Shouting into Space: Earth is Just One of 40 Billion Potentially Habitable Planets

And they lived happily ever after – in space… If soon one of the largest telescopes in the world finds a signal from a new space civilization, modern fairy tales might soon end with that sentence. Or is the search for echoes of those civilizations just a fairy tale? Is there life on the other side of the universe, and can Earthlings ‘shout’ to aliens with a telescope? This is a question to which no one yet has an answer. The Chinese have just launched FAST, the largest telescope in the world, larger than Arecibo in Puerto Rico, whose antennas are directed towards the human eye-visible blue infinity behind which, astrophysicists claim, galaxies dance shrouded in darkness and stardust, separated by great black holes…

Will China be lucky? This vast populous country has great ambitions: it invests billions of dollars in a space program managed by the military and aims to send astronauts to the Moon by 2020. Until then, it will capture signals from space with the FAST telescope, whose reflector is as large as thirty football fields. Its construction cost 180 million dollars and it is located in the mountainous region of Guizhou province, from where ten thousand people were relocated. The telescope listens for signals in space that would confirm the existence of intelligent life, or extraterrestrial civilizations and ‘little green big-eyed beings’.

The Russians almost got lucky when their radio telescope Ratan-600, located in the Caucasus, captured a signal from a Type II civilization a year ago. Although they attributed this unusual signal to the voice of a new civilization, they did not inform the public about it. A strong signal came from the depths of space, leading scientists to hypothesize that it was a communication from another civilization, a sign of extraterrestrial life. It was sent from the planet HD164595b in the solar system, located 95 light-years from Earth. Scientific analysis confirmed that it belongs to a Type II civilization, according to the Kardashev scale (Nikolai Kardashev was a Russian astronaut), a method of measuring the technological advancement of a civilization based on energy consumption.

The Russians waited for a new vocal encounter with our distant neighbors to repeat before announcing the news, but that did not happen. Therefore, after Claudio Maccone from the University of Turin, an Italian astronomer who was shown the results of ‘eavesdropping’ on space in Moscow, told everything to Paul Gilster, a writer of science fiction texts about space, and he published the story on his blog Glister, they denied having heard an extraterrestrial civilization. They announced that their Ratan-600 telescope had captured a signal from the depths of space, but later analyses showed that it was most likely an echo from Earth.

If a Type II civilization signal had indeed been discovered (according to the Kardashev scale, there are three types, each subsequent level indicating a more advanced civilization), it would mean that it is more advanced than ours. According to Kardashev, Earth is a Type I. The scale is based on the theory that the technological advancement of a civilization is measured by energy consumption and the degree of colonization of space. A Type I civilization has utilized the capacity of its own planet, Type II governs its star system, and Type III is an energy exploiter of the entire galaxy. And it is precisely in this assumption, many astronomers claim, that the answer to the question of whether other civilizations exist lies. If there is another civilization, especially Type III, its high energy consumption would create a large amount of waste heat, revealing itself. However, astronomers have so far ‘scanned’ several hundred galaxies but have not found new civilizations.

Nevertheless, some scientists, like Michael Garrett from the Dutch Institute for Radio Astronomy Astron, claim that there are many civilizations in the universe, but that Earthlings will never encounter intelligent life from other planets. – The Milky Way galaxy has three thousand civilizations, but I do not believe we will meet them – Garrett said at the Astronomers’ Congress in Toronto. He also stated that, according to NASA data and some other space research institutes, Earth is just one of as many as 40 billion potentially habitable planets in its galaxy. In his opinion, these civilizations are at least a thousand light-years apart, which makes any communication between them, as well as between them and Earth, impossible. Garrett also claims that a Type III civilization most likely does not exist, and that Earth in development has not yet reached even the first level. It will revolve around the Sun for another century or two before it fully masters nuclear fusion and solar energy and reaches Type I level.

Even if a Type III civilization exists, at the highest level of development, it may be very energy efficient and not produce large amounts of waste energy, which so far, due to limited knowledge of physics, scientists are unable to recognize or investigate. Garrett is not in agreement with Seth Shostak, director of the American astronomical institute SETI, who claims that we will communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations within the next two decades thanks to new digital technologies and powerful computers.