Are we really the only ones?
My whole life I’ve been asked the daunting question that seemed to put my whole belief system on trial. Aliens, were they real or not? If I had said yes, I was crazy, a conspiracy theorist who didn’t know the difference between fictional video game characters and real life. But if I had said no, I’d be shutting down the entire possibility of there being something more to life than just what my little planet has to offer.
Now, when I’m talking aliens, I don’t mean lengthy green guys with balloon heads, but any kind of life form that wasn’t from Earth. If you really break it down, the odds of life existing elsewhere in the universe are astronomical!
Earth is a tiny planet, orbiting a single star, in one galaxy that consists of up to 400 billion stars with as many as 8 trillion planets orbiting them. Outside of the Milky Way, there are up to 2 trillion galaxies in our expanding universe. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that all these trillions of potential planets could house life, especially not intelligent life, but there is a way to estimate how many intelligent civilizations could be out there using something called the Drake Equation, created by an astronomer named Frank Drake in 1961.
This formula is number of civilizations (N) equals number of habitable planets times the fraction of habitable planets with life, times the fraction of planets with life that have intelligent life capable of forming a civilization, times the fraction of those civilizations that are around now. The exact number calculated will be highly dependent on what is assumed about how common life arises on other planets and how likely that life is to become advanced.
However, a reasonable assumption could be that there are perhaps 1 billion habitable planets in our galaxy. If half of those had life, and 1/4 of those had intelligent life, and half of those were around today, there would be 62.5 million civilizations. This huge number is just one way of looking at things, but thanks to the Drake Equation, it could be possible.
More information on the Drake Equation can be found online at www.seti.org/drake-equation-index .
Remember that next time you look at the night sky, ask yourself: Are we really the only ones?
Thank you for listening to Western Slope Skies, produced by the Colorado Mesa University Astronomy Club and KVNF Community Radio. This feature was written and recorded by
Peyton Goumas, an astronomy student of Dr. Catherine Whiting at Colorado Mesa University.
Are we really the only ones? Humans may be too self-obsessed to open their minds to potential Alien life. Our universe is so vast that there must be more out there. Can the Drake Equation be used to solve this? Image credit: NASA.gov
More information on the Drake Equation can be found here https://www.seti.org/drake-equation-index
