"From a fundamental point of view, the question is: Has anything like this happened before?" Says Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. "And it is highly likely that our time and place is not the only one where advanced civilizations emerged."
“The question of whether advanced civilizations exist in other parts of the universe has always intertwined with three unknowns in the Drake equation,” says Frank. “We have known for a long time how many stars there are. We do not know how many of these stars have planets that can support life, how often life can appear and lead to the emergence of intelligent beings, and how long civilization can hold out before disappearing."
"We don't even know if a high-tech civilization can survive for more than several centuries."
“Our findings suggest that our biological and cultural evolution was not unique and has likely happened many times before. Other examples likely include the many energy-intensive civilizations that have faced a crisis on their planet as they evolved. This means that we can begin to investigate the problem using simulations to understand what leads to long-lived civilizations and what does not."
New research shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets, coupled with active research into this issue, provide a near empirical credibility to the existence of technological civilizations. In short, they had to exist. And unless the chances of developing an advanced life are incredibly low, the human race will definitely not be the first technological or advanced civilization.
In 2016, in a paper published in Astrobiology, scientists first showed what “pessimism” or “optimism” means in assessing the likelihood of extraterrestrial life.
“Thanks to NASA's Kepler satellite and other searches, we now know that about one in five stars has planets in a 'potentially habitable zone' where temperatures can support the life we know. So one of the three big uncertainties has gotten limited.”
Thanks to new findings from Frank and Woodruff Sullivan (from the University of Washington), scientists can arm themselves with everything they know about planets and climate to begin modeling the interactions of energy-intensive species with their homeworld, assuming a large sample of such cases already existed in space.
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Frank says Drake's third big question - how long can civilization survive - remains completely unanswered. “The fact that humans have had primitive technology for about ten thousand years tells us nothing about how long our other societies can live,” he explains.
In 1961, astrophysicist Frank Drake presented an equation to estimate the number of advanced civilizations that could exist in the Milky Way galaxy. It looks like this: N = R * (fp) (ne) (fl) (fi) (fc) L, the decoding of each variable is below. Based on the simplest statistics, it is easy to calculate that there may be thousands, even millions of alien civilizations somewhere out there:
R * is the rate of formation of stars in our galaxy.
fp is the percentage of stars with planets.
ne is the number of terrestrial planets around each star that has planets.
fl is the percentage of terrestrial planets that have evolved life.
fi is the percentage of planets with life on which intelligent life has evolved.
fc is the percentage of sapient species that have made it to the creation of technology that can be discovered by the forces of an external civilization like ours. For example, radio signals.
L is the average number of years it takes an advanced civilization to detect detectable signals.
Drake's equation has proven to be a solid foundation for research, and space technology has allowed scientists to identify several variables. But we can only guess what the variable L might be, the assumed longevity of other advanced civilizations.
Using their approach to the analysis of data on exoplanets in the Universe, Frank and Sullivan came to the conclusion that human civilization will be unique in space only if the civilization develops on a suitable planet less than once in 10 billion trillion (1022)
“One in ten billion trillion is extremely small,” says Frank. “To me, this means that another intelligent, technologically advanced species must have evolved before us. Even if the chance of the emergence of intelligent life is estimated at one in a trillion, this would mean that throughout the cosmic history of intelligent life appeared at least ten billion times."
Ilya Khel