Today was the first official announcement that scientists found a planet in the “goldilocks” zone, planets with orbit diameters just the right distance from their stars to be “not to hot, not to cold.”
It’s another confirmation that it’s possible there is life “out there”. And it’s another input to the classic “Drake equation”
The Drake equation states that:
N = R* • fp • ne • fℓ • fi • fc • L
where:
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
and
R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.Source: Wikipedia
Too much math for you? Let me simplify. That’s essentially a long string of probabilities that are multiplied together, leading to a number that’s way smaller than your odds of winning the lottery. The odds of alien intelligence are larger, however, than you becoming the next Justin Bieber. Or magically turning into a groundhog, for that matter.
The ratios that this new data have been informing are “fp” and “ne”: the fraction of stars with planets and the likelihood that those planets can support life. Finding a planet in the goldilocks zone increases the odds of liquid water being present, which is required for our only good example of intelligent life: us. Well, us minus believers in the Detroit Lions’ playoff chances this year. That team is imploding.
While all this is the stuff of my childhood imagination (Life on other planets!), I’m curious what we would do with certain knowledge of life beyond Earth.
Right now, we’re inferring details of the planets location and mass by observing the star’s wobble and the occlusion of light as a planet passes between us and the star on a regular basis. But let’s say, just for a moment, that we had God’s own telescope, and we could spy all the way to honest to goodness technologically sophisticated aliens on the surface of the planet. What on Earth would we do? Literally.
We could beam them a message on every frequency we could find. At 600 light years away, those aliens better manage to survive until the 1,200 years of a signal’s round trip. We better have some amazing amounts of patience ourselves. 1,200 years ago we were in the dark ages, so who knows what we’ll manage to solve and screw up in another 1,200 years.
Or we could devote huge resources to going there ourselves. That’s pretty grim, too, with so many problems here at home and the challenges of a ship that would need to preserve generations of spacefarers for centuries or more.
Or, and this is the sad realization, we’d just look to the sky and say “well, whaddya know.” It seems this knowledge is not actionable for multiple, multiple lifetimes.
And this may explain the reason why no one is visiting us. The distances are just too insurmountable. The closer problems, the more pressing. Where we place our feet is more urgent than reaching for the sky.
Maybe something “out there” already has God’s own microscope, and they are looking down on us (or us of 1,000 years ago — light takes a while to cover these distances). Maybe we should at least be waving in their direction, to let them know we’re not a species that’s only interested in the steps our feet take.
Sean Foote's Blog 