The search for intelligent life may be over! A team of Oxford University researchers claims life on earth is probably a unique universal phenomena, and that it´s “extremely unlikely” that any other intelligent life exists anywhere else in the universe.
In 1959, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi posed the Fermi paradox as a way of questioning whether human beings were the only intelligent life in the universe. But today, according to a recent IPSOS poll, “Just under half of Americans believe UFOs exist and have visited the Earth,” and the idea that we are the only intelligent species in the universe is utterly outrageous to at least these 150 million people.
Throwing a cat among the pigeons, a team of researchers from Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute have published a new paper that all but says the words “we are all alone.” The chief argument is that took approximately 4.5 billion years for a series of complex evolutionary transitions to spark what would become intelligent life on earth. This, coupled with the widely spaced timing of key evolutionary transitions on earth, led the scientists to conclude that the expected transition times likely “exceed the lifetime of Earth,” suggesting the evolution of intelligent life is “exceptionally rare.”
Evolution: from single cells to intelligent life, and then human evolution. An unlikely, essentially rare chain of events and likely not statistically possibly beyond planet earth. (elyomys / Adobe Stock)
The Chance Of Anything Coming From Mars Is A Million To One!
The new research leans on the Fermi paradox and the primary claim in this new statistical study is that the chances of intelligent life existing anywhere but earth is “exceptionally rare.” They also concluded that human-like civilizations are extremely unlikely to exist on other planets. The Oxford researchers make this assertion on an observation that’s really hard to argue. Namely, that it took about 4.5 billion years for a series of evolutionary transitions to produce intelligent life on earth. Therefore, for life to have evolved elsewhere in the universe “it would take longer than the whole of Earth's projected lifespan.”
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The question on the lips of diehard alien believers will be “so what type of science suggests we are all alone,” because in the polarized world we live in “my science is often better than your science.” Yes, that´s actually a thing these days.
Dr Anders Sandberg, lead author of the new paper, told the Daily Mail that the principal statistical application they used was a kind of “Bayesian analysis” that determined the probability of the same transitionary events that occurred on earth occurring elsewhere.
Intelligent Life Is Unlikely And Science Proves It
If these scientists were a bunch of sloppy-Joe skeptics maybe they should launch torpedoes at their underlying “assumptions.” For example, if they set out to prove life doesn’t exist perhaps their whole experiment leaned towards this expectation, skewing the results. However, according to Dr Sandberg his team made the primary assumption that what happened on earth “is typical for what happens on other planets.” The scientists highlight how low the probability actually is.
Multicellular life evolved on earth, according to the paper, and “originated independently over 40 times in nature.” The new statistical approach allowed the researchers to estimate how unlikely all the steps leading to life on earth actually were, Dr Sandberg told the Daily Mail. And knowing these levels of difficulty, it turns out earth is a very “unlikely planet,” and that the chances of us, being, well, us, is even infinitesimally smaller.
With enormous technological listening posts like these, we have been trying to find signals from other forms of intelligent life for a long time. But maybe there isn’t anybody else out there! (ILYA GENKIN / Adobe Stock)
Alien Intelligent Life, For Now, Is A Dead Idea
While this whole idea that we are all alone in the universe might be new to you, the scientific world has been buzzing about this outcome for at least a decade. In 2014 celebrity British professor Brian Cox debunked all ideas about intergalactic alien life in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, when he stated that he believed “humans were the only form of civilization in our galaxy.”
While skeptics sharpen their pencils to attack this new paper, they must keep in mind the challenging words of Dr Sandberg. He states that for anyone to prove life is indeed out there, evidence of “much earlier transitions than the ones that occurred on Earth, or multiple instances of transitions” must be presented. And there is no sign of that coming soon from anywhere!
You can read the full paper, ‘The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life Is Rare’ published Online:19 Nov 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2019.2149
Top image: The search for intelligent life on other planets may have reached its end. Statistically it's just not possible: we are alone! Source: vchalup / Adobe Stock
By Ashley Cowie
Intelligent Life is Extremely Unlikely
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It all depends on what source or which study you examine, as to the validity or ridicule of ‘life OUT THERE’ or not.
‘National Geographic’ last month published a summation of a recent study (see: Nadia Drake {daughter of the famed astonomer Frank Drake} on November 2, 2020, entitled: “How many alien civilizations are out there? A new galactic survey holds a clue.” (see the article at: https:www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/10/how-many-a...) It is estimated that some “300 milllion worlds with similar conditions to Earth are scattered throughout the Milk Way Galaxy” alone!!! The ‘European Space Agency’s Gaia Spacecraft,’ along with the finding of NASA’s ‘planet-hunting Kepler,’ revealed how scientists now are, “Finally able to determine that the Milky Way is populated by hundreds of millions of Earth-size planets orbiting sunlike stars—and that the nearest one is probably within 20 light-years of the solar system” (not counting the study done on our closest neighbor, ‘Proxima Centauri b’ and other recent discoveries of thousands of exo-planets) This study has already been accepted for publication in the esteemed, ‘Astronomical Journal.’
