There may never have been another intelligent, technologically advanced alien species in the entire history of the Universe. Last week, in the New York Times, scientist Adam Frank emphatically wrote that Yes, There Have Been Aliens, concluding that given all the potentially habitable worlds we know must be out there from our astrophysical discoveries, intelligent life must have arisen. What he fails to account for, however, is the magnitude of the unknowns that abiogenesis, evolution, long-term habitability and other factors bring into the equation. Although it’s true that there are an astronomical number of possibilities for intelligent, technologically advanced lifeforms, the huge uncertainties
Be patient- alien contact is now only 1,500 years away, scientists have calculated. Researchers at Cornell University have developed a new equation to explain the Fermi Paradox, which suggests earthlings should have made contact with an extraterrestrial civilization by now. The scientists calculated that signals from Earth would need to reach half of all the solar systems in the Milky Way in order to be picked up, decoded, and answered by an advanced alien civilization. That’s not likely to happen for some 1,500 years because TV and radio transmissions were only first dispatched into space 80 years ago, so far reaching about 8,530 stars and about 3,500 Earth-like planets, they calculated. But
