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The debate whether intelligent life - separate to humans - exists has raged for years. People draw on multiple sources and logic to conclude that somewhere at some point a developed civilisation must have been present. They point to historically significant and often unexplained phenomena: Ancient cave art that depicts otherworldly beings; tales of foreign lifeforms falling from the sky.
The Cost of Visiting Earth May Be Too Astronomical For Aliens
MATT WILLIAMS, UNIVERSE TODAY
27 DECEMBER 2020
In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project.
According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go down in the annals of history: Where is everybody?
This became the basis of the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the disparity between high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence.
It took into consideration factors such as the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of life in surrounding planets and the number of planets per solar system.
However, as technology improves and understanding of the Universe grows, NASA and institutions such as the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Santiago High School, California, have updated how the chances are calculated.
The team has not provided a clear answer into what the chances are, but essentially added several factors to the Drake Equation.
One such factor which was not considered in 1961 is that species tend to find a way of killing themselves off.
Are there other intelligent lifeforms in the universe besides humans capable of founding a civilization? That’s the million-dollar question that people of all walks of life have, to their best of their ability, attempt to answer. There are many theories that attempt to explain the utter lack of, well, alien signals. For instance, one new study concludes that intelligent life may have appeared several times in the Milky Way, however, the vast majority of these civilizations have wiped themselves out already.
Ever since people first realized we are all living on a giant rock orbiting one of many stars, a heartbreaking thought must have crept the mind: we’re not that special after all. But since there are countless stars in the Milky Way, and countless galaxies in the universe, there must be other civilizations out there. This thought comes as a consolation, so we might not be the only ones drifting through the frightening darkness of outer space.