New study: there could be around 36 alien civilizations in our galaxy

[Tribble Threat]

This estimate is designed narrowly to count the alien species who deliberately send radio signals into space.
And it's based on the assumption societies would only do this for 100 years. I don't know what other assumptions it's built on, other than that they're plugging numbers into Drake's equation.
Now if you want a measure of how many species are out there, Earth alone has billions.

 

[BillJ]

And it's based on the assumption societies would only do this for 100 years.

Considering the timespan we're talking about (Milky Way is 13.5 billion years old), I would find it hard to believe that there are even four civilizations within our galaxy that are roughly +/-100 years of our current technological stage.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

My expectation is that it would be impossible for organic life to get started until there were sufficient localised concentrations of elements with higher atomic numbers than the H, He, and Li from the Big Bang. Maybe there just wasn't enough of the right stuff to form planets with the right conditions until there had been enough generations of stars - perhaps a few billion years. Then you've probably got to add on several billion years for the improbable leaps from prokaryotes to eukaryotes and the evolution of multicellular life forms that eventually develop consciousness, language, social stability, tool making, the ability to cooperate and plan, agriculture, mathematics etc...

Someone has to be the First Ones, but as pointed out above, it still seems improbable that it's us, even just in our Galaxy, never mind the Cosmos.

More data points are required...

ZOG!

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[Gingerbread Demon]

ZOG!

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Well he got grumpy when Susan mentions the Vorlons. But he said "Zog" so everything's cool I guess. That ship was one of my favourite designs from B5, it was like a disco on the outside of the ship.