![]() ![]() "We don't know the mind of extraterrestrials."Īnd by the looks of things, it'll be at least a few hundred more years until we do.Speculation that life has been discovered beyond Earth exploded on the Internet after NASA announced plans for a press conference involving scientists who study unusual life forms. "I did the paper based only on life as we know it," he said. ![]() The model also presumes that alien intelligence will have brain compositions, values and senses of empathy similar to those of humans, which may simply not be the case, Caballero told Vice. The invasion probability is based on a very narrow slice of human history, and it makes many assumptions about the future development of our species. Though Caballero's study poses an interesting thought experiment, the author admits his model has limitations. "The probability of extraterrestrial invasion by a civilization whose planet we message is… around two orders of magnitude lower than the probability of a planet-killer asteroid collision," he wrote in his paper - adding that planet-killing asteroids, like the one that doomed the dinosaurs, are 1-in-100-million-year events. ![]() 4th search for aliens near Milky Way's center comes up empty 9 strange, scientific excuses for why humans haven't found aliens yet Furthermore, the probability that humans might contact one of these malicious civilizations - and then be invaded by them - is vanishingly small, Caballero added. "I don't mention the 4.42 civilizations in my paper because 1) we don't know whether all the civilizations in the galaxy are like us… and 2) a civilization like us would probably not pose a threat to another one since we don't have the technology to travel to their planet," Caballero told Vice.įour hostile alien powers doesn't seem like a lot to worry about. However, the number of malicious neighbors increases to 4.42 when accounting for civilizations that, like modern humans, are not yet capable of interstellar travel, Caballero told Vice News (opens in new tab). For his final calculation, Caballero turned to a 2012 paper published in the journal Mathematical SETI (opens in new tab), in which researchers predicted that as many as 15,785 alien civilizations could theoretically share the galaxy with humans.Ĭaballero concluded that less than one of the Type 1 civilizations - 0.22, to be precise - would be hostile toward humans who make contact. That may sound like very slim odds - and it is, until you start multiplying it by the millions of potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way. If current rates of technological advancement hold, then interstellar travel wouldn't be possible for another 259 years, Caballero calculated using the Kardashev scale (opens in new tab) - a system that categorizes how advanced a civilization is based on its energy expenditure.Īssuming the frequency of human invasions continues to decline over that time at the same rate that invasions have declined over the last 50 years (an average of minus 1.15% per year, according to Caballero's paper), then the human race has a 0.0014% probability of invading another planet when we potentially become an interstellar, or Type 1, civilization 259 years from now. However, Caballero wrote, that probability refers to the current state of human civilization - and humans aren't currently capable of interstellar travel. came top with 38% of global military spending.)įrom there, Caballero added each country's individual probability of instigating an invasion, then divided the sum by the total number of countries on Earth, ending up with what he describes as "the current human probability of invasion of an extraterrestrial civilization."Īccording to this model, the current odds of humans invading another inhabited planet are 0.028%. sat at the top of the list, with 14 invasions tallied in that time.) Then, he weighted each country's probability of launching an invasion based on that country's percentage of the global military expenditure. He found that a total of 51 of the world's 195 nations had launched some sort of invasion during that period. To reach his estimation, Caballero first counted the number of countries that invaded other countries between 19. ![]() (Caballero is not an astrophysicist, but he has published a study on the infamous Wow! signal - a potential sign of extraterrestrial life - in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Astrobiology (opens in new tab).) ![]()
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