Scientists told how long it takes to establish contact with alien civilizations
Miscellaneous / / May 04, 2022
There are several scenarios, and the time to first contact in them differs by hundreds of times.
The main question of the Fermi paradox is: if civilizations of intelligent beings can arise in space everywhere, then why have we not yet encountered them? In a recent scientific articleThe Number of Possible CETIs within Our Galaxy and the Communication Probability among These CETIs The Astrophysical Journal, scientists from China tried to answer this question.
Researchers Wenjie Song and He Gao from Peking University believe that even if there are dozens thousands of civilizations, they need to survive for thousands of years to have a chance to make contact with someone else.
Scientists estimated the possible number of communicating extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations (CETI) using two parameters: the probability of the appearance of life on an terrestrial planet and the stage of evolution of the star that forms their planetary system.
Nine different CETI distribution scenarios have been created. If there are enough of them (on the order of 110 across the Milky Way), then a civilization trying to contact someone will have to survive for 400,000 years before it receives a signal from another. In the best case scenario, with around 43,000 CETIs, this would take at least 2,000 years.
Accordingly, the reason why we still have not received a signal from another civilization may be that the lifetime of a person is currently not long enough. In addition, the lifetime of any civilization is likely to be self-limiting due to many potential problems, including which nuclear self-destruction, sudden climate change, comet impacts, environmental changes, etc. Further.
If a doomsday theoremThe end of the world theorem Doomsday argument is a probabilistic reasoning that predicts the future time of the human race, based only on an estimate of the number of people who have lived so far. true, in some pessimistic scenarios, people may not receive any signals from other CETIs until they disappear, noted publication authors.
The probabilistic approaches to the Fermi paradox put forward in the last few years suggest that our current search for other civilizations is still very limited and may remain so. And if someone were looking for us, they would have to be in a very small region of the galaxy to actually detect any signals from Earth.
And yet, scientists admit that there is a huge uncertainty in their probabilities, therefore, it is possible to receive an extraterrestrial signal earlier than the predicted time.
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