What if I informed you there may be over 2,000 alien civilizations at the moment within the Milky Manner galaxy? Appears like a plot twist out of your favourite sci-fi present, proper? However what if I stated we may use information science to get nearer to a solution? That’s precisely what we’ll be doing on this sequence, utilizing actual numbers to estimate what number of alien civilizations would possibly exist, how shut they may very well be, and whether or not now we have any likelihood of ever contacting them.
On this sequence, we’ll be working by means of the Drake Equation, which has been the go-to instrument for scientists because the Sixties in relation to estimating what number of superior alien civilizations are on the market. We’ll be spicing issues up with fashionable information science strategies like Monte Carlo simulations, that are primarily fancy methods of claiming, “Let’s run the numbers 1000’s of occasions and see what occurs.”
In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi famously requested, “The place is all people?” The universe is unimaginably huge, with billions of stars simply in our galaxy, and every of those stars doubtless has planets. So why haven’t we met any aliens but? That’s the Fermi Paradox — the contradiction between the excessive chance of extraterrestrial life and the dearth of proof for or contact with any alien civilizations.
To assist clear up this puzzle, Frank Drake got here up with the Drake Equation in 1961. It’s a manner of breaking down the issue into smaller steps, asking questions like: “What number of stars are there? What number of have planets? What number of of these planets may assist life?” Every of those questions narrows down the search, and on the finish, we get a quantity that tells us what number of civilizations may be on the market, sending alerts into house.