In a vast universe, 13.77 billion years old and containing 500 billion galaxies science is convinced that there must exist or must have existed “extraterrestrial intelligence” in this vastness. With this conviction, human beings have searched for and still searching for it incessantly.
Life, as we think of it, can perish in instant. Alien life can be far more complicated as we are learning from the surprising group of living things right here on earth that live in extreme conditions. Until few decades we were sure that our planet is unique with water, sunshine, and a protective atmosphere. We logically concluded that life needs all of those things, a conclusion which ruled out all other known worlds in the solar system.
What NASA says
Nevertheless in 2009 things changed when NASA launched the “Kepler space telescope “, we found thousands of Earth-like planets where conditions for life might be possible. This is meant undoubtedly the total revolution in the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life.
Astronomers always have different views and claims about this topic and sine times very different and highly imaginative also. There are several reasonable arguments used by both sides to support their respective opinions. Those who claim that we are alone in-universe point out the fact that we have never received any message from hypothetical civilization which seems very unlikely because if there would be any advanced life and aliens than us they should have shown their presence to us or maybe much more than us so that we can't detect them.
These Leads to DRAKE‘s EQUATION
Many hypotheses say that the average lifetime of the intelligent form of life is very short, so the civilization could have existed in past but now it is extinct.
To answer how many other extra-terrestrial intelligent civilizations are there in-universe? We need to take several factors into account.
Frank Drake was an astrobiologist who wanted to create a way to estimate the chances of there being an intelligent life somewhere else in-universe in doing so he created a 7 variable equation to make his estimate which we know and call THE DRAKE‘s EQUATION.
The Drake’s Equation
Definations
| Sl.no. | Representing letter |
Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | N | number of civilization(s) with which humans can communicate. |
| 2 | $R_{\ast }$ | mean rate of star formation (This is going to be very large as we know that there are hundreds of billions of stars in every galaxy and there are hundreds of billions of galaxy.) |
| 3 | $f_{p}$ or f planet | fraction of stars with planets (This is also going to be large as in relative to the few stars we have studied we have already found thousands of planets orbiting around these stars.) |
| 4 | $n_{e}$ | this represents the number of planets in the habitable zone. (This number is going to be lower than the other 2 so far as not many stars discovered are in the ideal zone of habitability.) |
| 5 | $f_{l}$ or f life | this stands for fraction of these planets on which life exists. |
| The next 2 variables are very selective filters which can lower down our chances to contact life greatly though not destroying them. | ||
| 1 | $f_{i}$ or f intel | fraction of planets in which intelligent life emerges. |
| 2 | $F_{t}$ or F tech | fraction of planets on which technological civilizations arise which is necessary to communicate with another civilization. |
| 👉 | L | this final variable represents the mean length of time that civilizations can communicate |
How do we use Drake's Equation and its uncertainties involved?
Our ultimate purpose was to find the number of extraterrestrial civilizations we may be able to communicate within our galaxy. Well, the answer to the question is we don’t know.
So we spent all this time for nothing?
Not really, Drakes purpose was not to give a precise estimate of the number of intelligent civilizations other than us, rather stimulate the scientific debate about the factors to consider when searching for life outside earth.
The main problem with the formula is that to predict the precise value of N we should be able to give a precise estimate for each of the factors in the equation and this is not possible.
The conclusion from Drake's Equation
Despite all these uncertainties Drake and his colleagues obtained a range of N between 20 and 50,000,000. This means that according to their estimates there could be as low as 20 civilizations which we may communicate in our galaxy and this number can be as high as 50 million! Which is quite fascinating, but then hold on they are only estimates which can be completely wrong. Other scientists for instance estimated more pessimistic values for parameters in the equation obtaining values near to 0.
Finally where we are now.
So no one can exactly predict the value of N but N cannot be exactly 0 as we know that humanity is one intelligent civilization that arose in-universe. This very fact implies there must be some other civilizations out there as well. We are indeed unsuccessful to find them yet, and we don’t know if they actually exist but it’s still very fascinating to think we are not alone in-universe. And who knows, maybe it's just a matter of time, and one day we may finally receive signals from the distant star. That day would probably be one of the most important days when we will finally answer one of the most mysterious questions.
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