Joe,I wanted to leave this comment on you blog, but I am just too verbose: I personally believe that there is ample opportunity for life in the universe. Because I am not a biologist, when I think ‘life’, I am really only interested in intelligent humanoid type life; fish would be ok though. Just musing, what if we found intelligent humanoid life that we learned to communicate with and they all turned out to be Catholic? Would the fact that a separate system had similar religious beliefs prove that there is a deity? Seems as though He doesn’t want to be proven anyway, so throw that one out. What if there religion was science? That is way to boring to contemplate. Mr. Wiggins’ mathematical model produces numbers that are incomprehensible in there magnitude which would lead the mind to conclude that surely with numbers like that there has to be life out there somewhere. There are limiting factors however that I believe Mr. Wiggins is aware of but had not space to elaborate on and neither do I for that matter. Maybe just one little (maybe) fact. The moon. If the discovery channel and Nova in particular are to be believed then the moon is an essential part of life as we know it today. I hear more and more that scientists should be on the look out for a planet, just the right proportional distance from it’s star with a moon to do the job right. That should reduce the numbers somewhat, but who know? From what I have seen there is so much variety out there that we can’t just limit our thinking to the one system we know. I can't figure out which 67 words to get rid of. Some might say the religious stuff, but I thought that was fun. Yeah, OK I will throw it out. Jim