Also, Steve LeVine’s article, “Alien Nations: Why Life on Other Planets Will Resemble Ours,” (see: https://onezero.medium.com/alien-nations-why-life-on-other-), for January 28th, details the work of Avi Loeb, who chairs a group known as: “Breakthrough Starshot,’ which includes such notable individuals as Freeman Dyson, Pete Worden, Nobel Laureate astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, as well as Mark Zuckerberg. Their desire is to “launch the first space probe to an exoplanet—Proxima Centauri b,” which is only “Four light-years from Earth.” Loeb and his group hope “to learn whether a technological alien civilization lives there.”
Anyone interested in this subject should also read Caleb Scharf’s article, “Alone in a Crowded Milky Way: Even a galaxy teeming with star-hopping alien civilizations should still harbor isolated unvisted worlds-and Earth might be among them,” (originally published in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Vol.322, No.1, (January 1, 2020), pp’s.32-39., as “The Galactic Archipelago.” See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alone-in-a-crowded-mi...)
Bascially, the above research is considering the evidence that “space-faring civilizations” within our own Milky Way Galaxy, could have spread across the galaxy at a rapid rate. The question, which Enrico Fermi asked years ago, “Well, if their out there, where’s the Evidence?”, which is basically an ego-centric statement. We have only begun to explore our own solar system and hardly know what lies within our ‘watery planet’ artifacts which may have come from a distant star system eons ago. The article postulates that, “Earth’s apparent solitude” may be the result of, or evidence that “galactic-settlement occurs in waves and that our species has arisen on an out-of-the-way-planet during a lull in interstellar exploration.”
The article aptly illustrates the above by detailing the account of the settling of ‘Pitcairn Island’ in the Pacific, by mutineers from the HMS BOUNTY, on the 15th of January, 1790, along with some inhabitants from Tahiti and one child. As appropriately stated: ”Pitcairn Island is the epitome of solitude.” No one had lived on the island since the 15th century, plus eighteen years transpired before any other ship actually arrived!!!
As Scharf states: “The parallels between this unmistakably terrestrial environment and our cosmic surroundings are striking...Like the islands of Earth...exoplanetary specks might both generate and support living systems and could provide a network of waypoints for any species determined to migrate across interstellar space. And that is where things get really intersting.”
Astrophysicist Michal Hart back in 1975, created “Hart’s Fact A,” which basically advocated that with the “abscene of aliens on Earth today,” no other technological advanced civilizations must exist now or ever had within our own galaxy. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article on the other hand, pursues the theory that the reason we’ve seen no other “cosmic cultures,” is “perhaps...they exist but that they are not in our neighborhood. This situation could arise if interstellar exploration and migration are patchy and occur in waves…,” or that perhaps we were once visted in the far distant past, but if an alien, “industrial civilization on the scale of our own had existed a few million years ago, we might not know about it. That absolutely DOES NOT MEAN ONE EXISTED; it indicates only that the possibility be rigorously eliminated...”
The conclusion by Scharf, is that: “Just as Pitcairn may have sat unoccupied for as much as three centuries in the Pacific Ocean, Earth might simpy be passing through a period of isolation before the COSMIC RIPPLE OF PAN-GALACTIC life washes over it once again. The real question, as it was for Polynesian settlers across the centuries, is whether our planetary civilization WILL STILL BE HERE WHEN IT HAPPENS.”
Thus, only ONE study on such an important topic illustrates nothing. As Thomas Kuhn long ago remarked within his famous work, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,’ that ‘paradigms,’regardless of the discipline, can indeed change with ‘irrefutable evidence.’ Since we have only just begun to explore the Cosmos, who knows what awaits us ‘out among the stars,’ and what fantastic evidence for ‘space-faring civilizations’ may possibly exist within our own Solar System, waiting for our discovery, once we truly begin our own ‘space-faring’ to other worlds!!!
Daniel N. Rolph, Phd
If there is intelligent life
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If there is intelligent life out there, why haven't they contacted us?
Maybe because they're, um, intelligent?
And, this is nothing short of
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And, this is nothing short of an arrogant conclusion.
You can’t prove something
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In reply to And, this is nothing short of by Archaeologist
You can’t prove something doesn’t exist. Even the military has footage of UFOs and admit the way they manouver, they are not of this earth, so they must come from another world with technology we haven’t figured out yet.
Visitors from the Universe
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Hi All,
I'll say this on the subject of visitors from other World's in the Universe and leave it be.
I think it's presumptuous to constantly live with this perpetual Idea that we're the only ones in existence in The Universe.
The expansion of the Universe alone should teach us were not the only beings in existence just because we haven't seen anything doesn't mean there's nothing out there in The Universe.
What don't want coming to Earth I'll keep to myself and what I do want coming to Earth I'll keep that to myself as well.
This is an exciting subject to have a discussion about look forward to sharing more possibilities regarding this Topic, so until next time Everyone, Goodbye!