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We don’t know, but there could be thousands, and possibly millions, of Earth-like planets studding the dark latitudes of the Milky Way. Our Galaxy could be thick with worlds that host not just life, but intelligence. In this putative club of sentients, is it possible that we are the newest a..."
We don’t know, but there could be thousands, and possibly millions, of Earth-like planets studding the dark latitudes of the Milky Way. Our Galaxy could be thick with worlds that host not just life, but intelligence. In this putative club of sentients, is it possible that we are the newest arrivals? This question can be trivially answered. Although Homo sapiens has been plodding the planet for a few hundred thousand years, our technical competence to build rockets and radios is only a century old. Anyone who’s mastered seventh grade science knows that’s not a heck of a lot of time compared to the age of the Earth. As a kid, you were probablyencouraged to make a paper strip chart of the history of our planet from its formation 4.6 billion years ago, through bacteria, trilobites, dinosaurs and humans.
If the chart ran the walls from the back of the classroom to the front blackboard, the representation of time since the invention of radio was only a hundredth of a hair’s-width wide. If your chart began with the formation of the Galaxy, 13 billion years ago, the era of technological competence would be even thinner. So we’re surely among the newest pledges in the frat house, if club membership requires radio technology or better. That means that if we pick up a signal from extraterrestrials, you can be smugly confident that those broadcasters are far beyond our own level.But thereare other matters of relevance: how many club members exist and how much more advanced would they be? If we want to estimate how many contemporary worlds have technically sophisticated inhabitants, we can begin with the Drake Equation. This fabled formulation estimates the number of hi-tech galactic societies as the product of the rate at which they arise times their average lifetime. This is just like computing how many students are on campus at the local university by multiplying the number of new admissions by the average length of a college stay (close to four years).We don’t know much about the average lifetime of technological societies, other than the fact that ours has, so far, managed to survive for a century. We also don’t know atwhat rate. ...
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We don’t know, but there could be thousands, and possibly millions, of Earth-like planets studding the dark latitudes of the Milky Way. Our Galaxy could be thick with worlds that host not just life, but intelligence. In this putative club of sentients, is it possible that we are the newest arrivals? This question can be trivially answered. Although Homo sapiens has been plodding the planet for a few hundred thousand years, our technical competence to build rockets and radios is only a century old. Anyone who’s mastered seventh grade science knows that’s not a heck of a lot of time compared to the age of the Earth. As a kid, you were probablyencouraged to make a paper strip chart of the history of our planet from its formation 4.6 billion years ago, through bacteria, trilobites, dinosaurs and humans. 
Scientists find most Earth-like planet yet
Water detected on distant planet
Oddball Planet Puzzles Astronomers
Astronomers claim galaxy record
'Cave entrances' spotted on Mars
Hubble spots "space jellyfish"
Probe reveals seas on Saturn moon
"Waterworld" discovered 40 light years away
Dazzling new images reveal the 'impossible' on the Sun
M-81 black hole bigger than thought
