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The statistical chances of being another intelligent life in the universe are “exceptionally rare,” according to a new study from the University of Oxford.
In the article, scientists at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford theorize that as life evolved on earth it depended in many cases on a series of unlikely “revolutionary transitions”. Given the late evolution of intelligent life on this planet, the chances of similar developments on other planets, before they were no longer able to sustain life, were highly unlikely, they said.
“It took about 4.5 billion years for a series of evolutionary transitions leading to intelligent life to take place on Earth,” they wrote in the journal published last month. “In a billion years, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will make the Earth uninhabitable for complex life.
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“With the dispersed timing of key evolutionary transitions and plausible priors, it can be concluded that the expected transition times probably exceed the lifetime of Earth, perhaps by several orders of magnitude,” writes the. “In turn, this suggests that intelligent life is likely to be exceptionally rare.”
To reach their conclusions, the scientist looked at statistical models to determine the likelihood that the sequence of evolutionary transitions that occurred on Earth could occur elsewhere.
In this image released by NASA, Comet Neowise, at left, is seen on the horizon east above Earth in this image taken from the International Space Station on Sunday, July 5, 2020 (NASA via AP)
“We made the assumption that what happened on Earth is typical of what happens on other planets – not the exact times, but that there are delicate stages that life must go through in sequence. to produce intelligent observers, ”said Anders Sandberg of Oxford. the daily mail.
The paper points out that it took over a billion years for life to pass from prokaryotes (single-celled organisms) to eukaryotes (organisms with a nucleus) means that such a step is highly unlikely.
He also notes that humans have only existed on Earth for about 6 million years, with Homo sapiens arriving only 200,000 years ago.
“Some transitions appear to have occurred only once in Earth’s history, suggesting a hypothesis reminiscent of Gould’s remark that if the ‘life strip’ were to be rerun, ‘luck becomes extremely small for something like human intelligence to ‘happen,’ the article said referring to the quote from evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
This image taken by the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the “Pillars of Creation” of the Eagle Nebula. (NASA, ESA / Hubble, Hubble Heritage team via AP)
“What we’ve added is a statistical approach that allows us to get estimates of how improbable the steps are,” Sandberg said. “We feed data on when things happened on Earth and an estimate of the number of steps, and in return we get the most likely difficulty levels.”
“[These] turn out to indicate that, yes, we are an unlikely planet, ”he said.
However, Sandberg noted that just because intelligent life scenarios on other plants were unlikely that humans should stop looking.
“Just because we got our results doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time looking at the real universe,” he said. “Data will always trump such careful reasoning and statistics.”
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