Marko Horvat, Anamari Nakić, Ivana Otočan
For over 50 years, astronomers have searched the skies for evidence of
electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrial civilizations that have reached
or surpassed our level of technological development. Although often overlooked
or given as granted, the parallel use of an equivalent communication technology
is a necessary prerequisite for establishing contact in both leakage and
deliberate messaging strategies. Civilization advancements, especially
accelerating change and exponential growth, lessen the perspective for a
simultaneous technological status of civilizations thus putting hard
constraints on the likelihood of a dialogue. In this paper we consider the
mathematical probability of technological synchronicity of our own and a number
of other hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations and explore the most
likely scenarios for their concurrency. If SETI projects rely on a fortuitous
detection of leaked interstellar signals (so called "eavesdropping") then
without any prior assumptions N \geq 138-4991 Earth-like civilizations have to
exist at this moment in the Galaxy for the technological usage synchronicity
probability p \geq 0.95 in the next 20 years. We also show that since the
emergence of complex life, coherent with the hypothesis of the Galactic
habitable zone, N \geq 1497 extraterrestrial civilizations had to be created in
the Galaxy in order to achieve the same estimated probability in the
technological possession synchronicity which corresponds to the deliberate
signaling scenario.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.0423
No comments:
Post a Comment