The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), at the Narrabri Observatory, 500 km north-west of Sydney, Australia.
Credit: ATCA/CSIRO
WHICH IS THE more shocking proposition: that our galactic neighbourhood is riddled with advanced alien civilisations? Or that we humans are a solitary beacon of intelligent life in a silent universe of almost incomprehensible vastness?
Either prospect is enough to keep you awake at night. Yet one of these two statements is likely true. We just don't know which one.
That's not to say we don't know anything about the likelihood of intelligent life existing in the universe. In fact, we know it does: the very presence of humanity means the probability of intelligence arising is greater than nil.
We just don't know how much greater than nil it is. It might be one in a million. It could be one in a billion. Or it could be a freak event, never to be repeated.
Consider the numbers involved: we live in a universe with billions upon billions of stars, many of which are very much like our own Sun, and each may well have a clutch of planets. So, even if the probability of intelligent life emerging is infinitesimally small, the sheer number of stars in the heavens makes it likely we're not alone.
One man who has maintained a life-long passion for solving this astronomical conundrum is Frank Drake, an American radio astronomer who now chairs the SETI Institute in the United States (SETI, a common acronym in the field, stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
According to Drake, his interest in the possible existence of extraterrestrial life started as a child. "I was eight years old and my father told me there were other worlds in space. To me that meant worlds with cities and people just like the Earth, and that fascinated me."
In the early 1960s, while working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, he and a few enthusiastic scientists became intrigued by the prospect of detecting evidence of extraterrestrial civilisations using the relatively new discipline of radio astronomy.
"In 1961, I was asked by the National Academy of Science to convene a meeting of scientists interested in SETI to explore what the possibilities were," says Drake.
"In preparing the agenda for the meeting, I listed all the factors one needed to know to predict the number of detectable civilisations in our galaxy. I recognised that if they were all multiplied together, one got an estimate of the number of detectable civilisations."
Thus the Drake equation was born. And it seems that ever since, Drake has spent his career in dogged pursuit of evidence for ET's existence.
While that evidence has yet to arrive, his equation lives on as a simple yet potent tool that gives us a road map of what we need to learn in order to solve this fundamental existential dilemma. So what's the equation like? Here it is:
N = R* x fp x ne x f1 x fi x fc x L
was Michael one of yours?
Dear Aliens,
Just wondering if Michael Jackson might have originated out in the heavens with you blokes, because he sure was one strange sort of a dood.
fascinating
Wouldnt it be fantastic if we could hear from another civilization. I really do hope that we are not alone and that we hear something within my lifetime. I can only hope...
X PRIZE
IS THERE AN X PRIZE FOR POSITIVE REPRODUCEABLE PROOF OF ET?
Drake's Equation is an
Drake's Equation is an excellent Mathematical model of the probabilities involved. There might, as yet, appear more factors to the equation; who knows?
The variables are quite wobbley and estimates between 1 and 200 seem reasonable. The Milky Way is a big place!
Evidence of alien contact
Assuming programs like SETI discover concrete evidence of extraterrestial civilisations existing outside our own solar system, what's stopping governments around the world from suppressing this information to the general public labelling any evidence, "Top Secret!".
Universe Silent Because Humans are Alone
The article is wildly optimistic about 1). The prospects of life originating from non-life (which is zero), and 2). The prospects of intelligent life arising and surviving.
To begin with, science has failed to accomplish biogenesis because biogenesis is impossible. If scientists cannot accomplish the task abiogenesis is likewise impossible.
Secondarily: Civilization has existed on the Earth for 10,000 years out of 4,600,000,000 years. SETI scientists try very hard to avoid the implications of this observation. I'll tell you what it means: Civilization may be considered as inevitable as the duck-billed platypus.
Thirdly, technological civilization sufficiently advanced for radio astronomy has only existed for 100 years out of civilization's 10,000 years. While some might consider this an evidence of technological civilization's inevitability, I shall remind you of the role of perpetual warfare in the advance of technology. Supposing an intelligent animal actually existed on another planet and that animal isn't perpetually engaged in warfare there isn't any reason at all to imagine that such a peaceful intelligent animal would ever invent radio telescopes.
Finally, the SETI advocated seem to operate on the notion that technological civilization is going to survive on the Earth forever. This assumption is wildly irrationally optimistic. Technological civilization is already dying, infrastructure eroding, resources depleting and climate change is poised to deliver the final knock-out punch.
If technological civilization survives for another century you may consider that a major miracle. Technological civilization isn't going to survive for another two centuries under any circumstance.
Technological civilization originated once and only once in this Universe. We're it. Humankind is alone in the Universe and there won't be any other.
David Mathews Nature Photos
No, We Are Not Alone in Our Galaxy, Let Alone the Universe
Do you really believe that all of the other celestial bodies in our solar system and potentially in the 200,000,000,000-plus planetary systems (planets, dwarf planets and moons numbering many times more) in our galaxy, the Milky Way, are biologically sterile or entirely devoid of life, and that life forms do not evolve in nearly endless ways from simple to complex, including in brains (universally present in all complex animal species on Earth) and brain-power? Do you reject recognition of the fact that there is a pyramid or hierarchy of brain development and ability among insect through more physically complex animal species on Earth that is a probable paradigm for other-world ET species? Think about it. T H I N K, rationally. Already chances are more than they are not that there is stable and possibly complex life beneath the ice shell of Jupiter's moon Europa, and even maybe beneath that of the asteroid-belt dwarf planet of Ceres, and perhaps short-lived, fleeting to durable microbial life, at least, in the wet H20 subsurface of Enceladus, a geyser harboring moon of Saturn, I'm happy to say and probably somewhat disillusion you. The evidence is strong that all of these have subsurface liquid water and certain that they have thin surface atmospheres containing oxygen.
