Intelligent life outside the Earth, most likely, lurks not on the outskirts, like our planet, but in the centers of the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies, where there are more "building materials" for the emergence of technologically advanced civilizations, scientists say in an article published in the journal Astrobiology.
For more than half a century, astronomers at the SETI Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations in the United States and their colleagues around the world have been trying to find life beyond Earth by listening to radio signals from various corners of the galaxy.
So far, no intelligent or unreasonable life has been discovered, but this task, according to representatives of NASA and SETI, can be solved very soon - in the next 10-20 years.
Today, according to Ian Morrison of the University of New South Wales (Australia) and Michael Gowanlock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), their colleagues are trying to search for aliens in about the same place as the Earth - on the outskirts of the Milky Way. …
The periphery of galaxies has several advantages in the context of the origin of life - there are not many stars, so there are rarely supernova explosions that can destroy civilization or cause mass extinctions on planets in nearby luminaries.
In the centers of galaxies, according to many scientists, it is too light, "hot" and too often supernovae break out for the birth of life and the emergence of technologically advanced civilizations.
Morrison and Gouenlock questioned this and decided to check whether the galactic "metropolis" is really not favorable for the origin of life, using a computer model of the evolution of life in a virtual analogue of the galaxy. The main parameters in this model were the frequency of supernova explosions and how long life managed to exist on planets before it was destroyed by the outbreak of a dying star.
Promotional video:
As it turned out, intelligent life in the center of galaxies can nevertheless appear, and at the same time it appears more often and much faster - about 2 billion years earlier than on Earth in some cases - than on the outskirts of the Milky Way and other stellar metropolises.
Supernova explosions, of course, will still occur in the vicinity of such planets approximately every 1.5-2 billion years. However, during this time, life, thanks to the richer conditions on the surface of the planets in the "metropolis", will have time to develop and give rise to intelligent beings, which, perhaps, will be able to protect themselves and the entire planet as a whole from supernova radiation.
This shows, as the authors of the article believe, that SETI and other organizations looking for traces of intelligent life should start looking for it in the centers of galaxies, and not on their outskirts, in order to fulfill the ambitious task that SETI and NASA have set themselves in recent years.