A new empirical constraint on the prevalence of technological species in the Universe

Are humans unique and alone in the vast universe? This question—summed up in the famous Drake equation—has for a half-century been one of the most intractable and uncertain in science.
But a new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets combined with a broader approach to the question makes it possible to assign a new empirically valid probability to whether any other advanced technological civilizations have ever existed.
And it shows that unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet are astonishingly low, then human kind is not the universe's first technological, or advanced, civilization.
The paper also shows for the first time just what "pessimism" or "optimism" mean when it comes to estimating the likelihood of advanced extraterrestrial life.

http://phys.org/news/2016-04-limits-uniqueness.html

Paper: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2015.1418

 

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Hard to decide if the Drake 'equation' and refined successors, or the odds of 'being in a computer simulated universe' as per http://www.sciforums.com/threads/is-universe-a-simulation.156153/
qualifies as the more speculative and unprovable conjecture. Well, unless SETI get's incredibly lucky - and a reasonably nearby, crazed alien civilization really has wasted an enormous amount of effort and resources pouring radio waves out into space.

 

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