The authors of the scientific article believe that there are very few alien civilizations in the universe.
The greatest mystery of our time is the question of the existence of intelligent aliens, that is, developed alien civilizations. Some scientists continue to insist that they exist and just need to be found. Others believe that we are alone in the universe.
The authors of a new paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology believe the answer to the question of whether extraterrestrial intelligent life exists in space could be an either/or proposition, writes Forbes.
Life must appear, or it does not appear
In their article, scientists argue that on planets like ours, life would either have to emerge over a long period of time or not emerge at all. That is, the space can be empty or overcrowded, while values in between seem far-fetched.
In ecological systems, whether a planet or a galaxy, populations evolve from some initial value to a stable equilibrium state, when the average number of births and deaths per unit time is the same, researchers say.
This equilibrium point is a function of birth and death rates and the basis for the existence of the ecological system.
According to the authors, they have taken a classic statistical result and applied it to the question of life in the universe.
If you run a series of experiments where the answer is binary (yes/no), and if there is no information about the experiments, you can expect that almost all experiments will yield a positive result, or almost all of them will yield a positive result . a negative result.
It is unlikely that interim, mixed results will be achieved, they say. This idea was first proposed by Edwin Jaynes, the founder of probability theory, which was based on the work of biochemist John Haldane.
The chance of finding aliens is zero
Despite this, many seekers of extraterrestrial intelligence maintain that life in space is common. But Haldane believed that identical results could be expected under identical conditions, the authors say.
That is, you would expect that if life probably exists, it will be everywhere, and if it is very rare, it will be nowhere.
According to scientists, it would be strange if half of all planetary systems had technologically advanced civilizations. This would mean that small changes in the properties of these planetary systems would significantly alter the prospects for the rise of technological civilizations.
Researchers have come to the conclusion that if only one alien intelligent civilization exists, the chance of discovering it is zero.
If advanced alien civilizations were to emerge, they would likely be visible in the infrared spectrum of light, thanks to structures such as Dyson spheres. But nothing of the sort was found, scientists say.
Aliens are very far away
Even if we assume that extraterrestrial intelligence is very rare, there are about a trillion galaxies in the universe, and therefore it is almost impossible to find extraterrestrials.
The authors of the article believe that, if any, very few developed alien civilizations exist and that they are very far apart.
Thus, scientists recognize the possibility that aliens live in another galaxy, but they simply do not exist in our galaxy. That is, Earth may be the only inhabited world in the Milky Way.
