There are an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
We estimate that 5 percent of those stars will be Sun-like, as NASA’s data has suggested. That means there are 500 quintillion, or 500 billion billion Sun-like stars in the universe.
Each of these Sun-like stars will have a “habitable zone,” where a planet could develop oceans of liquid water. If 5 percent of all the stars in the universe are like our Sun, then one-fifth of these stars will have Earth-like planets.
That means 1 percent of all the stars in the universe could be home to another planet we could live on. There would be 100 billion billion Earth-like planets in the cosmos. This means that for every single grain of sand on Earth, there are a hundred Earth-like planets in the universe. Based on these numbers, there are about a billion Earths in our own galaxy alone. If we then assume that only 1 percent of those watery worlds have developed some form of life, then every grain of sand on Earth represents an inhabited, Earth-like planet in the universe.
Let’s assume that a mere 1 percent of those inhabited planets have life that has evolved into an intelligent civilization, like what we now see on Earth. That would mean there are 10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in our universe. When we apply this same logic to the Milky Way, we have 100,000 intelligent civilizations seeded among the billion Earth-like planets out there waiting for us. This is a radical re-envisioning of everything we think we know, coming directly from official sources working with NASA data.
And with these numbers, the idea that "WE ARE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE becomes utterly RIDICULOUS.
