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| File photo - Crystal Graham, wearing an extra-terrestrial costume, waits in line for her turn in the UFO costume contest in Roswell (Reuters) |
Time for some comic (maybe not) relief....
Are aliens avoiding Earth?
By Walt Bonner Published September 23, 2016
Even with all of the advancements in modern technology, we still haven’t made contact with intelligent life on other planets. But what if our attempts to communicate have been ignored?
In 1973, a radio astronomer named John Ball came up with a possible theory as to why aliens – if they do exist – haven’t gotten back to us. Ball’s “Zoo Hypothesis” as it came to be known, posits that alien civilizations exist, and the most highly developed of them have been communicating. This elite alien “club” has come upon a mutual agreement to leave those deemed primitive or “lesser” life forms alone, only to be watched from a distance. Earthlings, therefore, did not make the cut with the galactic cool kids.
So assuming these aliens exist, under what circumstances could they all agree to keep us in the dark? A Scottish astronomer named Duncan Forgan has the answer.
“I was interested in this theory because it is so difficult to test in a scientific fashion,” Forgan told FoxNews.com. “The Zoo Hypothesis relies on us being unable to observe other aliens, so a failure to observe aliens can be used both as evidence for and against the hypothesis at the same time!”
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Forgan decided to test the assumptions that make up the hypothesis, instead of the hypothesis itself. One of these assumptions is that intelligent extraterrestrials can agree on a “no contact with primitive worlds” policy.
“Agreement requires communication, which is limited by the speed of light,” Forgan explained.
This would assume that civilizations must have existed long enough for messages to go back and forth between them, a process limited by the speed of light. Another assumption is that life would be able to thrive in a galaxy–wide habitable zone. Forgan entered these assumptions into a computer program, which then went about simulating civilizations and randomly placing them around the habitable zone, measuring the distance between them and calculating the likelihood of any two of them making contact and communicating within their lifetimes.
The computer found that for a "leave the Earthlings alone" agreement to be likely, at least 500 civilizations must exist, each of them having lasted over one million years. Any less than 500 civilizations and there are too many groups of civilizations to form a pact; if any one civilization lasted less than a million years, then there are also too many civilization groups to form the galactic club. (A “civilization group,” Forgan explained, is “a collection of civilizations that are ‘culturally connected’, which basically means that a civilization is aware of the others in the group as soon as it is technologically ready. Weirdly, the civilization groups are actually pretty well-mixed in space, which you wouldn't expect naively - the issue is their separation in space-time, not their separation in space.”)
In other words, Earth may not be in the universal doghouse after all.
