IAN Aliens are out there, dude!
TRACE I know they are!
I did the math.
IAN Ahem.
TRACE Maths.
Ugh.
TRACE Hey hoomons, Trace here for DNews.
Finding extra-terrestrial beings is not entirely science fiction, it's more like science…
uh.
Science Wait-and-see-but-it's-totally-going-to-happen.
It's a mathematical inevitability.
IAN It's true, but there are still some problems.
In 1959, the journal Nature published a paper that found satellite dishes, which are basically
electromagnetic wave antennas, had become sensitive enough that if pointed in the right
place, they MIGHT pick up alien communications.
TRACE A year later, a Cornell astronomer named Frank
Drake did so… kicking off the now-famous, Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence,
or SETI.
And then a year after that, he created the Drake Equation.
IAN The Drake Equation basically breaks down the
Milky Way into numbers to arrive at an estimate of how many communicating alien civilizations
might be out there.
The Drake Equation considers the following factors:
TRACE & IAN (alternate) The average rate of star formation
The fraction of those stars with planets The average number of potentially habitable
planets around those stars The fraction of those planets which can support
life The fraction that actually DO develop life
The fraction of those with life that evolved to be intelligent and civilized
The fraction of civilized intelligent life that have developed communications
And finally, the length of time it takes those intelligent aliens to transmit a signal into
space.
TRACE And this was all designed to put an estimate
on the number of developed, intelligent, communicative, civilizations which are out there waiting
for us to find…
IAN But obviously, there are some problems with
this formula.
It’s basically taking a bunch of unknowns and throwing them into an equation that can
give a huge range of probabilities.
But even Drake didn’t intend for this equation to be a definitive answer as to whether or
not aliens with radio dishes are REALLY out there.
It's supposed to help us start the conversation about the sheer NUMBER of planets which could
have life.
TRACE Interestingly as time goes on and advances
in astronomy come in thick and fast, we’re gradually refining our estimates on how many
exoplanets are out there in the galaxy…
IAN And there’s a LOT.
NASA’s Kepler space telescope is even finding worlds orbiting within their star’s “habitable
zones” that are possibly cosy places for life to evolve.
The upshot is that the more real data that we can throw into this equation, the more
compelling it becomes.
But there are other factors that the Drake Equation doesn’t consider, one of them being:
how do non-living chemicals turn into living, breathing, creatures that eventually evolve
to build radio transmitters?
TRACE Now, there’s another equation which uses
planetary chemistry to calculate the odds that life could form on a planet at all!
IAN It's almost like this new Scharf-Cronin equation
is one of the missing puzzle pieces from the Drake equation!
TRACE The Scharf-Cronin uses the total number of
building blocks on given planet, and multiplies it by the fraction of building blocks needed
per "organism", multiplies that by the availability of those building blocks during the time they
exist, and then the probability of the assembly of those blocks in a given time, and then
multiplies that by time overall.
IAN From that, it can determine a rough estimate
of the odds that an origin-of-life event would happen on a planet!
Turning non-living chemicals into a functioning biology is called “abiogenesis” and this
new equation provides us with new microscopic areas to study, beyond the Drake Equation,
if we are to identify where life could possibly gain a foothold.
TRACE Equations like these are starting points for
scientists to figure out what we need to know to find answers like, "are we alone?"
Without the Drake and now the Scharf-Cronin equations we wouldn't have a model to start
with, in finding out how many planets might have life out there.
IAN THIS is the bleeding-edge of science in some
ways.
Just a bunch of people... sitting around, thinking about how we can figure out the answer
to The Big Questions.
TRACE So, how do we know life exists?
Because mathematically speaking it probably does, maybe not Drake-level communicative
life, perhaps it's microroganisms, or maybe plants!
But, in the end, the 1959 paper by Cocconi and Morrison put it best in it's very last
line, "The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search, the chance
of success is zero."
IAN One way life could have found its way to our
planet, might have been via PANSPERMIA.
TRACE My, gosh Ian!
Whatever could that be?!
IAN You can watch this video and find out!
TRACE Do you think life exists out there?
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If you want more space stories from Ian click over to our new website Seeker.com!