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Salin Hatakaroon Ms. Orana Meenongwha English 10/1005 June 6,2018 Fermi Paradox
Introduction
Homo Sapiens, the first modern humans, had occurred approximately 200,000 years ago. The migration and adaptation allowed early humans to survive to the horrific environment. Therefore, humans are considered to be the only known species to successfully populated and colonized the globe. As we expanded in our knowledge, we started to look beyond the horizon. The first ever
human flight to successfully defined the Earth’s gravitational force, Vostok 1, took place on
April 1961. Consequently, the discovery of
space and universe make us considered that we’re
just a speck of dust. There are at least 300 billion stars and planets in our home galaxy , and yet, not to considered with the whole universe. Furthermore, there were high possibilities that there could be planets that could sustain life, just like the Earth. However, with the small amount of studies and evidences, the existence of extraterrestrial life was still inconclusive.
What is the Fermi Paradox?
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Fermi Paradox is an attempt to explain the existence of extraterrestrial civilization due to the absence of evidences. The paradox was named after Italian-American physicist, Enrico
Fermi. He was the 1938 Nobel Prize receiver and be considered as the “architect of nuclear age”.
Besides from being the c
reator of world’s first nuclear reactor, Fermi outstands in both
theoretically and experimentally.
Back in 1940’s, Fermi with a group of scientists had a regular conversation at Los
Alamos National Laboratory. The conversation in some means, had turned into an argument about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Fermi realized that habitable Earth-Like planets could possibly occurred in our Milky Way Galaxy. Assuming that intelligent and technological civilizations exists in one of them, the civilization will innovated interstellar travelling at some point. Accordingly, the following civilization will be able to colonize nearby planets and stellar systems, and could rapidly colonized the entire galaxy within ten million years. While ten million years may seems long, although, it was a flick of time when compared to the age of the Universe, 13.8 billion years. Fermi noticed that colonizing the entire galaxy should be a simple task, therefore, extraterrestrial intelligences had more than enough time to
have dominance over the whole galaxy. Although, Fermi haven’t seen any obvious evidences of these intelligences, so he questioned, “where is everybody?”.
The milky way galaxy itself consists of roughly 400 billion stars , in fact, 20 billion of them are sun-like stars and estimation suggests that a fifth of those stars have habitable planets within habitable zones. Assuming that life had existed in 0.1% of those planet, there would be around 1 million planets fulfilled with life. Correspondingly, if only a fragment of those planet
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had developed and advanced into intelligence civilizations like humans, there would still be countless of those civilization in our galaxy.
Drake’s Equation could be used to approximate the number of active intelligent
civilizations (N) within specific boundaries, which in this case, the Milky Way Galaxy. N = R
s
* f
p
* n
e
* f
l
* f
i
* f
e
* L R
s
is the rate of star formation that could potentially developed habitable planets, f
p
is the fraction of those stars with planetary systems, n
e
is the number of planets(per system) with environments habitable for life, f
l
is the fraction of those planets which life could exists, f
i
is the fraction of those planets where intelligent life evolves, f
e
is the fraction of such intelligent civilization developed interstellar communication technology and L is the length of time such intelligences keep emitting detectable signals into space. With our extremely imprecise estimations, the original formulation of the Equation is N = 10 * 0.5 * 2.0 * 1.0 * 0.01 * 0.01 * 10000. Which means there would probably be at least 10 active intelligence civilizations in our Milky Way alone.
The Kardashev Scale
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, when compared to 4.6 billion years, our sun is relatively young. In the Milky Way, there are older stars with older planets than ours , and in other words, there could be older civilizations that are far more advanced than us. By comparing the Earth to a hypothetical planet, planet x, which is 8 billion years old. If planet X have similar timeline to us, planet X civilizations should have the same level of our knowledge and technologies 3.6 billions years ago. Civilizations with thousands of years of
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technologies ahead of us could be compared like modern peoples to medieval person. Civilization with millions of years of technology ahead of us could be like modern peoples to chimpanzees. Imagine civilizations with billions years of technology ahead of us. Accordingly, as civilization grows larger and became more advanced, the demands for energy roses higher. Kardashev Scale was developed by Nikolai Kardashev in order to measure the technological advancement of civilization by measuring energy that was used and disposed. Originally, Kardashev scale had categorized intelligences in to 3 levels, but then later had extended into 7 levels. Type I civilizations (Planetary Civilizations) are given to species that are able to harness all energy and have fully control over their home planet. Theoretically, type I civilizations should be able to control such things as earthquakes, volcanoes or weathers. Currently, humans are considered to be 0.71 on the scale and it would take 100 to 200 years for humans to accomplished planetary civilizations. Type II civilizations (Stella Civilizations) can harness all energy from their host stars and would be able to have fully control of their stella-system. Megastructure like Dyson Sphere is a conceptual methods for reaching type II civilizations. Dyson Sphere is a structure that enclose the entire star, gathering most of its energy. Humans would take roughly 1,000 to 2,000 years to accomplished stella civilizations.