Ultimately, scientists simply need more data in order to truly understand the Fermi Paradox. Upcoming telescopes, like NASA's James Webb Space Telescope launching in December 2021, will be able to study the atmospheres of exoplanets like never before, while the search for new planets is continuing unabated.īy finding more planets in habitable zones around their stars, where temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist, scientists could narrow down the possibility of other Earth-like worlds in the universe - and, by using advanced telescopes, study some of these Earth-like orbs in our galaxy. Many scientists hope that we can solve the Fermi Paradox. (Image credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez) Can we solve the Fermi Paradox?Īn artist's conception of the James Webb Telescope. This "simple" formula, Drake once said, would be akin to estimating the number of students at a university by multiplying the number of new students entering each year by the average number of years a student will spend at a university, according to SETI.Īs of yet, however, a number of key variables in the equation remain unknown, meaning we can't yet come up with a possible number for other species of intelligent life. L = length of time over which these civilizations send those detectable signals into spaceīy including all of these factors in the equation, the idea is you might be able to work out how many other intelligent civilizations exist in the universe. □c = fraction of those civilizations that develop a technology to communicate their existence □i = fraction of planets that develop intelligent life, and thus intelligent civilizations □1 = fraction of those planets that "could" support life that actually develop life Ne = average number of planets that could potentially support life for each star that hosts planets □p = fraction of stars supporting planets R* = average rate of star formation in Milky Way The Drake equation is an idea, proposed by the American astronomer Frank Drake in 1961, that the number of potential civilizations in the universe can be calculated if we know a few key variables. ![]() If this idea is correct, it's not clear if we have already passed this filter - or we are yet to reach it … What is the Drake equation? They might be powerful solar flares, climate change, asteroid impacts, or perhaps something of the planet's own doing like a nuclear apocalypse. These events could be one of many things. The Great Filter is the idea that catastrophic events, either manmade or natural, cause intelligent life to be extinguished on habitable worlds before they have a chance to extend their reach into the universe. But there is the possibility that some sort of event, known as a Great Filter, might prevent civilizations like our own from progressing far enough to make contact elsewhere. Life, like that found on Earth, is simply so vanishingly unlikely to arise, that ours was the only world where this happened. Intelligent aliens might simply have decided to never visit us, or did so long ago without leaving any trace.Īlternatively, it might be that life is simply so rare that the chances of two intelligent species being positioned relatively near each other in the vastness of space is exceedingly slim.Ī more somber suggestion is that we are alone in the universe. The distance from Earth to Neptune, for comparison, is 0.0005 light-years - a journey that would still take us decades with current technology. Our closest star system for example, Alpha Centauri, is four light-years away. This means we have barely started to scratch the surface of studying other worlds.įor example, we are yet to find many planets that look exactly like Earth, orbiting stars like our sun - but upcoming telescopes are hoped to be capable of such detections in the coming decade or two.Įven then, the distances between star systems are enormous, making journeys between them difficult. The first planets beyond our own solar system were only discovered in the 1990s. The most obvious, and likely, is that we simply haven't looked hard enough to find other life, and interstellar travel between stars is difficult. ![]() There are a number of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Are we alone in the universe? Scientists hope to find the answer.
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