Eager reporters get excited about
planets in habitable zones, but
overlook show-stopping issues

Guest article by Ronald Fritz, PhD*

There’s no shortage of articles suggesting extraterrestrial (ET) life exists. A recent one (Pappas, 2025) essentially calls it a foregone conclusion, stating:

There are some 100 billion stars in the Milky way galaxy and at least 2 trillion galaxies in the universe we can study. If most of those stars have at least one planet around them, there could be up to 20 billion trillion extraterrestrial worlds out there.  Given those numbers, it would be shocking if only a single planet — Earth — had life.

Statements like this are largely inspired from a 2020 NASA led study (Bryson et al, 2021), which sought to more accurately characterize planets in what’s called the ‘Goldilocks zone’ – the area around a star where liquid water could potentially exist. This research has been driving major ET headlines even before its publication, including:

• “Half Of Sun-Like Stars May Have an Earth-Like Planet, Say NASA Scientists” – Forbes
• “Our Milky Way galaxy abounds with potentially Earth-like planets, a new study suggests.” com
• “Milky Way alone could hold about 300 million potentially habitable worlds” – Physicsfeed.com
• “Based on Kepler Data, There’s a 95% Chance of an Earth-Like Planet Within 20 Light-Years” – Universe Today
• “There Are Probably Four Rocky Planets in the Habitable Zones of Nearby Sun-like Stars, Says NASA” – Discover Magazine

And the list goes on.

So, this appears to be huge news: three hundred million potentially habitable planets – just in our galaxy alone! It seems we’re on the verge of finding life elsewhere – and with it, confirming evolution as its cause everywhere. This would demonstrate life is simply the inevitable consequence of having the right ingredients. Given those, violà, you have life, as evolutionists insist happened here on Earth. And now, with hundreds of millions of ‘potential Earths’ out there, it would seem almost certain that life sprung up on some of them, right?

At a casual glance, this might seem reasonable. After all, given enough opportunities, even rare outcomes eventually happen. ‘Perfect’ pearls are few and far between, but if you look at enough oysters, you’ll start finding some. And so it goes with extraterrestrial life, they say. But does this analogy really fit? Maybe it’s more like looking for Ponce de Leόn’s fountain of youth than hunting for pearls.

The secular scientists whose findings inspire provocative headlines like these understand the bigger picture though. They know that being in the habitable zone (HZ) of a star is necessary but far from sufficient to enable life. It’s just one attribute amongst many required. So, while headlines calling HZ planets “potentially habitable” are technically correct, they omit critical context. It’s like looking at a single puzzle piece and guessing what the full image might be. You need more information for an accurate assessment – and we have that!

For instance, it’s not just being in the HZ that matters, but where you reside in it. Soon-to-be-published research (S. Dwivedi and S. Chandra, 2025), which is receiving little fanfare I might add, addresses this. As the authors put it,

Exoplanets at the center of the HZ are considered more habitable due to optimal stellar flux, which minimizes extreme conditions like excessive heating or cooling.

This makes sense. Being in the HZ is not like a soccer goal, where it doesn’t matter whether the ball hits the center of the net or the post. Rather, it’s more like darts, where the closer you are to the center, the better. To address this, the authors developed a graded scale and integrated it with some other habitability factors called the Earth Similarity Index (ESI). The ESI assesses how closely an exoplanet resembles Earth by comparing candidates to Earth’s radius, density, surface temperature and escape velocity. Escape velocity – the speed needed for a planet or other object to break free from its gravitational pull – is used here to estimate how well a planet can retain its atmosphere, a crucial attribute.

Putting it all together, the authors find that for the 1,267 exoplanets meeting these criteria (Earth-like as defined), a large portion – between 98.58% to 99.37% – can be disqualified from habitability consideration. So, the potential three hundred million ET-friendly habitats just got pared down to a hundredth of that.

Another crucial prerequisite for habitability is a strong magnetic field – one robust enough to protect from harmful stellar activity, that’s not significantly disrupted by the star’s own magnetic field. Research on this (Atkinson, A.S., Alexander, D. & Farrish, A.O., 2024), shows only two out of the 1,546 Earth sized, HZ exoplanets evaluated meet these conditions. One of these (K2-3d) is believed to be tidal locked, meaning one side constantly faces the star – a situation thought to cause severe habitability issues in many cases (McIntyre, 2022). So, it’s reasonable to expect that only about one in 1,546 of these planet types possess the necessary magnetic circumstances to support life.

