(ORDO NEWS) — The good news is that if aliens are anything like human, then it follows from the calculation on the knee that there are only a couple of truly evil alien civilizations in our galaxy.
Stephen Hawking once said that with our messages to the depths of space, we risk destroying human civilization: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the result will be the same as when Christopher Columbus landed in America: everything ended badly for the Indians”.
Hawking’s words often become an argument against the exchange of messages with extraterrestrial intelligence, or METI. But how many truly hostile civilizations are there in the universe? And what are the chances that they will receive a message from our galaxy? Researches on this topic are countless: very, very few even make assumptions.
A new thought experiment provides a very rough guess — in the hope that scientists will take METI seriously and think about how safe it is to communicate with alien civilizations.
The article, for which the author himself admits “some limitations”, suggests that there are approximately four “hostile extraterrestrial civilizations” in the entire Milky Way. In all likelihood, we will have to send about 18 thousand messages to outer exoplanets – and still the probability of death will be even less than in a global catastrophe if the Earth suddenly collides with a giant asteroid.
The article, not yet peer-reviewed by experts, is called “Assessment of the prevalence of hostile extraterrestrial civilizations.” It was written by Alberto Caballero, a PhD student at the University of Vigo in Spain and the author of a separate study published in May in the International Journal of Astrobiology at the University of Cambridge. It analyzed the origin of the famous signal”Wow!” or “Whoa!”
Caballero admits that, due to a number of assumptions, it is difficult to verify the truth of his calculations. As part of the study, he calculated how many invasions have occurred on Earth over the past half century – meaning wars between countries. He then took this data and extrapolated it to the number of potentially habitable exoplanets known and suspected, according to an estimate by the Italian scientist Claudio Maccone, who believes that there are up to 15,785 civilizations in the Milky Way. The basic idea – that earthly conflicts will spill out into outer space, like in a video game – will seem familiar to fans of science fiction like the series “The Expanse”.
Caballero concludes that the likelihood of a hostile alien race invading Earth is low—very low indeed. “The probability that we will be invaded by an extraterrestrial civilization that received our signal is about two orders of magnitude lower than the risk of a collision with a killer asteroid,” which is once every 100 million years, he writes in the article.
He suggested that in the Milky Way there is “less than one” hostile extraterrestrial civilization of the “first type” – these include those who have mastered interstellar travel.
“According to my calculations, it turned out that there are only 0.22 type 1 civilizations (with the ability to interstellar travel), and only 4.42 similar to humanity (we are not even type 0 yet), he said. In his article I don’t stop at these 4.42, because: firstly, we don’t know if all civilizations in the galaxy are the same as us (that is, below type 0), and secondly, a civilization like ours certainly does not represent they are a threat, because we do not have the technology to fly to their planet (and when we do, we will automatically switch to type 2).”
Caballero emphasized that with the development of our society, invasions became less and less, from which he concluded that highly developed alien civilizations capable of destroying the Earth would hardly be interested in this.
“I wrote the article based on what we know about life in general. The mind of aliens is not familiar to us. Extraterrestrials may have a different chemical composition of the brain, our sympathy may be alien to them, or they may even have psychopathic tendencies,” he said. “There are a number of assumptions in my research, because we don’t know what kind of aliens they are.”
“Unfortunately, this is still a very closed topic, and it seems that no one is eager to discuss it,” he added. “People are afraid to send messages into space, but there are literally very few studies on how dangerous this is.”
Caballero understands that this is not the most reliable science, but still expects that his guess will be the starting point for further discussion.
“The mere fact that the estimated probability of an invasion from space is two orders of magnitude lower than an impact with a killer asteroid, in theory, opens the door for the next step – an international discussion about the conditions under which the first radio transmission or laser message will be sent into interstellar space,” he concluded.
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