Math proves alien life highly probable, contact unlikely

/Home/Aliens and UFOS/Life on other planets

Math proves alien life highly probable, contact unlikely
January 31, 2010
BY: BARRY BELMONT
The Nevada Sagebrush

From the near-constant pleading of researchers from NASA for more funding to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence scientists’ ever-present struggle to show the importance of their research, outer space is once again ablaze with controversy.

But for every story, there is an equal and opposite flawed story also trying to make headlines. For instance, when Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies legitimately discussed the possibility of an as-of-yet unrecognized, extraterrestrial microbe at a recent conference of the Royal Society in London, it was accompanied by a cacophony from quacks rehearsing lines for their auditions for the off-Broadway version of Men in Black II.

On par with Nobel laureate Francis Crick’s notion of panspermia — the “seeding” of life from extraterrestrial sources — Davies claims that there could (maybe) be life on this planet that did not evolve from the single ancestor the rest of us did. He thinks advances in microbiology will either prove this to be true or false within a few years.

Several theorems and equations even exist to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The most famous is known as the Drake Equation, which attempts to calculate the possibility of the existence of intelligent life.

Even if the origin of life is an incredibly rare event (we’re talking winning-the-California-SuperLotto-two-times-in-a-row rare), due to the universe’s extraordinary vastness, each of these equations points to tens of thousands of planets that should have life.

Say the origin of life is an unlikely event, something in the order of one in 1,000,000,000,000. Ridiculously unlikely, but not impossible.

There are about 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. There’s also about 100,000,000,000 stars in each galaxy. Now, estimates for the number of planets in a galaxy vary, but we’ll be absurdly conservative (in order to prove the point) and say the chances of a planet around a star is only one in 1,000,000.

Doing the math, you get an interesting result. Even with our highly conservative estimates, we predict that life should have formed on 10,000 planets in the universe. Whoa.

Sure, these ideas are at the very fringe of science, but they present legitimate research rather than the flimsy evidence of “I was abducted by aliens” or “We all saw a UFO and the government is covering it up” stories that UFOlogists generally present in favor of their position.

The problem with most evidence for aliens and UFOs is that it is completely reliant upon massive media and governmental conspiracies and anecdotal evidence without a smidgen of physical or testable evidence. Granted, it would be great if an advanced civilization came to Earth, but why should descriptions of beings that mastered intergalactic travel seem so reminiscent of the latest sci-fi blockbuster? Maybe it’s part of the conspiracy.

Ultimately, it’s the same vastness of space that almost guarantees the existence of life on other worlds that precludes the possibility of human beings ever coming in contact with an alien race.

The closest star to our solar system is Alpha Centauri, about four light years away. That doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that’s about 24 trillion miles away. Traveling at a million miles an hour, the trip to Alpha Centauri would take more than 2,500 years. And that’s just one star out of the one million billion billion that inhabit the universe.

So, although we’re not alone in the universe, we might as well be. But look on the bright side: We’re on one of the planets that won the lotto twice!