ET Phone Home
Is there Intelligent Life Out There
Just as a pleasant diversion I thought I'd bring up a subject that has been debated for a very long time. Whatever your own beliefs, I would hope you find this brief discussion fun.
The first question should not be if there is intelligent life out there in space, but whether or not there is any life at all besides our own Earth. To answer that one we would have to do some basic math.
There are an estimated 400 billion stars in just our Milky Way Galaxy, so we'll call that our own neighborhood or back yard...ok? So arbitrarily speaking, if only a tiny fraction of 1 percent of all those stars have orbiting planets capable of sustaining life as we know it (organic life, carbon based), let's say one one hundredth of one percent, then the answer we want is...400,000,000,000 times .0001, or 40 million planets that "might" have some kind of life on them. Now by any one's estimate, that is one heck of alot of maybes...
Okay then, we have established that it is likely that life exists elsewhere. Now comes the next logical question...is there intelligent life out there? To answer that we need to stick to our statistical mathematics and use a more complex equation, right? Don't worry, a man named Frank Drake did the thinking for us. Back in 1961 he came up with an equation to determine the probability of intelligent aliens living out there in the galaxy. It was never proposed as an exact mathematical model, but more as a reason to actually start thinking about the possibilities. To this day there is a huge scientific debate on the real value of Drake's equation. I won't throw the actual equation at you, but the lowest of the original estimated number of planets that could have intelligent life was 1000. Don't go jumping on me, that number is only a very crude statistical probability...and begs the obvious question...
How intelligent is intelligent? Of those 1000 potential homes for ET, how many of the aliens are advanced enough to even get off their own planet, let alone get all the way to ours...remember, we are pretty intelligent and advanced, but we still have a real hard time just exploring our own solar system.
Thanks for putting up with my blurb. Sometime in the future I'll post my own thoughts on UFO's and alien contact/invasions, heh heh.
Okay then, we have established that it is likely that life exists elsewhere. Now comes the next logical question...is there intelligent life out there? To answer that we need to stick to our statistical mathematics and use a more complex equation, right? Don't worry, a man named Frank Drake did the thinking for us. Back in 1961 he came up with an equation to determine the probability of intelligent aliens living out there in the galaxy. It was never proposed as an exact mathematical model, but more as a reason to actually start thinking about the possibilities. To this day there is a huge scientific debate on the real value of Drake's equation. I won't throw the actual equation at you, but the lowest of the original estimated number of planets that could have intelligent life was 1000. Don't go jumping on me, that number is only a very crude statistical probability...and begs the obvious question...
How intelligent is intelligent? Of those 1000 potential homes for ET, how many of the aliens are advanced enough to even get off their own planet, let alone get all the way to ours...remember, we are pretty intelligent and advanced, but we still have a real hard time just exploring our own solar system.
Thanks for putting up with my blurb. Sometime in the future I'll post my own thoughts on UFO's and alien contact/invasions, heh heh.
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