Maybe 30-60% chance we are alone in the Universe
When they combined these uncertainties, rather than the guesswork that often go into the Fermi Paradox, Sandberg, Drexler and Ord got a distribution as a result. Naturally, this resulted in a broad spread due to the number of uncertainties involved. But as Dr. Sandberg explained, it did provide them with an estimate of the likelihood that humanity (given what we know) is alone in the galaxy:
“We found that even using the guesstimates in the literature (we took them and randomly combined the parameter estimates) one can have a situation where the mean number of civilizations in the galaxy might be fairly high – say a hundred – and yet the probability that we are alone in the galaxy is 30%! The reason is that there is a very skew distribution of likelihood.
“If we instead try to review the scientific knowledge, things get even more extreme. This is because the probability of getting life and intelligence on a planet has an *extreme* uncertainty given what we know – we cannot rule out that it happens nearly everywhere there is the right conditions, but we cannot rule out that it is astronomically rare. This leads to an even stronger uncertainty about the number of civilizations, drawing us to conclude that there is a fairly high likelihood that we are alone. However, we *also* conclude that we shouldn’t be too surprised if we find intelligence!”
Humanity will need to move off earth and then over to a better cluster of galaxies
2. Universe Today – The Tools Humanity Will Need for Living in the Year 1 Trillion
The paper, “Securing Fuel for our Frigid Cosmic Future“, recently appeared online. As he indicates in his study, when the Universe is ten times its current age (roughly 138 billion years old), all stars outside the Local Group of galaxies will no be accessible to us since they will be receding away faster than the speed of light. For this reason, he recommends that humanity follow the lesson from Aesop’s fable, “The Ants and the Grasshopper”.
Advanced species should migrate to a rich clusters of galaxies.
These clusters represent the largest reservoirs of matter bound by gravity and would therefore be better able to resist the accelerated expansion of the Universe.
Within 50 million light years, the Virgo Cluster, contains about a thousands times more matter than the Milky Way Galaxy. The second closest is the Coma Cluster, a collection of over 1000 galaxies located about 336 million light-years away.
3. Universe Today – Strange Landscapes on Mars were Created by Explosive Volcanoes
6. Nextbigfuture – Asteroid day and NASA and ESA mission to a double asteroid
