Those who believe in aliens are by no means crazy. Indeed, according to all scientific calculations, it turns out that brothers in reason should be visible and invisible. But it is also reasonable not to believe in them. True, for another reason: because there is the famous Fermi Paradox.
Enrico Fermi is an American physicist of Italian origin and a Nobel Prize laureate. Long ago - back in 1950 - he dined with fellow physicists. And I listened as they argued that intelligent civilizations are not uncommon in the Universe. “Well, where are they?” The scientist asked. Physicists could not find an answer.
An obvious contradiction - the huge Universe and the lack of contact with its 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 are really a lot 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 come to us. And he didn't get in touch. At least there is no serious scientific evidence to speak of any contacts.
Fermi's paradox grows stronger
The Fermi paradox was born at a time when scientists still had a very vague idea of the number of planets suitable for life. Rather, they did not have it at all. They simply assumed that they must be in the vast universe. Now, thanks to research carried out with the help of space telescopes, it has become clear that the presence of "viable" planets is by no means an exception, rather a rule.
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And only in the Milky Way - our galaxy, numbering about 250 billion stars - more than 500 million planets can be not only inhabited, but inhabited by highly developed civilizations. As a result, tens of thousands of their representatives should have already visited the Earth, and there should be.
British scientists Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg of Oxford University believe that brothers in mind are mostly older. Since the Earth is the later child of the Universe. Most of the planets similar to it were formed 1-2 billion years earlier. Consequently, the civilizations existing on them have gone far ahead.
Armstrong and Sandberg recently published extensive research that made Fermi's paradox even more paradoxical. For example, they imagined that in addition to the human in our galaxy there is only one "older" civilization. But even in this - the extreme - case, its messengers for 500 million years would have populated the entire Milky Way. They would have found us, and we had them. And this is the most conservative scenario, assuming that the aliens move on slow-moving ships.
Scientists assure: interstellar travel on the shoulder of highly developed brothers in mind is nothing supernatural. They could also receive energy from solar panels. Even we have inexhaustible reserves of it. And sources. For example, Mercury well illuminated by the Sun. From such bodies as this relatively small planet with low gravity, only located in other stars, it is profitable and simple to launch spaceships, accelerating them by means of electromagnetic accelerators.
And it is possible to slow down, as Armstrong and Sandberg believe, by generating the so-called magnetic sail - a kind of electromagnetic cocoon around the ship, which will be acted upon by the force of the incoming flow of charged particles. The universe is filled with them.
Come in large numbers here from other galaxies
And if life also exists in neighboring galaxies? Which is quite logical. For example, in the legendary Andromeda Nebula, sung by the science fiction writer Ivan Efremov? It is even larger than the Milky Way. Then the aliens don't have a chance not to get noticed (or something?).
Scientists have determined the approximate number of aliens from other galaxies that could colonize ours. If they started 1 billion years ago, moving at half the speed of light, then representatives of 263 thousand civilizations would have already reached the Earth. For 2 billion we would have been noticed by 2 million 570 thousand other galactic brothers. And we, respectively, theirs.
Aliens traveling at speeds close to the speed of light must be innumerable. They are obliged to swarm like passengers in the crossings of the Moscow metro during rush hours. But for some reason they are not teeming.
And thanks for that
The conclusion is obvious. Armstrong and Sandberg turned the Fermi paradox into Fermi absurdity and, in fact, proved that we are the only one in the universe. Aliens, no, and never will be.
You can put it another way: God created only people. In this sense, scientists were even "holier than the Pope." John Paul II personally said back in 1999 that the almighty Lord was free to create intelligent life not only on Earth. Under the next Pope, Benedict XVI, the idea that we were not alone began to be promoted by the head of the Vatican Observatory - Specola, father Jose Gabriel Funes - an astronomer recognized in the scientific community.
“Aliens are my brothers” was the title of one of his articles published in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. Funes announced that belief in God and in intelligent life on other planets does not contradict each other. Moreover, he admits that aliens exist. Including those far ahead of us in development. And the same Lord God created them, who is one for the entire universe.
It seems that he did not.
Why no one comes to us. We are the smartest
The fact that we are most likely the only one of a kind was recently substantiated by astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, a professor from Harvard (Harvard's Dimitar Sasselov), one of the leaders of the Kepler telescope scientific program.
According to rough estimates, as the scientist explains, it took the stars formed in the young Universe 1 billion years to “produce” enough material from primary hydrogen and helium to form planets - oxygen, iron, silicon, carbon and other heavy elements. Another 9 billion years were spent on the very formation and creation of conditions suitable for life. Earth, which is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old, fits well into this time frame. It turns out that she did not let anyone forward in her development. But she did not overtake anyone.
In other words, 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, probably, the last …
Easy peasy
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 turn from a yellow dwarf (as it is now) into a red giant - it will grow so that it will swallow the Earth. But for about a billion years before that, it would still be inhabited.
Who will remain to live on Earth in the distant - almost unimaginable - future? Our superintelligent and beautiful descendants who conquered space and time? Or some hideous monsters? Neither one nor the other. British scientists, who "looked" through billions of years, have a very dark foreboding about the coming inhabitants. Bacteria - single-celled organisms floating in small lakes with hot and salt water or in cave reservoirs - that's who will inhabit the Earth, says Jack O'Malley-James and his colleagues at St. Andrew's University.
Such results were given by a mathematical model, which was developed and launched by researchers, imagining that the Sun will begin to warm up the Earth more and more. The British claim that such a miserable fate awaits life on any inhabited planet orbiting a star like our luminary - the oceans evaporate, mammals, fish, insects and other living creatures are gradually disappearing. The simplest organisms remain. Which eventually disappear too.
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 back.
From the discovery of the British it follows: 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 will be microbes. Because it turns out that they are - statistically - the most common aliens.
