“From a fundamental point of view, the question is: did anything like this before?”, says Adam Frank, Professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. “And it is highly likely that our time and place — not only of those where there was advanced civilization.”
“The question is whether there are advanced civilizations in other parts of the Universe, is always intertwined with the three unknowns in the Drake equation,” says Frank. “We know approximately how many stars there are. We don’t know how many of those stars have planets that can support life, how often you may receive life and lead to the emergence of intelligent beings and how long it can hold civilization before disappearing”.
“We don’t even know if there is a high-tech civilization, to survive for more than a few centuries.”
“Our findings suggest that our biological and cultural evolution was not unique and probably has happened many times before. Other examples probably include many energy-consuming civilizations that faced with a crisis on his planet with the development. This means that we can start to investigate the problem, using simulations to understand what leads to long-lived civilizations, and what is not.”
A new study shows that recent discoveries of exoplanets in combination with an active study of this question allow you to assign almost empirical validity of the existence of technological civilizations. If briefly — that they had to exist. And if only the chances of development of advanced life will not be incredibly low, the human species will definitely not be the first technology or advanced civilization.
In 2016, in a paper published in Astrobiology, scientists first showed that mean “pessimism” or “optimism” in assessing the likelihood of extraterrestrial life.
“Through the NASA satellite Kepler and other searches, we now know that approximately every fifth star has a planet to “potentially habitable zone” where temperatures could support known life. Thus, one of the three great uncertainties acquired limitations.”
Thanks to the new results of Frank and Woodruff Sullivan (University of Washington), scientists can equip all there is to know about planets and climate, to start the simulation of interactions energy-intensive in their home world, assuming a large sample of such cases already existed in the space.
Frank said that the third big question Drake — how long can a civilization survive — remains unanswered completely. “The fact that people had primitive technology, about ten thousand years, tells us nothing about how many can live out our society,” he explains.
In 1961, the astrophysicist Frank Drake introduced an equation to estimate the number of developed civilization that could exist in the milky Way galaxy. It looks like this: N = R*(fp)(ne)(fl)(fi)(fc)L, decoding of each variable below. The basis of simple statistics, it is easy to calculate that somewhere there may be thousands, even millions of alien civilizations:
- R* — rate of star formation in our galaxy.
- fp — percentage of stars with planets.
- ne is the number of earth-like planets around every star has planets.
- fl — percentage of earth-like planets that have developed life.
- fi — percentage of planets with life on which intelligent life evolved.
- fc — percentage of intelligent species that have come to create technologies that can detect external forces of civilization like ours. For example, radio signals.
- L is the average number of years it takes an advanced civilization to detect detectable signals.
The Drake equation was a strong basis for research and space technology have allowed scientists to define several variables. But we can only guess what might be a variable of L, expected durability of other advanced civilizations.
Using your approach to the analysis of data about exoplanets in the Universe, Frank Sullivan and sewed to the conclusion that human civilization will be unique in the cosmos, in that case, if civilization will develop on a suitable planet less than one time out of 10 billion trillion (1022)
“One of the ten billion trillion — a very little,” says Frank. “For me, this means that other intelligent, technologically advanced species probably evolved before us. Even if the chance of occurrence of reasonable life estimate in one in a trillion, it would mean that throughout cosmic history intelligent life has appeared at least ten billion times.”
Most likely, our civilization is not the only developed
Ilya Hel