Last week, renowned American astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil DeGrasse Tyson held an AMA session with Reddit users. Of course, a visit to such a popular public by an even more popular person immediately attracted many people who wanted to directly ask the famous scientist the questions they were interested in, among which was the following: "Do you think humanity will make contact with complex extraterrestrial life forms within the next 50 years?"
For those who expected a positive response, we have bad news:
"Not. I believe that we (or they) may be too far from each other in space and possibly time. By the definition of "complex life forms," I think you mean something that is not single-celled organisms. That is, living organisms with arms, legs, their own thoughts, and so on. Everything will depend on our ability to travel in interstellar space. But this will definitely not happen in the next 50 years. Not with the level of technology we have now,”Tyson replied.
Fermi paradox
There are about 100 billion planets in our own Milky Way galaxy alone. Even if a small percentage of these planets are habitable (which, in principle, should be, even taking into account our conservative standards), then even in this case, we will talk about millions of planets on which there may be life. Moreover, on hundreds of thousands of such planets, life can not only “exist”, but also be reasonable. If we take all this for facts, then according to the Fermi paradox, the question arises: why the hell are we still alone?
In a recent study (last year), scientists from the Australian National University suggested that the reason why we have not yet discovered extraterrestrial life is that this life, if it existed on other planets, could have simply become extinct by this time. And our survival on Earth is nothing more than fortunate circumstances and luck.
Promotional video:
According to physicist Brian Cox, in the near future we will definitely not meet intelligent aliens. Because if there are living forms of such a level of development, then most likely they could simply have outlived themselves - destroy themselves by creating technologies, social and political assessments in relation to which simply did not correspond to the level that would allow these technologies to be safely managed (though sounds familiar?)
Astronomers at Cornell University would most likely agree with the same Neil DeGrasse Tyson, since according to their rough calculations (according to the most popular assumptions about where exactly intelligent life may be in our galaxy), so that the aliens could pick up our signals and respond on them, it can take about 1500 years before we can hear our space neighbors.
At one of the last meetings of specialists from the NASA aerospace agency and SETI (Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations), it was noted that perhaps extraterrestrial intelligent life has simply not reached the level of technology that would allow sending signals over such vast distances. However, of course, the option is not ruled out in which extraterrestrial civilizations have really reached the required technological level, but at the same time adhere to some internal rule not to contact with other civilizations.
Another famous astrophysicist and popularizer of science, Stephen Hawking, generally views potential first contact as something very dangerous. As an example, he cites the story of Columbus, who, being a representative of a more developed civilization, came into contact with Native Americans (we are talking about Indians, of course). How it all ended in the future, I think, is not worth reminding. So according to Hawking, the same can happen to us.
According to Douglas Vakoch, head of the METI International project, whose goal is to try to transmit interstellar messages from humanity to probable intelligent beings outside the solar system, any civilization that has the ability to interstellar travel would already know about our existence. And I would very much like to hope that these civilizations are friendly.
And yet, Tyson's answer primarily suggests that our ability to meet life elsewhere will directly depend on our ability to overcome the difficulties and characteristics of interstellar travel. In other words, if we find a way to move faster through space (and do it within the timeframes indicated at the beginning of this article), then, most likely, Tyson will be glad to know that he was wrong about this.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK