(ORDO NEWS) — The Milky Way is home to millions of potentially habitable planets — and about four of those could have evil alien civilizations that would invade Earth if they could, according to new work.
All these films about evil aliens taking over the Earth may seem like fiction, but among the many possible civilizations of the Milky Way, there may be at least 4 hostile
It should be noted right away that the article that we will talk about was written by only one astronomer and has not yet been peer-reviewed in a scientific journal.
It was published as a preprint. However, this article poses the question: what are the chances that humans will one day encounter a hostile alien civilization capable of invading our planet?
Evil aliens
To answer this question, the study’s sole author, Alberto Caballero, a doctoral student in conflict resolution at the University of Vigo in Spain, began by analyzing human history. He first counted the number of countries that invaded other states between 1915 and 2022.
He found that a total of 51 of the world‘s 195 countries launched some kind of invasion during this period (the US was at the top of the list with 14 such events).
He then weighed the likelihood of such an event in the future for each country based on the share of its arms spending globally. Again, the US came out on top.
Caballero then added each country’s individual probability of provoking an invasion, and then divided the sum by the total number of countries on Earth to arrive at what he describes as “the current human probability of an alien invasion.”
According to this model, the current probability that humans will invade another habitable planet is 0.028%. However, Caballero wrote, this possibility refers to the current state of human civilization – and humans are not currently capable of interstellar travel.
If the current pace of technological progress continues, then interstellar travel will not be possible for another 259 years, Caballero calculated using the Kardashev Scale, a system that classifies how advanced a civilization is based on its energy expenditure.
Assuming that the frequency of human invasions continues to decline during this time at the same rate as over the past 50 years (average minus 1.15% per year), then the human race has a 0.0014% chance of landing on another planet with the target of its capture when we potentially become a Type I civilization in 259 years.
Caballero then turned to a 2012 paper published in the journal Mathematical SETI, in which researchers predicted that as many as 15,785 alien civilizations could theoretically exist in the Milky Way.
Caballero concluded that less than one of the Type I civilizations – 0.22 to be exact – would be hostile to humans who come into contact with them.
However, the number of evil-minded neighbors rises to 4.42 when accounting for civilizations that, like modern humans, are not yet capable of interstellar travel.
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