The Future of Alien Contact

The ancient question for humanity has always been are we alone? As we integrated and assimilated Neanderthals and Denisovians into our DNA (not always peacefully), the modern person has the same age-old questions. How many intelligent alien civilizations are out there among the hundreds of billions of stars in the spiral arms of the Milky Way? According to a new calculation, the answer is within the range of 25-100 (average of 36).

Let’s not be naive, in the area of 50 intelligent species have visited our planet at some time in our past that we could potentially communicate with in our galaxy alone.

While the galaxy is teaming with life, many species don’t last very long, meaning the probability that they have contact with each other is a numbers game of chance and timing.

If we grow up peacefully and achieve a world order that’s not aggressive, we would instantly have the potential to learn, trade and communicate with other species in the Galaxy who are still worried about our moral, ethical and genocidal development.

As we move to Mars for a plan B of our species in our solar system, NASA and others have to stop photoshopping aliens out of their pictures. We need to accept that to survive, communication with Aliens is really important for our psychological development as a species in the galactic community.

SpaceX and BlueOrigin will take us to space, and China will leapfrog the United States in the 2040s in the space race. , A new study just claimed that there are 36 alien civilizations in the Milky Way and represent it as a lower limit on what’s out there.

“There should be at least a few dozen active civilizations in our Galaxy under the assumption that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on other planets, as on Earth,” Christopher Conselice, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and lead author of the study.

We are still primitive in our understanding of xeno-sociology, but it’s fair to say that there are at least 50 to 100 “active” civilizations awake at any given 100 year period within our Galaxy.

Our awakening date as an inter-planetary species is 2080. So we have roughly 60 years to develop a cohesive geo-global unity of identity. Although we’ve come very far in our understanding of stars, planets, and what’s out there — in our Milky Way and beyond, we are still far too tribal, aggressive, reckless and brutish in terms of relationship to nation states, the environment, the economy and minorities within our own groups.

It’s not clear if we can make a quantum breakthrough in our morality, given our warlike history and tribal history. There’s a greater chance we will not make it past the 22nd century.

In a golden age of cosmology we have to redefine our place within the known Galaxy. If we think about the original Drake equation: the first equation to attempt to quantify how many alien civilizations might be present in our own galaxy today, new research is seeding light (the headline of this week) on the updated version of this equation.

As we face the plague, economic uncertainty and increased strain in geopolitical tensions, we have to realize the end game of our species if we want to survive. It’s not to grow our economy or to make the rich even richer. We need a better vision of the future of humanity.

The assumption, known as the Astrobiological Copernican Principle, is fair as everything from chemical reactions to star formation is known to occur if the conditions are right. But with a sample size of one, many of our assumptions of what complex life might be are likely flawed.

In a galaxy with so many suns and planets, it’s highly unlikely that 36 is a valid number of space fairing civilizations we would be able to communicate with.

A cosmic perspective on the search for life and examining the likely number of Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent (CETI) civilizations in our Galaxy by utilizing the latest astrophysical information still needs a lot of work. But we know such a ‘unity day’ of formal and open relationships with other intelligent life forms is near, likely only decades away.

Given our rudimentary data, under the strictest set of assumptions – where, as on Earth, life forms between 4.5bn and 5.5bn years after star formation – there are likely between four and 211 civilizations in the Milky Way today capable of communicating with others, with 36 the most likely figure. I think the true number is likely to be in the area of 500 and 1,000, among which we could potentially become one of the many.

Astrobiology however has a weak link. We are too aggressive in our current value system. Aliens would shun us due to our psychological immaturity. Our governments hide information on ETs and UFOs due to our collective immaturity. How many CETI civilizations are there? We might never know because we might not be deserving of that answer.