British physicists have found a new, more logical explanation for why humanity has not yet found aliens and will not find them in the future. They presented their findings in an article sent to publication in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A.
“Colleagues say that we have not found traces of aliens because intelligent life occurs very rarely in the Universe. But then it must be extremely rare, disappear very quickly, or hide itself from others. All such explanations are very strange and often unrealistic,”says Anders Sandberg of the University of Oxford (UK).
Astronomical odds
More than half a century ago, the American astronomer Frank Drake, trying to assess the chances of detecting extraterrestrial intelligence, developed a formula that allows you to calculate how many civilizations in the Galaxy with which contact is possible.
According to Drake's formula, the odds are pretty high. In response, physicist Enrico Fermi formulated a paradox, which was later named after him: if there are so many alien civilizations, then why does humanity not observe any traces of them?
Scientists have tried to solve this paradox in many ways. The most popular of these is the unique Earth hypothesis. She says that for the emergence of intelligent beings, unique conditions are needed: in fact, a complete copy of our planet.
Other astronomers believe that contact with aliens is impossible, either because galactic civilizations are disappearing too quickly, or because they are actively hiding themselves from humanity.
Promotional video:
Sandberg and his colleagues, including Eric Drexler, the author of the term "nanotechnology", found a new explanation for the Fermi paradox by drawing attention to the spread in values characteristic of the original parameters used in the Drake equation.
The mathematics of life
They noticed that many scientists, when assessing the number of civilizations in the Milky Way and in the Universe, simply ignore the fact that these values are very probabilistic and inaccurate, and their values can sometimes differ by seven to eight orders of magnitude. The result is not a wide range of answers, but a very specific figure that does not correspond to reality, but is close to the expectations of scientists.
British physicists corrected this defect by calculating the Drake equation taking into account all possible errors and scatter in the arguments. These include, for example, the rate of formation of stars in the Galaxy, the proportion of luminaries with planets, the number of Earth-like planets, and the typical lifespan of civilizations.
By combining the results of these calculations using statistics, Sandberg and his team found that the Galaxy was completely devoid of intelligent life 30 percent of the time, although with some combinations of parameters, the number of extraterrestrial civilizations was indeed quite high.
Such results, according to the authors of this idea, indicate that the Fermi paradox does not make sense - the absence of life in the observable Universe can be fully explained using the Drake equation. Most likely, humanity really still remains the only intelligent group of creatures in the Galaxy, although other civilizations could have existed in the past (or in the future).
However, as Sandberg emphasizes, this does not make the SETI projects, the Search Institute for Extraterrestrial Civilizations and the Breakthrough Listen initiative completely meaningless. Such observations, he said, are extremely important in order to narrow the spread in the values of the parameters of the Drake equation, as well as to search for a real answer to the main question of the Universe.