Alien Contact?
When the Internet went public in the 1990’s the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project asked the public to use their personal computers to help process the immense amount of data they were downloading with their radio telescope. I signed up and participated for years.
So far, we’re still waiting to hear from ET.
I grew up in the mid-20th century in the golden age of science fiction and was enamoured with the idea of extraterrestrial life. It was an exciting time; we finally had technology that might find signals from off-earth civilizations. To borrow a line from the movie Contact, “if there is no one else out there, it seems like an awful waste of space.”
I’ve thought about that line over the years and read a lot of opinions about why we haven’t found any concrete evidence of alien life (not withstanding the beliefs of some people that such evidence has been found and that it is being hidden from us in Area 51).
I’ve come to the conclusion that if alien intelligence has risen to the level of technology comparable to ours, it has likely struggled with similar problems to the ones we have today:
- Exponential population growth
- Limited resources
- Environmental pollution
- Climate degradation
- Disruption of the global balance of nature
Unless these alien civilizations found a way to work through these issues, I suspect they met with the same fate that seems to be looming for us on planet Earth, namely a massive collapse of all natural and human systems resulting in a major die off of most species, including humans.
We have had the technology for communicating with an alien civilization for less than 100 years, and given that the same technology appears to be accelerating our race to planetary destruction, it seems that we may not have long before we will lose the ability to communicate with the stars due to technological collapse (which I hope to discuss in a separate article).
While I don’t disagree with the forecasted outcome, I’m more optimistic than some in terms of the timeline. I’m thinking we may have about another 100 years before we will no longer have the technology to communicate with the stars. That would give us an interstellar communication window of about 200 years from start to end.
We have been broadcasting into space for approximately 100 years, first with radio and then television. If an alien civilization picked up any of these signals and chose to respond immediately - given the constraints of light speed travel for such a signal - the alien planet would need to be within 100 light years of earth for the exchange to happen within our 200 year technological window.
Scientists have found only 24 planets within 100 light years that have the potential for living beings. Even if all 24 planets at one time or another had intelligent life arise, the likelihood of any of them being around at the same time as us is very small.
Based on geologic evidence homo sapiens have been on earth for about 300,000 years, although our ancestors of the genus homo have been around for about 3,000,000 years. If we consider the 200 year technological window in relation to the 300,000 years of human existence, and assume a similar rise and fall in alien civilizations, then that leaves a very small window of less than 1/10th of 1% of the lifespan of a species to overlap with us on Earth.
With only 24 potential habitable planets within communication distance, then that means there is a less than 2% chance that an alien civilization would be able to communicate with us while we were still able to do so. And that would only be if all 24 of those planets developed intelligent life in the last 300,000 years.
In all likelihood, if intelligence did develop on any of those planets, it could have been any time within billions of years, depending on the age of their solar system. The likelihood of them being around, and technologically capable at the exact time that we developed the necessary technology, becomes extremely small. Most likely, if such life did exist within the 100 light years, our signals would either pass them after they have collapsed or they may not yet have the technology to hear our signals.
Bottom line, it seems very unlikely we will ever connect with an alien civilization outside our solar system. And for sure the aliens are not going to save us from ourselves.
