(ORDO NEWS) — The absence of signals from other advanced civilizations is, in fact, very bad news for humanity and modern civilization.
On Earth, civilizations are short-lived. The Roman Empire lasted less than a thousand years, while the Maya civilization lasted about two thousand years. And the more developed a civilization, the less it exists. How much is ours? With such irresponsibility and the pace of consumption, one must think, not for long.
The same thing can happen on other planets. And, most likely, this is what happens. Their short lifespan may explain why we still have n’t detected a single signal from alien intelligence.
According to calculations, in the Milky Way galaxy there should be several dozen worlds with civilizations advanced enough to send messages into space. But these worlds are probably so remote that the signals of their inhabitants do not reach the Earth or fly through space for thousands of years.
By the time the signal is received, that distant planet will no longer have the civilization that sent it. Or we won’t be. “We can imagine a galaxy where intelligent life is common, but communication is unlikely,” said Tom Westby and Christopher Conselis.
The analysis by Westby and Conselice at the University of Nottingham in England is based on a slightly modified Drake equation proposed almost 60 years ago. Frank Drake has identified factors that, in principle, allow us to estimate how many intelligent civilizations can exist in the galaxy.
Westby and Conselis started with the assumption that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent and technologically advanced life to develop on the planet, just like on Earth. Then it remains to find out how many stars are old enough and how many planets are in their Goldilocks zones.
Thus, in their new CETI equation, Westby and Conselis showed that the number of intelligent civilizations depends on how many stars are in the galaxy and how many of them are over 5 billion years old.
It turned out that some factors do not limit the prospects for the discovery of alien life. For example, almost all the stars in our galaxy are older than 5 billion years, and their average age is almost 10 billion years.
Some stars should be excluded due to the lack of basic elements in them. Of the remaining stars, probably only 20 percent have planets in the Goldilocks zone.
Since there are more than 200 billion stars in the galaxy, there must therefore be billions of worlds potentially inhabited by civilizations. But before stating this, one more important exception needs to be made.
It is safe to say that a civilization capable of sending signals can last 100 years. Radio waves were discovered on earth in 1865 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. They learned to use them in 1895, when the Russian physicist Alexander Popov created the first radio transmitter.
With this set of assumptions, given that the average lifespan of an advanced civilization is 100 years, there should be only 36 sufficiently advanced civilizations in our galaxy today.
Our nearest neighbor is likely to be about 17,000 light-years away, “making it impossible to share data or even detect these solar systems with current technology,” Westby and Conselis write. In the most optimistic case, the nearest civilization should be within 300 light years from us.
“The lifetime of civilizations in our galaxy is unknown, and this is by far the most important factor in the CETI equation,” Westby and Conselis note.
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