Most of terrestrial life has been extinguished by natural geological and astrophysical disasters repeatedly on Earth, only for it to recover with different species newly pervasive and, in the food web and chain, dominant following each mass extinction. These extinctions would probabilistically occur more and less often among other planetary systems of stars of the same type and age as ours, as well as of those of different type stars. Planets associated with stars of our type and age hosting life with no or fewer and much older such extinctions would likely have much more highly evolved plant, wild animal and civilized life forms than those here on Earth, if its civilized life has not destroyed itself or decimated the other major species on those planets. Fortunately for the human species the difference between the wild animal manner of life and the human and its pet manner of life is that the latter are domesticated manners of life, with humans having domesticated themselves and their pet animals to live "relatively" harmoniously together. Civilization equals intelligent or more-intelligent domestication and relative civility and a materially comfortable or splendid manner of life for and among its members. Just as there is a civil feud between the planetary protector-versus-plunderer intelligentsias and actors of our planet, whose outcome will determine the survival of humankind and that of the other major species populating our planet in the near term, same feuds likely have occurred within global civilizations on these other potentially advanced-life-hosting planets, with the protectors prevailing and failing on different such planets. We hope to find and make contact with the protector civilizations that have succeeded and endured. I'm sure technologically advanced ET species and civilizations are out there, residing on celestial bodies sprinkled in the hundreds of thousands to tens of millions among the 200,000,000,000 to 300,000,000,000 potential solar or planetary systems in our galaxy, but am equally sure that they do not resemble us and probably are not evolved primates in most instances or at all.
Just because life has not been created artificially by humans (where sophisticated biological science is less than 200 years old) does not mean that it will not soon be created, with the critical-mass exponential advances in our scientific knowledge and technologies in our time, or that bio-genesis cannot or does not proceed on its from abiogenesis, as only this such genesis could have engendered our own existence from the cosmic gas and dust cloud of manifold chemical elements and compounds, and the forces of extreme cold, explosions and heat, gravity, clumping and consolidation, inertia, electromagnetism, the thermodynamic weak and strong force, etc., that gave rise to and formed our sun and the celestial bodies of our solar system -- a process that can be observed telescopically in solar systems forming and evolving from cosmic clouds now.
A Near Infinity of Different Somthings from Existing Somethings
The argument that it is impossible for abiogenesis to accomplish biogenesis, evidentially because it has not been accomplished artificially yet in a laboratory by scientists, is utterly based on ignorance and possibly on loyalty and devotion to religion and a religious doctrine of anthropocentrism and deity creation and divine design of nature and the cosmos. A simple and simplistic illustration, for the sake of easy understanding, for how non-life propagates life is by you yourself combining sufficient mere soil, that is sufficiently nutritious, to a life-viable but lifeless seed or seeds and then by adding respectively sufficient and optimal measures of water, temperature and light and darkness, and time. The result will be that you will have produced a plant or plants, just as nature improvises or engineers life on its own with the inevitable occasional random occurrence of the convergence of the right ingredients and conditions conducive to the emergence of live and its evolution in our mind-bogglingly vast universe (Please, in your eloquence, do not argue there are no other stars or celestial bodies than those in our solar system, as you will just demonstrate again that literacy and eloquence do not constitute intelligence!), with much credit due, at root, to the sufficient and compatible presence of "organic compounds" present in the soil and the seed/s, which naturally occur in abundance in nature/the cosmos on Earth and ubiquitously in our solar system and beyond. It's (molecular and compound as well as biological emergence and divergence) all a matter of the interactive and the synergistic processes and dynamics of energy, matter, chemistry and physics under environmental conditions conducive to the production of life, which inhere in matter and energy.
Re:Comment "A Near Infinity of Different Somethings from Exi..."
Correction #1: The term "organic molecules" primarily applies instead of "organic compounds" in the above.
Correction #2: The word "periodic" applies instead of "occasional" in the above.
Humans are alone in the Universe
The article is wildly optimistic about 1). The prospects of life originating from non-life (which is zero), and 2). The prospects of intelligent life arising and surviving.
To begin with, science has failed to accomplish biogenesis because biogenesis is impossible. If scientists cannot accomplish the task abiogenesis is likewise impossible.
Secondarily: Civilization has existed on the Earth for 10,000 years out of 4,600,000,000 years. SETI scientists try very hard to avoid the implications of this observation. I'll tell you what it means: Civilization may be considered as inevitable as the duck-billed platypus.
Thirdly, technological civilization sufficiently advanced for radio astronomy has only existed for 100 years out of civilization's 10,000 years. While some might consider this an evidence of technological civilization's inevitability, I shall remind you of the role of perpetual warfare in the advance of technology. Supposing an intelligent animal actually existed on another planet and that animal isn't perpetually engaged in warfare there isn't any reason at all to imagine that such a peaceful intelligent animal would ever invent radio telescopes.
Finally, the SETI advocated seem to operate on the notion that technological civilization is going to survive on the Earth forever. This assumption is wildly irrationally optimistic. Technological civilization is already dying, infrastructure eroding, resources depleting and climate change is poised to deliver the final knock-out punch.
If technological civilization survives for another century you may consider that a major miracle. Technological civilization isn't going to survive for another two centuries under any circumstance.
Technological civilization originated once and only once in this Universe. We're it. Humankind is alone in the Universe and there won't be any other.
David Mathews Nature Photos