Re: Why the TPF Mission May Never Fly
"Let's say that Kepler detects Earth types at a statistical rate of 1 per thousand stars whose orbits are inclined correctly to ours."
Why would you suppose such a small percentage?
How many Earth type planets would detect if we looked at our sytem at the right angle- Mercury, Venus, Earth/moon, Mars; or do you mean earth types to only mean Earth- thereby only one for our system.
I think we are going a fair amount of "unexplainable" results, things like large asteriods in an asteriod belt, planets in L-points, graviational lensing by large planets near the star making say a minor planet appear bigger and "unpredictable".