A NASA study has found that there are likely a large number of alien civilizations in our galaxy.
According to a new study by NASA, our galaxy is likely to have a large number of extraterrestrial civilizations, probably many destroyed by their own technological development brought about by fratricide.
This is the conclusion of a new study published on December 14 on the arXiv database. The report was co-authored by experts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
The researchers used the famous Drake formula to estimate that there is a high probability that intelligent life other than humans will exist in the galaxy 8 billion years after its formation. The Drake formula was proposed by Frank Drake, founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, in 1961.
Since then, says study co-author Jonathan H. Jiang, “there has been a lot of human research” on the topic. Jiang is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.
“Especially since the Hubble Space Telescope and the Kepler Space Telescope, we’ve learned a lot about the density (of gas and stars) in our galaxy and the star formation rate and exoplanet formation …… and the incidence of supernova explosions,” he said. He said.
The authors of the report examined a range of factors that are hypothesized to influence the development of intelligent life, such as the prevalence of sun-like stars harboring Earth-like planets; the frequency of deadly radiation explosions from supernovae; the probability and time required for intelligent life to develop if conditions are right; and the likelihood of advanced civilizations eventually causing self-destruction.
Taking these factors into account, they modeled the evolution of the Milky Way over time and found that, based on known factors, the probability of life emerging peaks about 13,000 light-years from the galactic center and 8 billion years after galaxy formation. In comparison, Earth is about 25,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, and human civilization did not appear on the surface of the Earth until about 13.5 billion years after the formation of the Milky Way.
Most of these other civilizations that still exist in the Milky Way today are likely still very young. This is because intelligent life, after a long period of time, is likely to eventually cause its own annihilation due to the high level of technological development.
The last point is the most uncertain variable in the thesis, namely how long will it take for a civilization to emerge and bring about self-extinction? It is also the most important factor in determining the extent to which civilizations exist in the galaxy.
Experts believe that there may be many remnants of extinct aliens in the galaxy, and at the same time, because these habitable planets are often very distant and not easily observable from Earth, signs of the existence of these alien civilizations are difficult to detect by humans, thus dramatically increasing the difficulty of searching for intelligent life in the universe.
The paper has been submitted to a journal for publication and is awaiting peer review.
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