“In their paper, their analysis results in a “steady state Drake equation” involving the birth-to-death ratio; they then conclude that as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) searches only investigate about a thousand to 10,000 star systems, without yet finding any ETIs, the birth-to-death ratio must be much greater than the reciprocal of this number, 0.001 to 0.0001.”
It looks like they’ve only searched 0.0001% of the Milky Way so they really have no right to dim the odds lol.
Jump_Like_A_Willys on
I’ve said something similar for a while.
Yes, the galaxy has a lot of planets on which civilizations could arise. So the odds are good that other civilizations will exist at some point during the life of the galaxy. But are the ones that did arise still around? Or possibly the ones that will arise have not done so yet.
So while over a –say — 10 billion year period there will likely be many civilizations that arise, given the number of planets in the galaxy. But how many of that total are around right now? That may be a small number, and the distances involved may make it very unlikely we ever encounter each other.
Final_Winter7524 on
Well, duh.
Why do we think all the scifi stories have “subspace” and “hyperspace” and “warp” and “beaming”?
Because the distances in our universe are too bloody large for any of our equipment or signals to ever get anywhere in a reasonable time frame given our current technology.
Unless we discover and entirely new set of physics that allows us to circumvent what we think we know now, there may be billions of civilizations and we’d never know. Ever.
TravisTicklez on
“Our current technology” however is progressing quite quickly. Look at what we had even 100 years ago compared to today.
Kwayzar9111 on
The universe is still very young, there are trillions of years to go..we could be the first.. I do believe there is other intelligent life out there,
Anonymous-USA on
That’s one of the variables in Drake’s equation from the 1960’s already. And as the author writes “*we have essentially no constraints on these terms*” which was true then too. I also disagree with the statement “*This ratio is all that really matters*”. Because no matter how narrow that band may be there is always a distance at which we could detect them based on when they evolved. Further, any planet capable of evolving advanced intelligent life may be capable of doing so many times over. Lastly, how do you define “civilization”? While SETI has narrowly focused on alien civilizations that are technically advanced enough to transmit radio waves, it’s a much much wider window if you consider any culture. Humans have been around in some form for over a million years, but only transmitting powerful radio signals *now*. Do we dismiss our earlier cultural groups? There are many life forms on earth that can be qualified as “culture” — life that passes down learned information. But why require civilization or culture? Alien insects and microbes would be exciting too.
I’m not impressed with the article’s abstract.
Reggae_jammin on
I’m now inclined to think we’re alone – the latest hypothesis for life on Earth is that comets (or asteroids) carrying the complex particles necessary for life may have crashed into Early Earth. Due to unknown situations, these comets were slowed to speeds less than 11kms such that the particles weren’t destroyed on impact. Just seems like a “miracle”, for want of a better word, that we even exist.
Even moving past that, we now have satellites orbiting the Earth, space probes and space telescopes etc and in the next 10 to 15 years, the number of telescopes and probes in space will explode. So far from our scanning, we’re not seeing similar activities on other planets or star systems.
So, either we’re alone, other civilizations existed but not anymore or other civilizations exist but are great at hiding their trails. RIght now, I lean towards the first one.
G-rantification on
Dim odds indeed, based on our current measurement constraints. Looking forward to fine-tuning of instruments and equations!
sovlex on
Do we really want to discover civilization close or slightly advanced to ours? With primitive ethics and dangerous weapons? Do we really want that? I question the very necessity of this basic aspiration.
PrinceEntrapto on
I believe we have already encountered several examples of ETI activity yet just can’t validate it, from the Wow! and several other suspicious strong narrowband signals to a possible accelerating antimatter-propelled spacecraft’s signature, and from the existence of Przybylski’s star to star clusters exhibiting anomalous infrared excess consistent with partial obstruction by opaque objects such as Dyson swarms – there are numerous hypothesised technosignatures that appear to have been observed yet can’t be conclusively determined to be the result of technology
Even the Wow! signal, despite remaining the most likely contender for an ETI transmission, has been dismissed by many as unimportant because it ‘never repeated’, yet in the almost 50 years since its discovery, only around 150 hours (or about a week’s worth of time) has been dedicated to searching for it – roughly 0.04% of the total time elapsed since 1977, and for all we know it could have repeated dozens of times within those 400,000 hours spent *not* searching for it
ApocalypseSpokesman on
I’m not sure I follow the paper’s reasoning, but I dig David Kipping and Cool Worlds.
And I reckon that at any given time there are maybe a few tech-ready species in the Milky Way, but they are distant enough from one another and the longevity of their civilizations so short that in the entire history of our (or any other) galaxy, genuine meet-ups between technological civilizations have only happened 2 or 3 times.
I’d wager the more common pattern is a newly arisen tech civilization comes upon some radio broadcast or other artifact of another that has already met its end.
TheRomanSchizo610 on
Remember folks, alien civilizations≠alien life in general.
b0rtb0rtb0rtb0rt on
I’m not sure why people are expecting life to be multicellular, much less something we’d recognize as intelligent and technological. Projects like SETI are fun hobbies, but they say more about people’s anthropocentrism than anything resembling science.
