New study: there could be around 36 alien civilizations in our galaxy
- Thread starter Romulan_spy
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The abstract of the article states that there could be 4 to 211 civilizations, with the nearest 7 to 50 k light years away.. Being smarter than them, I'm quite sure there are 212.
Well, to be more precise the study got a result of 36 civs but with a large statistical error of -32 to +175. So the futurism.com article I referenced only mentioned the main result of 36. But taking the statistical error into account, the result could be anywhere between 4 and 211 like you said.
And of course the exact numbers hardly matter, since they're very rough estimates at best. It's just meant to give a broad idea of the possible range.
I think this is the key sentence in the abstract:
"If spread uniformly throughout the Galaxy this would imply that the nearest CETI is at most
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."
So even if we take the best case of only 7,000 l.y away, the paper is saying that detecting another CETI with our current tech is extremely unlikely.
"If spread uniformly throughout the Galaxy this would imply that the nearest CETI is at most
So even if we take the best case of only 7,000 l.y away, the paper is saying that detecting another CETI with our current tech is extremely unlikely.
Between 4 and 211.. that's not much... less competition when we're going to create the Terran empire! MWUHAHAHAHAA all those resources are belong to US!!
Unless each "single" civilization has colonized thousands of star systems over thousands or millions of years. Then the galaxy would look kind of like Stargate SG-1, where we find the presence of the same handful of civilizations over and over again as we expand into space.
^SG-1 began in 1997, but most of the franchise aired in the 2000s.
My own guess is that aliens are beyond the light horizon.
The universe is cruel...it can go FTL during inflation—but won’t let a smaller spaceship do it. Being smaller should make it easier.
Over unity mass/energy creation, effective antigravity with dark energy—entanglement/teleportation only at small scales. No endless steady-state universe to play in.
The Maker can be a real jerk
The universe is cruel...it can go FTL during inflation—but won’t let a smaller spaceship do it. Being smaller should make it easier.
Over unity mass/energy creation, effective antigravity with dark energy—entanglement/teleportation only at small scales. No endless steady-state universe to play in.
The Maker can be a real jerk
Or - just gave us a few ... obstacles ... to overcome?
To paraphrase a Facebook meme I saw recently, I think we need to retire the expression "avoid like the plague," because we've seen now that a lot of people don't actually do that.
I'd be excited to see a planet with a bunch of alien animals on it. Civilization's overrated.
But whether or not any of the alien animals are civilized, I definitely wonder what they look like. The possibilities are endless.
But whether or not any of the alien animals are civilized, I definitely wonder what they look like. The possibilities are endless.
Knowing Humans, they would domesticate those animals if they had any use.
We'd probably have another "Great White Hunter" era with jackasses heading off to hunt the great beasts into extinction...again...
my suspicion is that of worlds that are like ours, most eiter get stuck in an archean period or at best move on to blue green algae. It may be that the Great Oxidation Event that happened on earth happens on any world where early life flourishes, and it either does not survive it or moves on to the "Blue world" phase. But multicellular life might be rarer. Then again we haven't seen any other life, so it is hard to say. I think its amazing how rare we might be, in terms of this Hubble Sphere, anyway.
