Now, two scientists have made the fairly bold prediction that
we're going to find a watery, warm planet such as our own in the
first half of next year! "In the past decades, the number of
known extrasolar planets has ballooned into the hundreds, and
with it the expectation that the discovery of the first Earth-
like extrasolar planet is not far off," writes Greg Loughlin of
the University of California, Santa Cruz and Sam Arbesman of
Harvard. "Here we develop a novel metric of habitability for
discovered planets, and use this to arrive at a prediction for
when the first habitable planet will be discovered. Using a
bootstrap analysis of currently discovered exoplanets, we
predict the discovery of the first Earth-like planet to be
announced in the first half of 2011, with the likeliest date
being early May 2011." Of course, we want to find another Earth
because we want to find ourselves, intelligent life -- or
failing that, just life. Judging by the organisms we have here
on Earth, that knocks out nearly every s