As the authors put it, “It would appear that conditions (related to planet and host star magnetic fields) supporting habitability are quite rare, even with fairly liberal assumptions”. Therefore, this eliminates another 99.9353% of the 3 million bringing the possible Milky Way candidates down to around 1,940. ET housing options are getting narrowed down fast now.

And we’re just getting started. What about the ability to possess an Earth-like atmosphere? That’s pretty important. As per Konatham et al., of the 1,034 right-sized exoplanets studied, only 45 are candidates to potentially possess Earth-like atmospheres – and this is based on just one criterion: thermal escape of atmospheric species from atmospheres. There are other criteria that would further lower these odds. But using just this single factor, only about 4.35% appear capable of maintaining an Earth-like atmosphere. This cuts ET’s list from 1,940 down to 84 candidates. For those hoping for extraterrestrial life, this is like shopping for a new home – exciting at first, then tempered by reality.

What about temperature variability? The Earth Similarity Index (ESI) mentioned earlier considers temperature, but only as an annual average, ignoring variability in the star’s output around an average. Hmmm, that seems like an oversight. It’s like expecting Houston’s average annual temperature (a perfect 71° F) during your trip there in August. Now imagine that kind of variability on a planetary scale.

It turns out that our sun is one of the most stable stars of its type ever observed (Reinhold et al, 2020). Compared to 369 other stars nearly identical in size, age, temperature, mass, magnetism and rotational speed, only about 3% (0.0298) are as ‘quiet’ as our sun. In fact, 95% are twice as variable. If we consider twice the activity as life inhibiting, then only 5% of our 84 remain in the pool of adequate residences for ET – bringing the original 300 million down to four.

And that’s before we consider a host of additional requirements we know of, but can’t yet fully assess. Some of those include:

• Having water – being in the HZ simply means liquid water could exist, not that there is any.
• Nearby stellar traffic – interactions between planets and passing stars can rule out many HZ exoplanets.
• Stable axial tilt – our unique moon-earth system prevents troublesome wobble; no similar systems have yet been found.
• Essential elements for metabolic activity – carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and others must be present in the right amounts.
• Excessive volcanic activity and unstable surfaces – these can affect atmosphere composition and climate.
• Chemical and atmospheric composition – and the complex interactions between them have to be just right.
• Excessive orbital eccentricity – highly non-circular orbits cause extreme climate variations.
• Tidal locking – as mentioned, one side permanently faces the star, creating severe habitability issues: this is thought common for close-in exoplanets.
• And countless other known and unknown factors that could prevent life.

As we see here on Earth, everything must be in place – and balanced appropriately – to give life a fighting chance.

But remember, what we’ve been discussing so far concerns the odds of finding another place like ours. To that, we must add the odds of life spontaneously arising there. The process by which life supposedly emerges from non-life is called abiogenesis by evolutionists, and it is the mechanism they propose for life’s origin.

Tomonori Totani, a Japanese astronomer, has attempted to calculate some odds of this happening purely by random chance. He focused on what he considers a likely first step in the abiogenesis process – “the abiotic emergence of ordered information in RNA” (Totani, 2020). RNA is widely viewed by many evolutionists as a precursor to DNA, it’s vastly more complex cousin. Totani states that an RNA polymer needs at least 40 nucleotides in order have a chance at self-replication, which is critical for abiogenesis. He estimates the odds of 40 nucleotides forming by random chance to be between one in 10²⁰ and one in 10⁸⁰. To put that in perspective, 10⁸⁰ is roughly the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe – so you get a sense of the extreme improbability here. He goes on to say that for an RNA length of 76 nucleotides or more (arguably a more reasonable assumption for self-replication), the odds under ‘the most liberal set of assumptions’ start at one in 10^80, and become even more remote from there. So, can we agree the evolution of an RNA molecule is more like searching for a mythical fountain of youth than for a ‘perfect’ pearl?

