But, the big question is, come 3 and a bit years, how many exo solar systems will it have found like ours to how many more systems with HJ's and therefore unlike ours, will it have found?
You seem to make a lot of early assumptions which get invalidated by later events, and then ignore those events which disprove you. Now that it is understood that a system with HJs IS compatible with terrestrial planets, and that HJs seem to be a common precursor to solar systems, researchers are starting to consider looking for the remains of an HJ in our own system, on the assumption that we ARE like the systems we are seeing.
You also do not seem to have considered the ratio of HJs detected to systems with normal gas giants, detected by other projects. If detecting an HJ indicates that a system is 'unlike ours', I presume that you would agree that detecting a gas giant in a 'normal position' would suggest that a system is 'like ours'?
All the current data on detected planets can be found in the ExtraSolar Planets Encyclopedia -
http://exoplanet.eu/catalog-all.php If you put this on a spreadsheet you will see that there's a cluster in the 1-10 day range, representing the 'hot Jupiters', and another, larger, cluster of gas giants with orbital periods of about 1-10 years, representing 'standard gas giants'. We have around 150 HJs found, and 200 'normal Jupiters'.
So, even though we are preferentially detecting low-period planets at the moment, we still know of more long-period planets. Estimates of the numbers of earth-like planets in the galaxy are now commonly in the billions...
Im willing to bet kepler will find an inordinate amount of systems with hj's and very, very few if any, like ours. Now wouldnt that be fun?
As I said earlier, you DO tend to jump the gun a lot, don't you? You're lucky I'm not a betting man, but you should find no shortage of people to take you up on that one. A couple of months ago this happened:
http://news.discovery.com/space/kepler-scientist-galaxy-is-rich-in-earth-like-planets.htmlSo you can see that current discoveries seem to suggest that earth-type planets ARE common in the galaxy and that our system seems to be perfectly normal. Arguing that this is not true seems to be wilfully ignoring the latest findings.
We will not have long to wait for the first data release in Feb 2011. And when we get SIM Lite up there, I expect this will enable us to disprove the 'rare-earth' hypothesis completely...