The Green Hills of Second Earth

The Kepler Space Telescope is producing some very hopeful results:

“What we found was, there wasn’t a very strong corelation between Jupiter[-sized] planets from the smaller planets,” the study’s leader, Lars Buchhave, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute and the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the University of Copenhagen, told the News.

“In other words, we don’t need a lot of stuff in the disk of the planetary system to form small planets like here on Earth,” he said. “And that means – or could mean at least – since we don’t need a special environment for the planets to form, then we could form planets around a wide range of stars and planets like Earth could be common in our galaxy.”

We should probably be more excited about the prospects of finding a Second Home, than about finding other intelligent life.