A good recently published study suggests the Milky Way galaxy could contain alien civilizations, though there’s a strong opportunity the majority of them are already dead.
Researchers from the California Institute of Technology, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Santiago High School used a great expanded version of the famous Drake Equation, which determined the odds of extraterrestrial intelligence existing found in our galaxy. The study seemed at several factors that could presumably result in a habitable environment, and driven intelligent life may have surfaced in our galaxy about 8 billions years after it was produced. Some of these civilizations could possess been 13,000 light-years from the galactic center, about 12,000 light-years closer than Earth, where humans are assumed to possess appeared 13.5 billion years after the Milky Way was formed.
The study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, also considered factors that may have ended these civilizations, such as exposure to radiation, a halt in evolution, and the tendency for intelligent life to self-annihilate, whether it be through climate change, technological advancements, or war. This has revealed that any alien civilizations that are still alive are virtually all likely fresh, as self-annihilation commonly arises after a lengthy period.
“While zero evidence explicitly suggests that intelligent life will eventually annihilate themselves, we cannot a good priori preclude the probability of self-annihilation,” the study reading. “As early on as 1961, Hoerner (1961) advises that the progress of science and technology will inevitably bring about complete destruction 11 and biological degeneration, related to the proposal by Sagan and Shklovskii (1966). This is further more recognized by many previous studies arguing that self-annihilation of humans is normally highly possible via numerous scenarios (e.g., Nick, 2002; Webb, 2011), integrating but not really limited to war, climate adjustment (Billings, 2018), and the advancement of biotechnology (Sotos, 2019).”
