…are often risky, but can be illuminating nonetheless.

The astronomy decadal report, which was issued a few weeks ago, set forth three big-picture goals for the next decade: (1) searching for the first stars, galaxies, and black holes; (2) seeking nearby habitable planets; and (3) advancing understanding of the fundamental physics of the universe.

It’s looking quite likely that goal number two will be the first to get substantially met. For quite a while now, a plot of year of discovery vs. the known planetary Msin(i)’s has provided grist for speculation that the first announcement of an Earthlike Msin(i) will occur this year…

In all likelihood, the surface of the first Earth-mass object detected in orbit around a sun-like star will be better suited to oven-cleaning than life as we know it. An interesting question, then, is: when will the first potentially habitable planet be detected? As readers know, such a world will very likely be detected via either transit (MEarth, Warm Spitzer or Kepler) or by the radial velocity technique (HD 40307, Alpha Cen B, etc. etc.).

Earlier this year, I struck up an e-mail conversation with Sam Arbesman, a Research Fellow at Harvard who studies computational approaches to the social sciences. Sam has a rather eclectic spectrum of interests, and writes pieces for the Boston Globe and the New York Times on topics ranging from mesofacts to baseball statistics. He’s also in charge of collecting fares for the Milky Way Transit Authority.

We carried out a scientometric analysis to arrive at what we believe is likely to be a reasonably accurate prediction of the discovery date of the first potentially habitable extrasolar planet with a mass similar to Earth.

Our paper has been accepted by the journal PLoS One, and Sam just posted to arXiv, apparently with little time to spare. The best-guess date that emerged from the analysis is May 2011.

Audaciously, alarmingly close! Certainly soon enough, in any case, for us to look rather sheepish if we’re off by a significant amount…