Intelligent Life | What's the Probability?

While Allegedly Working for the United States Military, Bob Lazar Drew This Sketch of an Extraterrestrial Craft He Was Working to Reverse Engineer

"Are We Alone?"

This is one of the biggest philosophical questions man has ever devised. Armed with data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and multiple other sources, this thought-intriguing question may be somewhat answerable, but it leads to more questions. If there is other intelligent life, possibly more advanced than us, what would it look like? Would they develop morality/ethics? What color are they? These questions may be unanswerable for a long time, or maybe they won't be.

The Data

Dr. Erik Petigura led a study of 42,000 sun-like stars with the Kepler telescope, as well as counting the stars that aren't like our sun. His team also tracked the planets around sun-like stars to determine what planets were in the habitable zone. Here are the studies summary findings:

• There are an estimated 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7e22) stars in the universe. You may commonly hear this as 1 grain of sand = 10,000 stars.

• 5% of those stars are sun-like. This means there are an estimated 3,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 (3.5e21) sun-like stars in the universe.

• 20% of sun-like stars have an Earth-like planet orbiting around them. This means there are an estimated 700,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7e20) stars with Earth-like planets orbiting around them. 1 grain of sand = 100 Earth-like planets in the universe.

• Based on those numbers, there are about 1,000,000,000 Earth's in the Milky Way.

Hypothetically:

1. If 1% of "Earths" developed life = 7,000,000,000,000,000 planets with life.

2. If 1% of "Earths" with life developed intelligent life = 100,000 intelligent aliens in our Galaxy.

3. If 0.1% of Earth's with life developed intelligent life = 100 intelligent aliens in our Galaxy.

Another study calculated that the chances of humans being the first technologically advanced species in the universe is 0.00000000000000000001%. Less than 1 billion trillion, yeah seriously.

"To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology-producing species very likely have evolved before us" - Lead author Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York.

You THINK?

How Long Does it Take Civilization To Evolve?

Scientists estimate that the universe is 14 billion years old. They also estimate that the Milky Way is around 13.6 billion years old, they estimate the solar system is near 5 billion years old and the Earth about 4.6 billion years. As far as we can see with fossil records, life started to form on Earth around 3.5 billion years ago, 1.1 billion years after the estimated formation of earth.

So how long did it take humans to evolve? Strong evidence supports that the first human lineage from the great apes was about 8 million years ago, 4.592 billion years after the Earth formed. Yeah, the Earth has spent 99.83% of it's existence without us. We started building our first tools around 3.3 million years ago, so the Earth spent 99.93% of it's existence without any tools. Society, as far as we know, appeared 7,000 years ago. You heard that right, the Earth lived 99.9997% of it's life before humans built society.

Humans have only been around for 0.0571% of the universes existence. We've only been around for 0.0588% of the Milky Way's existence, and we've only been around for 0.173% of the Earth's existence.

After life sprung up for the first time on Earth, it took evolution about 3.5 billion years to have an artificial rocket built by an intelligent species launched into space. 3.5 billion years is only 25% of the Universes lifetime. It is almost certain that in that other 75% of the universes lifetime, other life has sprung up. It is extremely likely that other intelligent species could be hundreds of thousands, millions, or even billions of years more advanced than us.

Where Are All the Aliens?

The most likely answer to this is the zoo hypothesis. Darwinistic evolution allows for what's most effective, and for sentient life to continue it's existence, the ability to suffer and feel pain is likely the most efficient way. When intelligence meets suffering, something amazing happens; The creation of morality.

I theorize that any species capable of interstellar travel likely has a non-interference policy. We are already starting to see this type of ethics on Earth being created and implemented for wild animals, a civilization that is dozens of thousands of years more advanced would likely have the same thing. To last that long as a civilization, you can't have war. The technology used in war past a certain point would bring the species to extinction or start-over. We were already ridiculously close to doing just that in the cold war! For any intelligent race to achieve interstellar space travel, they must have some type of morality or ethics to stop their society from becoming tyrannical and ensuring the progression of their species.

Furthermore, the quarantine theory suggests that intelligent extraterrestrials are intentionally stopping our discovery of their existence for they know it would disrupt the natural development of the planet. Jean-Pierre Rospars, the honorary research director at the National Institute of Agronomic Research in France has this to say about the quarantine theory:

“It seems likely that extraterrestrials are imposing a ‘galactic quarantine’ because they realize it would be culturally disruptive for us to learn about them. Cognitive evolution on Earth shows random features while also following predictable paths ... we can expect the repeated, independent emergence of intelligent species in the universe, and we should expect to see more or less similar forms of intelligence everywhere, under favorable conditions.There’s no reason to think that humans have reached the highest cognitive level possible. Higher levels might evolve on Earth in the future and already be reached elsewhere.”