And that’s just for the abiogenesis of RNA – only one of many components needed in a living cell. Those who attempt to estimate the likelihood of even the simplest cell assembling spontaneously, quickly confront the futility of the task.  A recent article (Abel, 2024), addresses this reality head-on:

All of these statistically prohibitive ‘natural’ events (regarding abiogenesis of various cell components) are conveniently converted into certainties by blind-belief, unsubstantiated concepts such as ‘Emergence’ and ‘Self-Organization.’ We somehow manage to forget that all of these individual statistically prohibitive probabilities have to be multiplied together to predict the likelihood of even a protocell.

Nobel prize winner, Ilya Prigogine summarizes it succinctly as,

The statistical probability that organic structures and reactions that typify living organisms could be generated by accident, is zero.

Despite the overwhelming improbability, evolutionists continue to deny this reality though, fueling a constant stream of headlines about extraterrestrial life. In pursuit of clicks, readers, and funding, they mislead an unsuspecting public into believing the discovery of extraterrestrial life is imminent—when in fact, the odds of finding it are no better than chasing Ponce de León’s mythical fountain of youth. So, contrary to what all these headlines claim, the probability of a any encounter, close or near, is in fact nil.

References

Abel, D.A. (2024). Why is Abiogenesis Such a Tough Nut to Crack?. Archives of Microbiology and Immunology. 8(3), 338-364. DOI: 10.26502/ami.936500182.

Atkinson, A.S., Alexander, D., & Farrish, A.O., (2024). Exploring the Effects of Stellar Magnetism on the Potential Habitability of Exoplanets. Astrophysical Journal. 969(2).  DOI 10.3847/1538-4357/ad4605.

Bryson, S., Kunimoto, M., Kopparapu, R. K., Coughlin, J. L., Borucki, W. J., Koch, D., … (2021). The Occurrence of Rocky Habitable Zone Planets Around Solar-Like Stars from Kepler Data. Astronomical Journal. 161(36).  DOI 10.3847/1538-3881/abc418.

Dwivedi, S. & Chandra, S. (2025). Quantitative study of habitability of various classes of exoplanets. Advances in Space Research. 75(10). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2025.05.019

Konatham S., Martin-Torres, J., & Zorzano M-P. (2020). Atmospheric composition of exoplanets based on the thermal escape of gases and implications for habitability. Proc. R. Soc. A 476: 20200148.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2020.0148.

McIntyre, S.R.N. (2022). Tidally driven tectonic activity as a parameter in exoplanet habitability.  Astronomy & Astrophysics. 662(June). https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202141112.

Pappas, S. (2025, 5/24). Aliens: Facts about extraterrestrial life and how scientists are looking for it. LiveScience Website.

Reinhold, T., Shapiro, A. I., Solanki, S. K., Montet, B. T., Krivova, N. A., Cameron, R. H., & Amazo-Gómez, E. M. (2020). The Sun is less active than other solar-like stars. Science, 368(6490), 518-521.

Totani, T. (2020). Emergence of life in an inflationary universe. Scientific Reports. 10(1), 1671.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-58060-0.

*Ronald D. Fritz, PhD, is a retired research statistician whose career spanned 27 years. Before entering the field of statistics, he worked as an engineer and engineering manager in the defense industry. He earned his doctorate in Industrial Engineering, with a minor in Mathematical Statistics, from Clemson University, where he was honored as a Dean’s Scholar.

Dr. Fritz served as a consulting statistician across a broad range of industries, culminating in a 12-year role as a global statistical resource at PepsiCo.  During his time at PepsiCo, he led significant research on gluten contamination in oats and its relationship to celiac disease, publishing several articles on the subject.

In retirement, Dr. Fritz developed a deep interest in creation science, sparked by a visit to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. As he delved into the topic, he shared his findings with his pastor, which led to an invitation to speak at their church. This initial presentation opened the door to further speaking engagements at churches throughout the region.

Dr. Fritz has been married for 35 years to his wife, Mitzie. They live in the mountain community of Bee Log, North Carolina, within sight of the church where they were married and now worship. In his free time, Dr. Fritz tends a small chestnut orchard on their property, working to revive what was once a cherished local delicacy. The couple has two adult children.

(Visited 32 times, 32 visits today)