If you look at all the reports about extraterrestrial intelligence, you will find two things: pseudoscientific claims with little or no basis that extraterrestrials have visited Earth, and scientific research that shows no signs of progress. So the idea of ​​aliens is easily relegated, if not to the same folder as the fairies, then at least to the “hobbits” who still survive on Flores. So it’s not completely impossible, but it’s unlikely to be a cause for concern.

But there are good reasons why money and brains continue to be invested in SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Here are six of them:

Earth-like rocky planets are not uncommon

We have long known that there are an extraordinary number of stars in the galaxy; it is currently estimated to be over 100 billion, not to mention the universe as a whole. But life (probably) needs planets, not just stars. It was once thought that planets formed only under very rare circumstances, when another star passed by a developing system at just the right moment; This would seriously threaten the possibility of life elsewhere.

Even after the modern model of planetary systems took hold, questions remained. Perhaps planets, or at least Earth-like planets, were very rare for a reason we have not yet determined.

But large amounts of data from the Kepler and TESS telescopes, supplemented by other planet detection methods, show that rocky planets are very common indeed. Some systems have at least seven, and perhaps even more are waiting to be discovered. Most of the rocky planets we’ve found so far are too close to their stars to be ideal candidates, but that’s only because planets in those places are easier to find. The longer we search, the better opportunities we find. It is clear that our galaxy holds together places where life could exist, and the same is happening in other galaxies and possibly globular clusters.

Even if only one out of billions of galaxies was inhabited by someone with the ability to build spaceships, that would still mean we are not alone.

The first beginnings of life on Earth

Even though we have found several steps of this chain, we still do not know exactly how life on Earth began. So it is technically possible for the existence of life to be a strange event that happens so rarely that it does not lead to the emergence of other species with advanced technology.

Despite all this, we know that life began very early on Earth; perhaps as early as it might have been if it hadn’t been smashed by space rocks so large that a killer dino would look tiny. It’s like buying a weekly lottery ticket where you don’t know the odds (although why you do this is beyond us). Maybe you were really lucky if you won in the first draw, but the odds were probably not that good.

If it wasn’t so difficult for life to develop here, it shouldn’t be so difficult on many similar planets either.

Life finds a way to survive in such extreme conditions on Earth

Once life evolves, it has an uncanny ability to occupy some truly inhospitable places. From the heat and pressure around (and beneath) hydrothermal vents, to the icy cold of Antarctica, the dryness of Atakami, and the extreme salinity of some desert bodies of water—even in conditions that kill 99.99 percent of life on Earth, it still manages to get things done. his house is a house.

There is no reason to think that extraterrestrial life would be any less sustainable. In this case, the prospects for the development and prosperity of life elsewhere look particularly good. Life may not have an innate tendency to develop intelligence, but the greater the diversity, the greater the chance that some will eventually become smarter.

No wonder we couldn’t find any signs of life

We’ve been searching for signs of life on other worlds longer than most readers. This has led some people to turn the above lottery analogy on its head. If you play the lottery long enough and don’t win, you might not just be unlucky; Maybe your chances are very low or there may be cheating in the game.

The problem with this conclusion is that we didn’t actually look that closely. If aliens are either very, very close (on a cosmic scale), or making their presence known very loudly, or sending messages directly to us, most of our efforts to find life outside the solar system will make sense. Even if there are already many advanced civilizations, there is no reason to expect that any of this could be true.

Technologies that can detect more modest signals or receive them from greater distances only emerged last year. Unless we expect to find societies at least as advanced as ours on almost every habitable rock, there is no reason to hope that we have found anything.

Maybe we’re using the wrong methods to search

There is also the question of whether we applied our methods correctly. It is possible that the universe is full of intelligent chatter and we are not tuned to the right frequency (metaphorically, but perhaps literally). Our search for extraterrestrial communication is like the analogy of a drunk looking for his keys under a street lamp because there is a better vantage point.

We do this a little better than the hero of this story, who knows he’s dropped his keys somewhere else but can’t hunt in the dark. In our case, the radio frequencies on which we searched for alien speech were chosen in part because they made sense. But it is also true that we mostly look for cheap and (relatively) simple ways. If advanced species communicate between worlds using lasers or something we can’t yet imagine, we won’t be able to connect to them yet.

Prospects for space travel are based on highly questionable assumptions

When Fermi created his famous paradox, he wondered why aliens hadn’t visited us yet. We still don’t know, but people have made numerous statements since then; Some of these are quite plausible, and only a few of them require that aliens do not exist.

Simply put, space is big. Crossing the Atlantic was once considered an epic voyage, but even on the flimsy ships that were the first to accomplish it, it only took nine weeks. If there is no way to break the light barrier, space travel will take much longer and also be more expensive. The assumption that someone will start colonizing the galaxy once they invent spaceflight is based on a belief in alien psychology that has no basis in fact. Perhaps interstellar travel is so expensive that it is resorted to only in extreme cases, leaving many places alone. Source