Are we alone? It's one of the most basic questions of human existence. People have been trying to answer it for millennia in one form or another, but only recently have we gained the tools and knowledge to start tractably trying to estimate whether we are or not. Those efforts take the form of famous tools like the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation, but there's always room for a more nuanced understanding. A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Antal Veres of the Hungarian University of Agriculture introduces a new one—the Solitude Zone.
The Solitude Zone isn't a place, though; it's a statistical window where the probability of exactly one lifeform of a given complexity exists is greater than a situation where either multiple lifeforms of that same technological advancement level exist or none at all do. That second part is critical—it makes the statistical window a bell curve rather than an exponential function. But before we get too far in the statistical weeds, let's lock down some concepts.
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