According to a paper published in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, life should be relatively common throughout the universe.
Are we alone in the universe? This is perhaps one of the most important unanswered questions in the history of humankind.
For millennia have humans gazed upon the stars wondering if there is something, or someone else out there, beyond the darkness and glaring stars?
Perhaps, as soon as ancient people developed the ability to think, they wondered if there was something more up there in the sky.
Thousands of years later, and despite our fancy technologies and life-changing gadgets, we cannot understand the cosmos we live in, and explain and answer whether we are alone in the universe?
But suppose we were to make an educated guess and base it on facts such as the number of stars in our galaxy, the number of confirmed exoplanets, and the idea that each star is home to at least one planet. In that case, I think we could then say that it is very unlikely that we are the only planet where life developed in the entire universe.
Now, a new study has estimated the odds of not life but intelligent life emerging beyond our planet, and the results are unsurprising. A researcher from the University of Columbia has used Bayesian statistics to understand better the odds of alien life emerging in the universe. Bayesian statistics is a system for describing epistemological uncertainty using the mathematical language of probability.
To understand alien life, we must look first at our own planet and its evolution
. Scientists say that life on Earth sprung into existence when our planet’s environment was stable enough to support its formation. We know for a fact that the first multicellular organisms—which eventually gave rise to our modern civilization—took longer to evolve, around 4 billion years.
But even with this knowledge, we are still unable to explain if life emerged on another planet in the universe.
Although we may not be able to answer whether aliens exist, David Kipping, an assistant professor in Columbia’s Department of Astronomy, has published the study in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.
The paper looks at the emergence of alien life from a statistical point of view.
“The rapid emergence of life and the late evolution of humanity, in the context of the timeline of evolution, are certainly suggestive,” Kipping explained. “But in this study, it’s possible actually to quantify what the facts tell us.”
Using data such as the chronology of the earliest appearance of life on Earth, and the evolution of humankind, the researcher questions how often could we expect life and intelligence to re-emerge on our planet if Earth’s history were to reset and repeat.
Essentially, the researchers asked what the chances were for life and intelligent life to come into existence if Earth was a young planet that just met the necessary conditions for life as we know it to exist. Would something have gone differently, or would everything be repeated?
“The analysis can only provide statistical probabilities, but the case for a universe teeming with life emerges as the favored bet.” Kipping explained.
Kipping proposed four possible answers;
- Life is common, and intelligence emerged more often than not.
- Life is rare but can develop intelligence.
- Life is common, although the emergence of intelligent life is rare.
- Life is rare and rarely develops into intelligent life.
“The technique is akin to betting odds,” Kipping said. “It encourages the repeated testing of new evidence against your position, in essence, a positive feedback loop of refining your estimates of the likelihood of an event.”
The four above-mentioned theories were incorporated into Bayesian mathematical formulas, allowing the researcher to weigh the models against the other.
“In Bayesian inference, prior probability distributions always need to be selected,” Kipping said. “But a key result here is that when one compares the rare-life versus common-life scenarios, the common-life scenario is always at least nine times more likely than the rare one.”
Kipping argues that if exoplanets in the universe have similar conditions and evolutionary timelines to Earth, life should be able to emerge across the universe spontaneously.
What are the odds for the emergence of intelligent life? Kipping found just 3:2 odds that intelligence is rare. In other words, “if we played Earth’s history again, the emergence of intelligence is actually somewhat unlikely,” Kipping explained.
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