Extraterrestrial life might be out there, according to scientists at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., but it is unlikely that our cosmic neighbors will get in touch for at least 1,500 years. Terzian suggest that we may have contact with aliens when about half of our galaxy has been signalled, i.e.in about 1,500 years.
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“It’s possible to hear any time at all, but it becomes likely we will have heard around 1,500 years from now”, study author Evan Solomonides, from Cornell Uiversity, said in a press statement.
But that represents just 0.125 percent of the area of the Milky Way, which contains about 200 billion stars, Gizmodo reported.
So we should keep looking, he said.
The good news is that contact with aliens will happen, the bad news, however, is that it will not happen until about 1500 years’ time, say two scientists from the Department of Astronomy, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
If We Aren’t Alone, Why Haven’t We Found Others Yet?
The Fermi Paradox itself asks why we haven’t “heard back” – despite the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence, it is highly likely, considering how numerous universe’s untold billions of planets are probably similar to Earth and could host life.
The so-called mediocrity principle, on the other hand, was proposed by Copernicus in the 16th century and states that nothing may really be special about us – Earth’s physical characteristics aren’t unique, its natural processes are aplenty through the cosmos.
“Even our mundane, typical spiral galaxy – not exceptionally large compared to other galaxies – is vast beyond imagination”, he added.
We have not been sending radio signals from Earth for the last 80 years with TV signals joining them about 65 years ago However, even if they were received, Solomonides, believes that they would struggle to decode them for sometime given the language skills required and the need to turn light waves into sound before they endeavored to decipher them.
“We clearly show that human communication has reached a sphere with a radius of roughly 80 light years, and has not reached a number of stars and planets adequate to expect an answer”, the astronomers write.
As per the second principle, earth is not special and therefore, it would not deliberately being sought after by the aliens. This is according to Cornell astronomers who deconstructed the Fermi paradox and paired it with the mediocrity principle for a fresh equation.
“That means the noise we can make as a society has to have reached them”, he said.
“This is not to say that we must be reached by then or else we are, in fact, alone”.
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The astronomers say we should give the signals time to reach half of all the solar systems in the Milky Way in order to be picked up. This is the mediocrity principle, which Carl Sagan once summed up in a handsome but depressing thought: “We find that we live on an insignificant planet, of a humdrum star, lost in a galaxy, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people”.
