There Might Be 100 Million Planets In Our Galaxy With Complex Life

50 years is tooo long...
I need a pill that would make me 30 years
younger. So i can go back to school and
use that time more "wisely". I´ll be 44
i a cpl of days, and its been my dream
since i was kid to roam the stars...

Im "beating" the notion of education into
my kids, saying "DONT bother with trying
to find out what you want to do when you
grow up, FOCUS on learning EVERYTHING..
That way you can CHOOSE when you get there"

Visit the ATS Live Forum for more information. Look for Out of the Box SE5 EP3.

originally posted by: JadeStar
I think someone asked me earlier what was my answer to the Fermi Paradox (ie: If the Galaxy is full of life where are all the aliens? Why haven't we noticed them?)

I have several that depending on my mood I favor.

1. The length of time a coherent technological civilization exists might have some sort of upper limit which we have yet to discover....

...

4. The time with the most technological alien species in the Milky Way was billions of years before our solar system formed, most are now extinct (in which case we may find plenty of worlds that someone once lived on) ...

Time may be the answer to the fermi Paradox.

Let's say a technological civilization lasts about 100,000 years. I have no idea how accurate that is, but consider that we have only been a "technological civilization" for maybe a few hundred years so far (maybe even less, depending on your definition of "technological civilization"). At any rate, we have been a "civilization" of any type for about 50,000 years.

Now, how many technological civilizations could have come and gone in our galaxy during the 4.5 billion years the earth has been around? Let's make up a number -- say 45,000. That sounds like a lot of civilizations that may have come and gone, lasting for 100,000 years at a time, since the birth of our planet. However, that would only average out to only one civilization existing at one any given time.

Maybe there have been 45,000 technological civilizations in our galaxy since the birth of the Earth, but that means that, on average, maybe only one exists today -- and that one might be us.


Let's turn that math around. Let's say that there are 100 technological civilizations exiting right at this moment in our galaxy -- and 100 have existed at any given time in the past 4.5 billion years. If we use that same length of time the technological civilization last of 100,000 years (and, as i said, that number may be arbitrary, but it sounds as reasonable as any number to me), then that means since the birth of the earth, there have been 4,500,000 technological civilization (with lifespan of 100,000 years) in our galaxy.

That number seems too high to me. That's why I think that if there are other technological civilizations in our galaxy, there are only a few, and those could be scattered with a lot of space in between. Enough space in between that they may not know we are here.