SCIENTISTS are grappling with a decades-old theory regarding the search for extraterrestrial life.
The Drake equation is a formula for determining the likelihood of alien life developing to the point its detectable.
1
Earth’s place in the universe has been studied by countless high-minded thinkers over centuries.
Scientific American noted that Darwin’s theory of evolution altered the perception of aliens as products of biology running its course elsewhere in the universe.
“Up to this point anything non-human was…more often than not arbitrarily fantastic,” they wrote.
But the question remains – why haven’t we found anyone? Some scientists argue the question should be reframed not to ask why haven’t we found signs of life, rather than intelligent life itself.
Phys.org writes that alien-produced technology has a better chance of being found because of its capacity to outlast the intelligent life that created it.
Their reporting cuts a schism between biosignatures – telltale signs of life like methane gas that the Drake equation is built on – and technosignatures like the physical remnants of societies.
The author notes that a technosignature of intelligent life can exist without a planet – like an alien spacecraft or satellite meandering through the cosmos.
“This might even be the most common form of technosignature in the galaxy,” they wrote.
Most read in Tech
The lack of discovery could also be interpreted as good news.
In Tim Urban’s Fermi Paradox, he describes the Great Filter as an evolutionary event that has thus far prevented species from different planets form ever meeting.
The Great Filter could be behind us, meaning we’re the only species to make it to intelligence high enough to start going off world – which would explain the cosmic silence.
Or, the Great Filter is ahead of us and we’re on a path to extinction – Urban quoted a philosopher who said finding life elsewhere “would be by far the worst news ever printed on a newspaper cover,” because it eliminates the Great Filters behind us.
“The silence of the night sky is golden,” the expert told Urban.
Humans are sending more and more rockets to space each year – 2021 set the record for most all time with 144 exits from Earth in a year.
The more we look the more isolated we feel – but that and more would all change if we were to find something.
We pay for your stories!
Do you have a story for The US Sun team?