The vast majority of life on earth by any measurement is microbial, and for the majority of its history it’s been solely microbial. In two to four hundred million years, the only life on the planet will be microbial until the sun blows off its outer layers.
Todd_wittwicky on
We’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas! Must be nothing else out there! /s
14 Comments
“In their paper, their analysis results in a “steady state Drake equation” involving the birth-to-death ratio; they then conclude that as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) searches only investigate about a thousand to 10,000 star systems, without yet finding any ETIs, the birth-to-death ratio must be much greater than the reciprocal of this number, 0.001 to 0.0001.”
It looks like they’ve only searched 0.0001% of the Milky Way so they really have no right to dim the odds lol.
I’ve said something similar for a while.
Yes, the galaxy has a lot of planets on which civilizations could arise. So the odds are good that other civilizations will exist at some point during the life of the galaxy. But are the ones that did arise still around? Or possibly the ones that will arise have not done so yet.
So while over a –say — 10 billion year period there will likely be many civilizations that arise, given the number of planets in the galaxy. But how many of that total are around right now? That may be a small number, and the distances involved may make it very unlikely we ever encounter each other.
Well, duh.
Why do we think all the scifi stories have “subspace” and “hyperspace” and “warp” and “beaming”?
Because the distances in our universe are too bloody large for any of our equipment or signals to ever get anywhere in a reasonable time frame given our current technology.
Unless we discover and entirely new set of physics that allows us to circumvent what we think we know now, there may be billions of civilizations and we’d never know. Ever.
“Our current technology” however is progressing quite quickly. Look at what we had even 100 years ago compared to today.
The universe is still very young, there are trillions of years to go..we could be the first.. I do believe there is other intelligent life out there,
That’s one of the variables in Drake’s equation from the 1960’s already. And as the author writes “*we have essentially no constraints on these terms*” which was true then too. I also disagree with the statement “*This ratio is all that really matters*”. Because no matter how narrow that band may be there is always a distance at which we could detect them based on when they evolved. Further, any planet capable of evolving advanced intelligent life may be capable of doing so many times over. Lastly, how do you define “civilization”? While SETI has narrowly focused on alien civilizations that are technically advanced enough to transmit radio waves, it’s a much much wider window if you consider any culture. Humans have been around in some form for over a million years, but only transmitting powerful radio signals *now*. Do we dismiss our earlier cultural groups? There are many life forms on earth that can be qualified as “culture” — life that passes down learned information. But why require civilization or culture? Alien insects and microbes would be exciting too.
I’m not impressed with the article’s abstract.
I’m now inclined to think we’re alone – the latest hypothesis for life on Earth is that comets (or asteroids) carrying the complex particles necessary for life may have crashed into Early Earth. Due to unknown situations, these comets were slowed to speeds less than 11kms such that the particles weren’t destroyed on impact. Just seems like a “miracle”, for want of a better word, that we even exist.
Even moving past that, we now have satellites orbiting the Earth, space probes and space telescopes etc and in the next 10 to 15 years, the number of telescopes and probes in space will explode. So far from our scanning, we’re not seeing similar activities on other planets or star systems.
So, either we’re alone, other civilizations existed but not anymore or other civilizations exist but are great at hiding their trails. RIght now, I lean towards the first one.
Dim odds indeed, based on our current measurement constraints. Looking forward to fine-tuning of instruments and equations!
Do we really want to discover civilization close or slightly advanced to ours? With primitive ethics and dangerous weapons? Do we really want that? I question the very necessity of this basic aspiration.
I believe we have already encountered several examples of ETI activity yet just can’t validate it, from the Wow! and several other suspicious strong narrowband signals to a possible accelerating antimatter-propelled spacecraft’s signature, and from the existence of Przybylski’s star to star clusters exhibiting anomalous infrared excess consistent with partial obstruction by opaque objects such as Dyson swarms – there are numerous hypothesised technosignatures that appear to have been observed yet can’t be conclusively determined to be the result of technology
Even the Wow! signal, despite remaining the most likely contender for an ETI transmission, has been dismissed by many as unimportant because it ‘never repeated’, yet in the almost 50 years since its discovery, only around 150 hours (or about a week’s worth of time) has been dedicated to searching for it – roughly 0.04% of the total time elapsed since 1977, and for all we know it could have repeated dozens of times within those 400,000 hours spent *not* searching for it
I’m not sure I follow the paper’s reasoning, but I dig David Kipping and Cool Worlds.
And I reckon that at any given time there are maybe a few tech-ready species in the Milky Way, but they are distant enough from one another and the longevity of their civilizations so short that in the entire history of our (or any other) galaxy, genuine meet-ups between technological civilizations have only happened 2 or 3 times.
I’d wager the more common pattern is a newly arisen tech civilization comes upon some radio broadcast or other artifact of another that has already met its end.
Remember folks, alien civilizations≠alien life in general.
I’m not sure why people are expecting life to be multicellular, much less something we’d recognize as intelligent and technological. Projects like SETI are fun hobbies, but they say more about people’s anthropocentrism than anything resembling science.
The vast majority of life on earth by any measurement is microbial, and for the majority of its history it’s been solely microbial. In two to four hundred million years, the only life on the planet will be microbial until the sun blows off its outer layers.
We’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas! Must be nothing else out there! /s