What are the odds of finding love?
Today I will tell you what a nuclear physicist and us The search for aliens can learn about the search for love! Well, scientists don’t know exactly how love works. Or what he does with our brains, but that’s the subject of another video. But what WE KNOW is that in every culture, almost everyone on Earth, we go in search of love. With another 7 billion people, how can it be so difficult to find love ?! Sometimes we ask ourselves, “Where is everyone?” That was what Enrico Fermi asked, except that he was talking about extraterrestrial life.
Fermi thought: with billions of stars and planets in the galaxy, 13 billion years should be enough for a civilization to stand up and say “Hello! Welcome to the neighborhood. ”This is the so-called Fermi paradox. An astronomer named Frank Drake took Fermi’s question and answered it equations, because astronomers do that. When you attach some galaxy data, you can estimate how many civilizations there may be. Let’s play with “Drake’s equation” and see what we get. The “N star” is the number of stars in the Milky Way, the lowest estimate is 100 billion. “fs index p” is the part of the stars with planets which, as NASA (Kepler mission) now claims, is 100% planet for every star! “ns index e” is a fraction of the planets on which life could be as we know it.
According to a recent estimate, this is 2.5 billion potentially habitable planets, let’s substitute 4%. “fs index l” are the planets on which life would actually evolve, recently calculated at 13%. This leaves “fs index i” for the part where intelligence evolved, the “fs index c” the part that developed technology and “fs index L” the time for which a civilization exists before it destroys itself. The last three are difficult to count, so let’s use Carl Sagan’s numbers to be sure, because we trust Carl. Put it on a calculator and you will get 52,000 possible communicating civilizations Yes, it’s a complete estimate, but it’s a scientific estimate, so it’s okay.
I think that means we have no reason to feel lonely if we remain optimistic.