Alien Civilizations May Number In The Trillions, New Study Says:
Proving again that we hardly know anything about our universe and certainly nothing about the potential for how abundant life may be ‘out there’ in the cosmos.. enter this study.
The research, published in the journal Astrobiology last week, suggests that more planets in the Milky Way galaxy may harbor advanced civilizations than we previously imagined.
Study co-authors Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan looked at recent discoveries of potentially habitable exoplanets and considered the odds of whether sophisticated civilizations existed on them in the past or present.
“What we showed was the ‘floor’ on the probability for a civilization to form on any randomly chosen planet,” Frank, a University of Rochester physics and astronomy professor, told The Huffington Post in an email. “If we are the only civilization in cosmic history, then that what we calculated is the actual probability nature has set. But if the actual probability is higher than that floor, then civilizations have happened before.”
According to the theory, the amount of life on planets beyond ours is potentially staggering.
“Even if you are pretty pessimistic and think that you’d have to search through 100 billion (habitable zone) planets before you found one where a civilization developed, then there have still been a trillion civilizations over cosmic history!” Frank wrote. “When I think about that, my mind reels — even if there is just a one in a 100 billion chance of evolution creating exo-civilizations, the universe still has made so many of them that we are swamped by histories other than our own.”
So there you have your “feeling small on Sunday morning” post.. The notion that we are just existent in a universe abundant in other civilizations like this. Or maybe hopefully NOT like us at all..
