The question of whether we are lonely in the Universe does not give rest to representatives of the human race for decades. Every time, peering at the night sky, we hope that someone will notice us and our deafening solitude will finally come to an end. But what if we are the last? What if all civilizations, theoretically inhabitant Milky Way, have long died long ago? Whatever sadness seemed to us a similar version of the development of events, we cannot completely exclude it. So, according to the results of the study conducted by the employees of the California Institute of Technology, our galaxy may be full of dead civilizations. The authors of scientific work used the extended Frank Drake equation, which determines the chances of the existence of an extraterrestrial mind in the Milky Way. In general, the researchers came to the conclusion that reasonable forms of life on the universes of the universe are prone to self-destruction. But why?
Who lives in the Milky Way?
The very idea that in one of the observed universe besides us there is no one else, scares. Billions of galaxies, stars and planets, which are watching astronomers with the help of increasingly powerful telescopes, seem uninhabited from the ground. Meanwhile, quite recently, the team of astronomers from the University of Nottingham in England calculated that in our galaxy should have at least 36 reasonable civilizations capable of communicating with us.
British astronomers proceeded from the assumption that reasonable life appears on other inhabited planets of the earthly type in about 4.5-5.5 billion years after their formation. You can read more about this work here.
An outstanding astronomer and popularizer of the science of Karl Sagan believed that the emergence of life on the planets should be cosmic inevitability, and the number of alien civilizations in the universe can fluctuate from "miserable several to millions". With the help of the famous Drake equation, designed to determine the possible number of reasonable civilizations on the expanses of the Milky Way, Sagan concluded that a very small number of civilizations are able to avoid self-destruction.
As the LiveScience edition writes, a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology, the laboratory of the NASA reactive movement and Santiago High School seems to agree with the conclusions of the Sagan on the inclination of reasonable civilizations to self-destruction.
Even more exciting articles on how astronomers are looking for extraterrestrial reasonable civilizations on the expanses of the infinite universe, read on our channel in Yandex.Dzen. There are regularly published articles that are not on the site.
Stunning silence
In the course of work, which has not yet passed the expert assessment and published on the AIRXIV preprints server, scientists used the extended version of the Drake equation written by an outstanding astronomer in 1961. In the study, factors such as the rate of stars appear, the number of planets and the proportion of planets on which life is developing is taken into account. I note that initially the Drake equation was designed not to calculate the exact number, but rather to stimulate the debate on how many extraterrestrial civilizations can be nearby.
According to the mathematical model used by scientists in its work, alien civilizations could appear in the Milky Way of approximately 8 billion years after the formation of the Galaxy. The models also predict that some of these civilizations could be at a distance of 13,000 light years from the center of the Galaxy, which is about 12,000 light years closer than the Earth on which we believes, as scientists believe, appeared after 13.5 billion years After the formation of the Milky Way.
It is interesting: if the aliens contact us, will we understand them?
Interestingly, the resulting conclusions of astronomers came after consideration of a number of factors, which are often overlooked - for example, abogenesis - a process that is the creation of organic molecules by the forces other than living organisms, as well as various evolutionary time frames and the likelihood of potential self-destruction. The authors also reviewed a number of factors, presumably affecting the development of a reasonable life - the predominance of sun-like stars, around which the planets of the earth's type rotate; frequency of supernova explosions; The probability and time necessary for the development of a reasonable life.
However, a new study is characterized by the fact that researchers focused mainly on factors capable of bringing civilizations to an inevitable death. Among them is the impact of radiation, a sudden pause during evolution and a tendency to self-destruct by changing climate, technological progress or war. It also follows that any existing alien civilizations are most likely very young, since self-destruction usually occurs after a long period of existence and development of civilization.
Even if the galaxy reached its civilization peak more than 5 billion years ago, most of the civilizations that existed then most likely self-esteem, found researchers.
In general, a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology, the NASA and High School of Santiago Laboratory gives a gloomy answer to the question formulated by the Italian physicist, one of the founding fathers of a nuclear bomb, Enrico Fermi "Where is all"? The authors of scientific work believe that all reasonable civilizations that exist in the Milky Way may have already destroyed themselves. The results obtained should say, look convincingly - in the end, the universe is incomprehensible, and we still have not found any signs that reasonable living beings are somewhere else except the Earth.
As for us with you, the authors of the study call our civilization border. So, today no one knows whether we can experience the consequences of the rapid climate change. Moreover, such the greatest scientists as Stephen Hawking and strongly proposed humanity with no more than 600 years of life, among the threats highlighting artificial intelligence, nuclear war and environmental pollution. What do you think, will the humanity avoid self-destruction avoid? The answer will be waiting here, as well as in the comments to this article.