The Milky Way could be teeming with interstellar alien civilizations, according to a new study. We just don't know about it because they haven't paid us a visit in 10 million years.
The study, published in
The Astronomical Journal, posits that intelligent extraterrestrial life could
be taking its time to explore the galaxy, harnessing star systems' movement to
make star-hopping easier.
The work is a new response to a
question known as the Fermi Paradox, which asks why we haven't detected signs
of extraterrestrial intelligence.
The paradox was first posed by
physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked: "Where is everybody?"
Fermi was questioning the
feasibility of travel between stars, but since then, his query has come to
represent doubts about the very existence of extraterrestrials.
Astrophysicist Michael Hart explored
the question formally when he argued in a 1975 paper that there has been plenty
of time for intelligent life to colonise the Milky Way in the 13.6 billion
years since the galaxy first formed, yet we've heard nothing from them.
Hart concluded that there must be no
other advanced civilizations in our galaxy.
The new study offers a different
perspective on the question: Maybe aliens are just taking their time and being
strategic, the authors suggest.
"If you don't account for
motion of stars when you try to solve this problem, you're basically left with
one of two solutions," Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, a computational
scientist and the study's lead author, told Business Insider.
"Either nobody leaves their
planet, or we are in fact the only technological civilisation in the
galaxy."
Stars (and the planets around them)
orbit the centre of the galaxy on different paths at different speeds. As they
do, they occasionally pass each other, Carroll-Nellenback pointed out. So
aliens could be waiting for their next destination to come closer to them, his
study says.
In that case, civilizations would
take longer to spread across the stars than Hart estimated. So they may not
have reached us yet - or maybe they did, long before humans evolved.
A new idea about interstellar travel
Researchers have sought to answer
the Fermi Paradox in a number of ways – studies have investigated the
possibility that all alien life forms in oceans below a planet's surface, and
posited that civilizations may get undone by their unsustainability before
accomplishing any interstellar travel.
There's also the "zoo
hypothesis", which imagines that Milky Way societies have decided not to
contact us for the same reasons that we have nature preserves or maintain
protections for some uncontacted indigenous peoples.
A 2018 Oxford University study,
meanwhile, suggested that there's a roughly 2-in-5 chance we're alone in our
galaxy and a 1-in-3 chance we're alone in the entire cosmos.
But the authors of the newest study
point out that previous research hasn't accounted for a crucial fact of our
galaxy: It moves. Just as planets orbit stars, star systems orbit the galactic
centre. Our Solar System, for example, orbits the galaxy every 230 million
years.
If civilizations arise in star
systems far away from the others (like our own, which is in the backwaters of
the galaxy), they could make the trip shorter by waiting until their orbital
path brings them closer to a habitable star system, the study says.
Then once settled in that new
system, the aliens could wait again for an optimal travel distance to make
another hop, and so on.
In this scenario, aliens aren't
jet-setting across the galaxy. They're just waiting long enough for their star
to get close to another star with a habitable planet.
"If long enough is a billion
years, well then that's one solution to the Fermi paradox,"
Carroll-Nellenback said. "Habitable worlds are so rare that you have to
wait longer than any civilisation is expected to last before another one comes
in range."
The Milky Way could be full of settled star systems
To explore the scenarios in which
aliens could exist, the researchers used numerical models to simulate a
civilisation's spread across the galaxy.
They factored in a variety of
possibilities for a hypothetical civilisation's proximity to new star systems,
the range and speed of its interstellar probes, and the launch rate of those
probes.
The research team did not attempt to
guess at aliens' motivations or politics – a tendency that some astronomers
view as a pitfall in other Fermi Paradox solutions.
"We tried to come up with a
model that would involve the fewest assumptions about sociology that we
could," Carroll-Nellenback said.
Still, part of the problem with
modelling the galactic spread of alien civilizations is that we're only working
with one data point: ourselves. So all our predictions are based on our own
behaviour.
But even with this limitation, the
researchers found that the Milky Way could be filled with settled star systems
that we don't know about. That still held true when they used conservative
estimates of the speed and frequency of aliens' interstellar travel.
"Every system could be
habitable and could be settled, but they wouldn't visit us because they're not
close enough," Carroll-Nellenback said, though he added that just because
that's possible doesn't make it likely.
So far, we've detected about 4,000
planets outside our Solar System and none have been shown to host life. But we
haven't looked that hard: There are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky
Way, and even more planets.
One recent study estimated that up
to 10 billion of those planets could be Earth-like.
So the study authors wrote that
concluding that none of those planets hold life would be like looking at a
pool-sized amount of ocean water and finding no dolphins, then deciding that
the entire ocean has no dolphins.
Aliens may have visited Earth in the past
Another key element in debates about
alien life is what Hart called "Fact A": There are no interstellar
visitors on Earth now, and there is no evidence of past visits.
But that doesn't mean they were
never here, the authors of the new study say.
If an alien civilisation came to
Earth millions of years ago (the Earth is 4.5 billion years old), there might
be no remaining signs of their visit, the authors wrote. They pointed to
previous research suggesting that we may not be able to detect evidence of past
alien visits.
It's even possible that aliens have
passed near Earth since we've been here, but decided not to visit. The paper
calls this the "Aurora effect", named for Kim Stanley Robinson's
novel Aurora.
What's more, aliens might not want
to visit a planet that already has life, the authors said. To assume that they
would, they added, would be a "naive projection" of a human tendency
to equate expansion with conquest.
The study accounted for all of these
considerations – the calculations assumed that alien civilizations would only
settle a fraction of the habitable worlds they encountered. Still, the
researchers said, if there are enough habitable worlds, aliens could easily
have spread across the galaxy by now.
There's still much more to learn
For now, the researchers don't think
we should get discouraged by any perceived silence from the universe.
"It doesn't mean that we're
alone," Carroll-Nellenback said.
"It just means that habitable
planets are probably rare and hard to get to."
In the next few years, our ability
to detect and observe other potentially habitable planets is expected to
improve dramatically as new telescopes get built and launched into space.
The Kepler telescope made leaps and
bounds in the search for planets that might host life in our galaxy. In Earth's
orbit today, the Hubble Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey
Satellite (TESS) are continuing the search.
Of course, what would really improve
scientists' ability to estimate the probability that we're alone in the
universe would be more data on the speed or ranges of interstellar probes. A
better sense of how long hypothetical alien civilizations last would be useful,
too.
"We're in desperate need of
some data points," Carroll-Nellenback said.