planets.

The researchers estimated that about 1.6% of the Sun-like stars in their sample had Jupiter-size planets and 12% had so-called "super-Earths", which are between three and 10 times the mass of the Earth.
Best guess

The Keck telescopes are not powerful enough to detect planets that are any smaller, so the scientists have assumed that this trend toward more smaller planets continues and estimated that 23 of the stars had Earth-sized planets.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

If there are more rocky small planets out there then it seems more likely that there's life out there too”

End Quote Dr Andrew Howard University of California, Berkeley

Dr Andrew Howard, from the University of California at Berkeley, admits that the estimate is currently impossible to back up using existing data.

However, he says it is the first estimate that has been obtained using observations of relatively small planets.

"This extrapolation is the least certain part of our analysis. The true answer might be one in eight or one in two - but we know that it isn't one in 100," he told BBC News.

Based on these statistics, Dr Howard says that Nasa's Kepler space telescope - which is to to survey 156,000 stars - will detect between 120 and 260 "plausibly terrestrial worlds".

"If there's life out there, it's most likely that it exists on rocky planets like our own Earth. So if there are more rocky small planets out there, then it seems more likely that there's life out there too," he said.

But according to Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society, most of the worlds they predict exist would be too close to be habitable.

"We probably need to wait a bit longer before we find a significant number of 'Earths' in habitable zones of their parent stars."

Russia

Mork

what if admin just shut the seti@home bulletin boards down for a month?
1.less stress on the servers
2.less sniping and backbiting on the boards.
3.possibly restore some sanity?

i'm all for it.
remembering when classic would go down for a month or so.
force people to run other projects for awhile.
or cut the juice and save them $$$ on electricity.
let the scientists do their jobs without worrying about supplying us
with wu's


my two cents worth.



phud

bacon

perpetrator

skies

More

Rider

light
(thanx Dune:)

Pipe

Stephen Hawking does have a point, 'we' tend to see things, from 'our' point of view, same chance, 'they' do too.

Firstly, there would likely be world-wide panic, civil disorder, rioting & looting etc. Look back at the 1948 USA radio transmission of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds. Many thousands of people were spooked out of their lives believing it was true.

I think we can distinguish between an invasion, which would cause panic, and mere contact with aliens.

The latter would threaten all governments with sudden disloyalty. I think many (most?) people would go Homer Simpson declaring "I, for one, welcome our alien overlords!" and not give a damn about working and paying taxes.

Religions would eagerly put the aliens in context, variously calling them God, Satan, or whatever the hell makes them feel good and not give up their faith.

this is NOT BOINC
15 Aug 2010 6:33:37 UTC
please go to the BOINC newsgroups
THIS IS SETI@Home not boinc
We have little to to tell you about how to run boinc as a project
THEY ARE NOT US

In that case, it's going to be difficult to route any incming calls from the internet to the virtual BOINC server.

Are you sure it's a modem, not a router? If there's ethernet involved, routing would be more normal - even if the same box can double as a modem with a USB port. You mentioned that you can access internally on 192.168.x.x/test - that sounds very much like a router-managed LAN to me.

What's the output from IPCONFIG /ALL on your internet access machine? (may want to send by PM, rather than sanitising it all for posting here).