"The idea that we are the only intelligent creatures in a cosmos of a hundred billion galaxies is so preposterous that there are very few astronomers today who would take it seriously. It is safest to assume therefore, that they are out there and to consider the manner in which this may impinge upon human society."
Arthur C. Clarke, physicist and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey
The Kepler space telescope has mapped more than 1,200 planets in one tiny corner of our Milky Way Galaxy. Based on that sample, scientists say that there are approximately 50 billion planets in the entire galaxy based on a conservative estimate of one planet per star in the galaxy, including 500 million that are theoretically capable of sustaining life.
In astronomer Milan Cirkovic's view, truly advanced technological civilizations (ATCs: those who survive the bottleneck presented by the threat of self-destruction through warfare or asteroid impact or other accidents) will tend to be located at the outskirts of the Milky Way. The very traits that make ATCs capable of migrating and utilizing resources with high efficiency will tend to make them systematically hard to detect from afar.
Jamin Zuckerman proposed in 1985 that stellar evolution of stars far older than our Sun is an important motivation for civilizations to undertake interstellar migrations. It seems implausible that any but the most extreme conservative societies would opt to wait to be forced to migration by slow and easily predictable process like their star leaving the Main Sequence..
Kepler has discovered 1,235 exoplanets that revolve around a sun, in an area that represents around 1/400th of the Milky Way. By extrapolating these numbers, the Kepler team has estimated that there are at least 50 billion exoplanets in our galaxy — 500 million of which sit inside the habitable "Goldilocks" zones of their suns, the area that it is neither too hot nor too cold to support life.
Astronomers estimate that there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe. If you want to extrapolate those numbers, that means there are around 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 (50 quintillion) potentially habitable planets in the universe.
One of the greatest philosophical and scientific challenges that currently confronts humanity is the unsolved question of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for or contact with such civilizations.
The 14-billion-year age of the universe and its 130 billion galaxies and a Milky Way Galaxy with some 400 billion stars suggest that if the Earth is typical, should be common. Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, discussing this observation with colleagues over lunch in 1950, asked, logically: "Where are they?" Why, if advanced extraterrestrial civilizations exist in our Milky Way galaxy, hasn't evidence such as probes, spacecraft, or radio transmissions been found?
As our technologies become ever more sophisticated and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence continues to fail, the "Great Silence" becomes louder than ever. The seemingly empty cosmos is screaming out to us that something is amiss. Or is it?
Using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, proposed an answer to the Fermi Paradox. Bjork proposed that an alien civilization might build intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for life.
He found, however, that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - NASA's current Cassini mission to Saturn is gliding along at 32km a second - it would take 10 billion years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore a mere four percent of the galaxy.
Like humans, alien civilizations could shorten the time to find extra-terrestrials by picking up television and radio broadcasts that might leak from colonized planets. "Even then," he reported, "unless they can develop an exotic form of transport that gets them across the galaxy in two weeks it's still going to take millions of years to find us. There are so many stars in the galaxy that probably life could exist elsewhere, but will we ever get in contact with them? Not in our lifetime."
The problem of distance is compounded by the fact that timescales that provide a "window of opportunity" for detection or contact might be quite small. Advanced civilizations may periodically arise and fall throughout our galaxy as they do here, on Earth, but this may be such a rare event, relatively speaking, that the odds of two or more such civilizations existing at the same time are low.
In short, there may have been intelligent civilizations in the galaxy before the emergence of intelligence on Earth, and there may be intelligent civilizations after its extinction, but it is possible that human beings are the only intelligent civilization in existence "now." "Now" assumes that an extraterrestrial intelligence is not able to travel to our vicinity at faster-than-light speeds, in order to detect an intelligence 1,000 light-years distant, that intelligence will need to have been active 1,000 years ago.
There is also a possibility that archaeological evidence of past civilizations may be detected through deep space observations — especially if they left behind large artifacts such as Dyson spheres.
Perhaps...but in our search for life and intelligence we have to keep in mind that the Milky Way Galaxy is two or three times the age of our Solar System, so there are going to be some societies out there that are millions of years, maybe more, beyond ours, which may have proceeded beyond biology—that have invented intelligent, self-replicating machines and it could be that what we first find is something that's artificially constructed if we have the ability to recognize it as such. It may very well be that our greatest discovery will be that the very nature of alien communication will prevent our being able to communicate with it.
Provided by The Daily Galaxy - Casey Kazan / NASA/JPL and New Scientist
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