Imagine if the nearest intelligent aliens were not across the street, not across the solar system, but on the far side of the Milky Way, some 33,000 light-years away from Earth.
That’s the scenario painted by a new study, which finds that if alien civilizations exist, they are probably rare, distant, and most likely millions of years older than humanity. According to the study authors, the odds of another technological species existing at the same time as us are slim.
This is because finding a world with the right atmosphere, chemistry, and geological activity is like hunting for a cosmic needle in a haystack, and this is why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been such a struggle.
“Extraterrestrial intelligences—ETIs—in our galaxy are probably pretty rare,” Manuel Scherf, one of the study authors, and a researcher from the Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, said.
All it takes is one other one.
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