We don’t know for sure, but we want to believe. Outer space is a vast expanse that we have so much more to learn about, which is why it’s hard to flat-out deny the possibility that other intelligent life forms exist.
In 1995 a pair of scientists discovered a planet outside our solar system orbiting a solar-type star. Since that finding—which won the scientists a portion of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics—researchers have discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets, including some Earth-like planets that may have the potential to harbor life. These planets may be the key to answering the questions, are aliens real, and do aliens exist?
In order to detect if planets are harboring life, however, scientists must first determine what features indicate that life is (or once was) present.
Over the last decade, astronomers have expended great effort trying to find what traces of simple forms of life—known as “biosignatures”—might exist elsewhere in the universe. But what if an alien planet hosted intelligent life that built a technological civilization? Could there be “technosignatures” that civilization on another world would create that could be seen from Earth? And, could these technosignatures be even easier to detect than biosignatures?
fact,s on allien,s
On November 14, 2004, a training mission near San Diego became one that Commander David Fravor will never forget—and remains one he still can’t explain.
Fravor recalls seeing a Tic Tac-shaped object that moved much faster than the capability of any known weaponry that currently exists. “We’re flying brand new Super Hornets. It was an air defense exercise—two good guys against two bad guys,” Fravor said in a History Channel video interview. Everything seemed normal until the USS Princeton called upon Fravor and company for a real-world task.
Changing course, it wasn’t long before Fravor and the other pilots saw something strange: what appeared to be a sunken plane or submerging submarine moving erratically right under the water’s surface.
“It’s white, it has no wings, it has no rotors, I go ‘holy, what is that?’’’ Fravor said. The UFO had no windows, and it’s reported that infrared monitors failed to pick up on any exhaust fumes.
In 2040, Americans plan to vote in a U.S. presidential election. Japan promises to stop using nuclear power. Britain’s Prince George will turn the ripe age of 27. And, as the interactive above demonstrates, the world is likely to find alien life. It could happen even sooner, depending how many civilizations are out there to be found. To understand why this is, it helps to know about someone name Frank Drake.
Drake is the least lonely man on Earth—if not in the entire galaxy. Most of us are reserving judgment on whether there is intelligent life on other planets; we haven’t even found bacteria yet, much less a race of aliens with Internet service and takeout food. But Drake, an astrophysicist and chairman emeritus of the California-based SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, has no such doubts.
It was in 1961, when he was working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W. Va., that Drake developed the eponymous—and now famous—Drake Equation, which calculates how many advanced and detectable civilizations there should be in the Milky Way in any one year. The number turns out to be potentially huge, and while it’s admittedly based on a number of Earth-centric suppositions—the collapse of any one of which calls much of the equation into question—all of those suppositions are based in increasingly solid science.
Start with the number of stars in our galaxy, which is conservatively estimated at 100 billion, though is often cited as three times that. Of those 100 billion, from 20% to 50% probably harbor planetary systems—an estimate that becomes more and more reliable as the Kepler Space Telescope and various ground-based observatories detect increasing numbers of exoplanets.
Not all of those exoplanets would be capable of sustaining Earth-like life, so the equation assumes from 1 to 5 in any system could. Of those bio-friendly worlds, from 0% to 100% would actually go on to develop life. And of those world, in turn, from 0% to 100% would develop life forms that we would consider intelligent.
The mere existence of intelligent life forms tells us nothing, however, unless they have the ability to make themselves known—which means to manipulate radio waves and other forms of electromagnetic signaling. Drake estimates that from 10% to 20% of the smart civilizations would clear that bar.
Finally, and perhaps most anthropocentrically, the equation considers how long any one of those semaphoring civilizations would be around to blink their signals our way. A sun like ours survives for about 10 billion years; life on Earth has been around for only about 3.5 billion years, and humans have been radio-capable for barely a century.
If we destroy ourselves in an environmental or nuclear holocaust tomorrow, our signal will go dark then. If we survive for tens of thousands of years, we will be announcing our presence to the cosmos for far longer—and the same is true of all of the other civilizations that live in the Milky Way.
Factor all of this together and stir in a little statistical seasoning concerning our increasing ability to study other star systems for signals, and, as the above interactive shows—the results can vary wildly. If you play the game conservatively—lowballing all of the variables—you might get about 1,000 detectable civilizations out there at any given time. Play it more liberally and you get hundreds of millions. The interactive let’s you play that game yourself. Imagine there are 10,000 detectable civilizations and we are likely to find alien life by 2040. If there are a million, we’d discover alien life by 2028.
Nobody pretends the Drake Equation is the final word. Even its enthusiasts admit that it is, at best, a way to “organize our ignorance.” But organized ignorance is a whole lot better than the disorganized kind; and it is, almost always, a starting point toward wisdom.
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