By the latest estimations, scientists think there may potentially be millions of planets spread across the Milky Way Galaxy that could be host to alien life in some shape, way, or form. Now, a new study suggests that out of the millions of planets that could theoretically sustain life, just four of them may harbor alien civilizations that humanity would deem “hostile.”
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In a paper recently published to the pre-print database arXiv (for studies that have yet to peer-reviewed), doctoral student Alberto Cabellero used mathematics to determine the number of potential threats out there amongst the stars — or, at the very least, in Earth’s immediate neck of the woods in the ever-expanding cosmos.
“This paper attempts to provide an estimation of the prevalence of hostile extraterrestrial civilizations through an extrapolation of the probability that we, as the human civilization, would attack or invade an inhabited exoplanet,” Caballero wrote in his study.
In an interview with Vice, Caballero admits his paper is largely based on assumptions and data obtained by analyzing country-to-country invasion here on Earth.
“I did the paper based only on life as we know it. We don’t know the mind of extraterrestrials. An extraterrestrial civilization may have a brain with a different chemical composition and they might not have our empathy or they might have more psychopathological behaviors,” he told the website. “I found this way to do [the study], which has limitations, because we don’t know the mind of what aliens would be like.”
He concluded, “The fact that the estimated probability of extraterrestrial invasion is two orders of magnitude lower than that of a planet-killer asteroid collision should open the door to the next step, which is having an international debate to determine the conditions under which the first serious interstellar radio or laser message will be sent to a nearby potentially habitable exoplanet.”
Caballero’s full study can be read here.
Cover photo by Tobias Roetsch/Future Publishing via Getty Images
