What if there is life on another planet? Our Milky Way galaxy comprises more than 100 million stars and maybe more planets. But we’ve known about the existence of life only on Earth, so far. However, with so many planets, some might be home to live. Throughout thousands of years of human civilization, we have acquired knowledge that planetary systems are standard throughout the galaxy. But it raises another question: Among these systems, does any support life? What is the rate of life’s emergence, and what is its typical duration?
Are we alone in the void? What does research have to say about life outside Earth? Image by Pixabay/Gera
Silence in the Universe
The eerie silence of the Universe is known as the Fermi Paradox. It is a contradiction between the odds of extraterrestrial life and the lack of evidence of its existence. The core question- “Where is everybody?” was tossed by physicist Enrico Fermi. Many ideas try to explain the absence of alien evidence, with possibilities ranging from life being unusual to advanced civilizations being inherently unstable. It becomes more possible to make statistical statements about the likelihood of life as we learn more about exoplanets. The basic idea of the paradox lies in the fact that our galaxy contains a vast number of planets. And with so many, there must be another intelligent life in one of them. However, we don’t have a way to assert whether that is true or not! However, we can’t completely reject the fact that there may not be life on other planets.
What does the Drake Equation say?
Exoplanet research over the past two decades has begun to provide us with real numbers for parts of the Drake Equation, a subject that has been the subject of much speculation. It is a series of values that aim to predict the potential quantity of advanced civilizations. A large portion of the Equation’s values remain undetermined, particularly the likelihood of life, intelligent life, and detectable technology arising on those planets. However, the Equation indicates that we may eventually be able to determine the answer. It seems more helpful than Fermi’s silence.
The Drake equation, proposed by Frank Drake, is used to estimate the number of active extraterrestrial civilizations. Picture by Pixabay/Geralt
The Drake Equation was reviewed by researchers at the University of Rochester in New York in 2016. Since the inception of the Equation, we’ve discovered millions of potentially suitable planets for life. It makes it possible to determine how likely it is that there is or was another life outside Earth. Researchers found that the chances of no other life developing would have to be very low, possibly 1 in 10 billion trillion possibilities, for Earth to be the only evolved planet in our galaxy.
Frank Drake, who propounded the Drake Equation, passed away in 2022, but he settled on an educated guess for a solution to his Equation: 10,000 planets with intelligent life in the Milky Way galaxy. There is no definitive evidence of life yet, but researchers are excited to pursue it.
Position of the probability of life
We are at the intersection of finding life. The Milky Way contains thousands of planets we’ve seen, and a considerable number are Earth-sized. These are situated within the ‘habitable zones’ of their stars. It is the zone comprising a star where a planet’s temperature would permit liquid water to exist.
We are still searching for traces of life outside Earth, hoping to find evidence of it. Image by Pixabay/Geralt
As our space and ground-based telescopes, along with our remote-sensing technology, continue to advance, the galaxy’s immense planetary count —likely in the trillions —is becoming more accessible to us. Although we’ve discovered many worlds across the Universe, ours is the only one we know that nurtures life. We’re looking into the darkness, hoping for a response.
References:
The Insights were published by NASA.
