The existence of
extra-terrestrial life is one of the most compelling debates in science. When
we ask "Are we alone?", we are wondering about how life itself
begins, and what our place and function is in this universe. A new paper, published in
Astrobiology, uses the most recent discoveries of exoplanets to estimate the
likelihood that other technologically advanced civilizations have ever existed.
The authors’ pessimistic
limit is that humanity is unique if the odds of an advanced civilization
existing on a planet is less than one chance in about 10 billion trillion.
“One in 10 billion trillion
is incredibly small. To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology
producing species very likely have evolved before us,” said Adam Frank, lead
author of this study, in a statement.
“Think of it this way.
Before our result, you’d be considered a pessimist if you imagined the
probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in
a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what
has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about 10 billion
other times over cosmic history [owing to the estimated number of stars and
planets in the universe]!”
This probability was
constructed from the famous Drake Equation, a probabilistic argument to how
likely or not intelligent life is. The Drake equation uses seven probabilistic
parameters to obtain an estimate of the number of civilizations in the Milky
Way. The purpose of it was never to provide a precise number, but to stimulate
the debate about alien life.
In the research paper, Frank and his
colleague Woodruff Sullivan simplified the equation significantly. The number
of advanced civilizations is equal to the number of habitable planets in a
given volume of the universe multiplied by the likelihood of a technological
species arising on one of these planets.
The likelihood is obviously
a matter of guesswork, but by expecting humans to be alone, they were able to
provide their pessimistic limit.
“From a fundamental
perspective, the question is ‘has it ever happened anywhere before?’” said
Frank. “Our result is the first time anyone has been able to set any empirical
answer for that question and it is astonishingly likely that we are not the
only time and place that an advance civilization has evolved.”
So what do you think? Are we
alone in this Universe?
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