As for what it says about the odds that there is life somewhere out there, it means "just in our Milky Way galaxy alone, that's 8.8 billion throws of the biological dice," said study co-author Geoff Marcy, a longtime planet hunter from the University of California at Berkeley.

Study: 8.8 billion Earth-size, just-right planets Tuesday, November 5, 2013 @ 10:26am