I was reading an article about discoveries made by the Kepler space telescope when I wondered what kind of processing power does this instrument has. Turns out this telescope, designed in 2006, uses a RAD750 which is basically a radiation hardened PowerPC 750. It can be clocked up to 200 MHz. Although I didn't find many other specification, I did find it can operate at -67 °F (-55 °C) to 257 °F (125 °C), 1 million Rads of radiation (1,000 rads is about all a normal microchip can take, and 10,000 rads will kill a person). And each chip is estimated to cost $200,000. With this processing power, the telescope has discovered 962 exoplanets, including Kepler 186f—an Earth sized planet in the habitable zone of it's star (meaning it could have liquid water). Using basic probabilities it is estimated there are some 40 billion Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zones just in the Milky Way Galaxy or which 11 billion orbit stars much like our sun. If life on a planet has the same odds as winning the Powerball lottery at one in 175 million, that means there would be 62 planets setup like ours with life just in the our own galaxy. And there are hundreds of billions of galaxies besides our own.
... If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
Carl Sagan paraphrasing Thomas Carlyle.