With the help of the Kepler space telescope, it has been established that more than 500 million planets in our Galaxy are suitable for life. In this connection, astronomers and mathematicians who have joined them insist: only in the Milky Way - this is our Galaxy - thousands, if not tens of thousands of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations must exist.
And in the rest of the Universe - they are countless. Skeptics, however, argue: there is no one but us. And they refer to the famous Fermi paradox. According to legend, the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi once at dinner listened to fellow physicists who argued that brothers in mind are not uncommon in the Universe.
And, in turn, asked: "Well, where are they?" Physicists could not find what to answer. An obvious contradiction - the huge Universe and the lack of contact with its other inhabitants - was later called the Fermi paradox. A quarter of a century later, the Englishman Michael Hart made an addition. Expressed in the sense that if there were thousands of alien civilizations, they would have reached us millions of years ago.
Well, at least someone. To this day, no one from other worlds has reached us. And this, in the opinion of skeptics, is the most convincing argument in favor of the fact that there are no “brothers” at all. … and we are alone Alas, the skeptics may be right. And we are truly one of a kind.
This was recently substantiated by astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, a Harvard professor and one of the leaders of the Kepler telescope's scientific program. The scientist calculated: how many years would have to pass from the moment of the formation of the universe to the appearance of reason. Here's what happened. It took about 1 billion years for young stars to “accumulate” enough material from primary hydrogen and helium to form planets.
Another 8-9 billion years was spent on the formation of rocky planets and the creation of conditions suitable for life. Total - 9 - 10 billion years. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. It turns out that the Earth, which is determined to be about 4.5 billion years old, fits well into this time frame. And it may well be that it has not overtaken anyone in its development and has not let anyone go ahead.
That is, there is a high probability that our planet is the first on which life originated. And we, accordingly, are the first intelligent beings in the Universe. And, accordingly, the most intelligent. Sasselov believes that the time it takes for even the simplest organisms to appear may well be commensurate with the age of the universe. Consequently, if there are brothers in mind somewhere else, then, most likely, their civilization is no more developed than ours. A billion years before the end of the world.
Now let's try to look into the future. Not fun, let's face it. Life on our planet will finally perish in about 2.8 billion years. The last earthlings will be destroyed by the dying Sun, which will expand and swallow the Earth. But for about a billion years before that, it will still be inhabited. Who will remain to live on Earth? Our superintelligent and beautiful descendants who conquered space and time? Or some hideous monsters? Neither one nor the other.
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Bacteria - single-celled organisms that float in small lakes with hot and salt water or in cave reservoirs - that's all the population that will survive, says Jack O'Malley-James and his British colleagues at St. Andrew's University. Such results were given by a mathematical model. The British assure: a miserable fate awaits life on any inhabited planet orbiting a star like our star - the oceans evaporate, the living creatures are gradually disappearing.
Protozoa will be the last to leave. The researchers applied their model to various terrestrial planets. And it turned out that, having originated, life, as a rule, drags out a primitive existence for about 3 billion years. Further it becomes more complicated up to reasonable. Then - after a relatively short period of time - it is simplified again. And disappears.
Such is the life cycle: from simple to complex and vice versa. From the discovery of the British, it follows again: the likelihood of meeting brothers in mind is extremely small. After all, the period of their existence on any planet is incommensurably small in comparison with the age of the planet itself. More likely there are germs. Because it turns out that they are - statistically - the most common aliens.
Now O'Malley-James and his colleagues are trying to determine what the most likely chemical composition of primitive inhabitants of other worlds might be in order to search for them remotely.