From the Singularity Hub’s Aaron Frank: Only decades into our “age of cosmology” — the moment when we earned the technological rights to peer deep into our cosmic home — we’ve learned that we live in a mega-palace of a universe. And we’ve also found something odd. We seem to be the only ones home! Where are the aliens? Was it something we said?
Within just a single generation, powerful telescopes, satellites, and space probes have given us tools to explore the structure of our universe. And the more we find; the more we discover how fine-tuned it could be for life. At least in our own solar system, organic compound-glazed comets drift everywhere. Some scientists suggest that one of these life-triggering ice balls crashed into Earth billions of years ago, delivering the conditions for chemistry and biology to take root. If the rest of the universe is similarly structured, we should be inside a life-spawning factory of a universe.
Just consider the mind-boggling numbers.
Even the most conservative NASA estimates say our universe has 500 billion billion stars like our own, and orbiting those suns are another 100 billion billion Earth-like planets. That is 100 habitable planets for every grain of sand on Earth. That’s trillions of opportunities for some other planet to grow life.
For argument’s sake, if even just a tenth of a percent of those planets capable of supporting life harbored some version of it, then there would be one million planets with life in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. A few might even have developed civilizations like our own, and cosmically thinking, if even just a handful of alien civilizations have advanced beyond our current level of technological progress, humanity should be waking up to a universe like the world of Star Trek.
But so far, no Ferengi, Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans—nobody.