Geoscientist Jim Kasting: Earth-like planets should be present around 10 - 50% of stars

While doing a search for Alpha Centauri I came across this article, on the view of geoscientist Jim Kasting that planets like ours are quite common - his broad estimate (and all we have now are broad estimates) is that they should be found around 10 - 50% of stars. He has also recently written a book on the subject, and Google Books has a preview here. Given that it's not a bestseller it might be a bit tough to find here in Korea, so I may have to stick with just the preview for now.



One more interesting tidbit on Alpha Centauri: here's the search volume on Google for the term Alpha Centauri over the past twelve months. You can see there was a bit of a bump in December, when Avatar came out. The red line I added to show the highest part of the graph before Avatar was released. The amount of news volume related to the star system was more of a spike than just a bump.