Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 16 2020, @08:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-should-be-42 dept.

Research sheds new light on intelligent life existing across the Galaxy

Is there anyone out there? This is an age-old question that researchers have now shed new light on with a study that calculates there could be more than 30 intelligent civilizations throughout our Galaxy. This is an enormous advance over previous estimates which spanned from zero to billions.

One of the biggest and longest-standing questions in the history of human thought is whether there are other intelligent lifeforms within our Universe. Obtaining good estimates of the number of possible extraterrestrial civilizations has however been very challenging.

A new study led by the University of Nottingham and published today in The Astrophysical Journal [DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab8225] [DX] has taken a new approach to this problem. Using the assumption that intelligent life forms on other planets in a similar way as it does on Earth, researchers have obtained an estimate for the number of intelligent communicating civilizations within our own galaxy -the Milky Way. They calculate that there could be over 30 active communicating intelligent civilizations in our home Galaxy.

The abstract:

We present a cosmic perspective on the search for life and examine the likely number of Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent (CETI) civilizations in our Galaxy by utilizing the latest astrophysical information. Our calculation involves Galactic star formation histories, metallicity distributions, and the likelihood of stars hosting Earth-like planets in their habitable zones, under specific assumptions which we describe as the Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong conditions. These assumptions are based on the one situation in which intelligent, communicative life is known to exist—on our own planet. This type of life has developed in a metal-rich environment and has taken roughly 5 Gyr to do so. We investigate the possible number of CETI civilizations based on different scenarios. At one extreme is the Weak Astrobiological Copernican scenario—such that a planet forms intelligent life sometime after 5 Gyr, but not earlier. The other is the Strong Astrobiological Copernican scenario in which life must form between 4.5 and 5.5 Gyr, as on Earth. In the Strong scenario (under the strictest set of assumptions), we find there should be at least 36 (+175/-32) civilizations within our Galaxy: this is a lower limit, based on the assumption that the average lifetime, L, of a communicating civilization is 100 yr (since we know that our own civilization has had radio communications for this time). If spread uniformly throughout the Galaxy this would imply that the nearest CETI is at most 17,000(+33,600/-10,000) lt-yr away and most likely hosted by a low-mass M-dwarf star, likely far surpassing our ability to detect it for the foreseeable future, and making interstellar communication impossible. Furthermore, the likelihood that the host stars for this life are solar-type stars is extremely small and most would have to be M dwarfs, which may not be stable enough to host life over long timescales. We furthermore explore other scenarios and explain the likely number of CETI there are within the Galaxy based on variations of our assumptions.

Somewhere between 4 and 211 (or 0 and 1) civilizations.

Also at The Guardian and USA Today.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Bot on Tuesday June 16 2020, @06:37PM (7 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Tuesday June 16 2020, @06:37PM (#1008790) Journal

    >The abiogenesis question is a lot closer to being answered than ever before

    You cannot reply to the abiogenesis question until you have reverse engineered the universe and you cannot prove you did it from the inside.

    Cue retarded atheist accusing me to shift goalposts no true scotsman whatever

    I am indeed shifting goalposts, to the past. Abiogenesis was given as a fact since worms and insects came out of dirty water, rotten meat, crap... They got it wrong because they couldn't see the microrganisms, we MAY get it wrong now because we consider quantum scale phenomenons impersonally random, because our equations describe it in terms of probability. This is more anthropocentric than most of the religions SCIENCE!!! aims to take the place of.

    --
    Account abandoned.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   -2  
       Flamebait=1, Overrated=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Flamebait' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   0  
  • (Score: 3, Touché) by FatPhil on Tuesday June 16 2020, @07:48PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday June 16 2020, @07:48PM (#1008819) Homepage
    > You cannot reply to the abiogenesis question until you have reverse engineered the universe

    False.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @08:36PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @08:36PM (#1008832)

    The scientific theories underlying abiogenesis are not anywhere close to the apparent observations of Spontaneous Generation. There is also nothing anthropocentric about it either, as there isn't some requirement built in that the Universe is specially made for us or that humans are somehow special compared to other entities in an abiogenesis framework. Even if our current theories are wrong in light of quantum chemistry as to the exact mechanism, the described reactions are much closer to the everyday activities of the Universe than things appearing in a *poof* of magic could ever be.

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday June 16 2020, @08:53PM (4 children)

      by Bot (3902) on Tuesday June 16 2020, @08:53PM (#1008838) Journal

      You are misunderstanding my position on both counts. I drew a parallel and how the research is advanced does not matter.
      Plus the anthropocentrism is not on homo sapiens sapiens but on the assumption "I can describe interactions probabilistically therefore the system is impersonally random". Sorry can't do that.

      Say, for example you learn all laws governing matter, trace them back to t=0, explain fully what happened without resorting to a god, prove that the way things are is the only conceivable form for an universe, so that there is no need for any god to even having decided which set of rules govern the interaction of particles at quantum scale. This means nothing because 'conceivable' is rooted into this implementation of one universe. So you use a concept which is not necessarily defined outside the same way if any.

      --
      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday June 16 2020, @10:13PM (2 children)

        by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Tuesday June 16 2020, @10:13PM (#1008878)

        Are you trying to prove the existence of the Christian god using logic?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @11:47PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @11:47PM (#1008926)

          “Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

          The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

          "But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

          "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @04:41AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @04:41AM (#1009029)

          They could certainly try. But maybe that should wait until they can show the other gods definitely don't exist otherwise you can just pick any god you want even one of your own invention. But that will probably have to wait until they can agree on what the Christian God is and its properties in order to avoid disproving their own or taking friendly fire. Although, to do that, they'd all need to agree on the proper interpretation of the words in the Bible. And step one of that process should probably be to figure out which of the books of the Bible are the real ones and which are not. However, waiting for Christendom to finally decide after 1600+ years of no progress probably means the rest of us will have to wait awhile for the next part.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @11:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @11:18PM (#1008905)

        I don't think you know what "anthropocentrism" [wikipedia.org] means. Even without that, your idea still seems weak because we can seemingly only operate within this Universe. Ideas operating outside the scope of the universe would necessarily be pragmatically false or noncognitivistic in nature. Literally anything we could know would have to, in some way, be anchored in the Universe in which we operate. Additionally, you don't have to have metauniversal knowledge to have universal knowledge. Without evidence of agency, there is no epistemic justification for agency; without evidence of certainty, there is no epistemic justification for certainty. Therefore, the provisional claim of the interactions as probabilistic and impersonally random in appearance is more sound due to its lack of ontological entity importation.