The Milky Way alone, according to various estimates, can contain from 100 to 400 billion stars. Potentially, planets can be located near each of them. Only in the universe we observe can there be at least two trillion galaxies, each of which contains trillions of planets orbiting hundreds of billions of stars. And even if there are very, very few among such a number of planets that will be able to support life, somewhere in the Universe there must still be intelligent life, besides ours.
Calculations say that if only 0.1 percent of the planets of only our galaxy are potentially viable, then we will talk about about one million planets on which life can be. Such calculations prompted Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi to ask the question: "Hey, so where are you all?" This question is a prerequisite for the so-called Fermi paradox, and, according to modern scientists, the most likely answers to it will be associated with the person himself.
There is such a hypothesis - "The Great Filter". According to her, until the moment when intelligent life can leave the limits of its home world, it needs to overcome a certain wall. The same Great filter. The hypothesis says that in the global evolutionary process there are some transitional moments that any intelligent civilization will have to overcome in order to be able to communicate with other worlds. For some civilizations, these transitional moments may take place at an early stage of life, but in our case we are just moving towards this moment of evolution. From this conclusion, one can make a counterintuitive conclusion that the easier our evolution has been until now, the worse the chances of humanity in the future.
Take climate change. Regardless of whether you believe in them or not, if they are left to chance, they will eventually destroy most of the life we know on Earth. For the past 12,000 years or so, the planet's climate has been remarkably stable, allowing human civilization to flourish, moving from agriculture to industrialization, which, ironically, could destroy us all.
Recent studies have identified which characteristics and characteristics of living species are most likely to allow them to survive in a planet that has undergone global climate change. The two most important traits are non-selectivity and the ability to reproduce quickly. Based on this, it can be concluded that humans will not rank among the primary surviving species. From this we can also draw another conclusion: despite the fact that events on other planets (those transition periods) may develop differently, there is a high probability that there were so many obstacles in the path of life that existed on these planets that civilizations ultimately failed to overcome them.
“In the Universe several billion years old, where stellar systems are separated not only by space, but also by time, civilizations can appear, develop and eventually self-eliminate so quickly that they simply do not have time to find their own kind. We ourselves are living in an age of a new mass extinction that has just begun. There are many more deaths ahead of us,”writes New York Magazine columnist David Wallace-Wells.
Many other thinkers have their own answers to the Fermi paradox. In some cases they are even more depressing than this one, in others less. Here are some examples.
Anders Sandberg, an Oxford astrophysicist, member of the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Milan Cirkovic, and Stuart Armstrong, an expert on artificial intelligence, believe that aliens are not extinct, but simply hibernate, waiting for the general cosmic background of the Universe to cool.
Promotional video:
Professor Zara Osmanova from the Free University of Tbilisi believes that sooner or later our search for extraterrestrial megastructures will be crowned with some successes, only now we are looking for them not at the stars we need. And you need to look, according to Osmanova, next to the pulsars.
Physicist Brian Cox suggests his own version, in which things could end sadly for other extraterrestrial civilizations, so it is possible that they could end the same for us.
“Why not assume that the growth of science and engineering could transcend political and social norms and norms, and things got so out of control that it led to disaster,” says Cox.
"If intelligent life on another planet, unwittingly, destroyed itself under the onslaught of the development of its technologies, then why, in fact, should we exclude the possibility of a similar fate for humanity?"
Nikolay Khizhnyak