British scientists believe that human civilization cannot achieve interstellar travel until it collapses?

The earth under human feet is just a trivial grain of sand in the universe, and even the solar system where the earth is located is not an advanced existence in the universe, because there are as many as 400 billion stars in the Milky Way alone, and each star is the sun with at least one planetary world.

Astronomers estimate that there are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the Hubble volume with a diameter of 93 billion light years, and the Milky Way is only one-third of 2 trillion.

Since there are so many galaxies, stars and planets in the universe, why haven't humans discovered other intelligent civilizations in the universe until today?

According to Fermi's paradox, there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way. Even if the space speed of alien civilization is only one percent of the speed of light, it is enough for them to travel through the Milky Way in 654.38+ million years, enough to discover and meet human civilization, because 654.38+ million years is just a flick of a finger on the cosmic scale.

However, the fact is that the Milky Way is quiet and the universe is quiet, not to mention the alien civilization that roams the universe. Even single-celled life on the early earth has not been found, and astronomers have not found any traces of life and civilization on the moon, Mars or more distant terrestrial planets.

196 1 year, astronomer drake created a formula to calculate the number of alien civilizations in the milky way according to the formation rate of stars in the milky way, the proportion of stars owning planets and the proportion of planets appearing life and developing into civilizations. As a result of this formula, there are at least 1000 advanced intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, all of which have the ability to discover and connect human civilizations.

As for why they didn't come to the earth, it was actually because of the limitation of light speed and the short existence of human civilization itself.

In the case that the upper limit of information transmission speed in the universe is the speed of light, the solar system in the suburbs of the Milky Way is at least 22,000 light years away from the center of the Milky Way with dense stars, which means that even if an alien civilization drives a light-speed spacecraft, it will take 22,000 years to reach the solar system. If alien civilizations happen to be located at the other end of the Milky Way, then the diameter of the Milky Way is1.8000 light-years, which is a voyage they must go through.

Compared with the long voyage of 6.5438+0.8 million years, the history of human civilization is only about 1 10,000 years, the history of science and technology is only 300 years, and the history of exploring the universe on a large scale and leaving the earth is at most 50 years.

It is not difficult to see that it is unrealistic to expect to meet other alien civilizations in the Milky Way within such a narrow time window.

To say the least, even in the 4.5 billion-year history of the earth, there have indeed been incidents in which alien civilizations came to the earth. When human civilization was far from emerging, other species on the earth could not be recorded, let alone have substantial exchanges with alien civilizations, because before human beings appeared, the earth was essentially a natural zoo.

The scientific community believes that this possibility is very small, because under the limitation of the speed of light, human civilization may not be able to achieve real interstellar travel until the day of collapse.

A recent study published in the Journal of Interface of the Royal Society proves that before the development of interstellar navigation technology, human civilization is likely to collapse due to population explosion.

Because the explosive population growth brought by technological progress will greatly increase energy consumption and aggravate the energy crisis, and the breakthrough of science and technology does not take population as the first factor, which means that the rapid population growth will only shorten the window period of technological explosion.

The final result is likely to be that the population of human civilization has overwhelmed the earth, leading to a narrower and narrower technological window. In the end, the whole human civilization developed the ability of large-scale interstellar navigation and disappeared from the universe because of the exhaustion of resources.

Judging from the curve of the current speed of technological progress and population growth, without considering the technological explosion, human beings will face the dilemma that the speed of technological innovation cannot keep up with the speed of population explosion in 10 thousand years at the earliest.

This is also the reason why Hawking has repeatedly encouraged human beings to leave the earth to build new homes, because the resources on the earth simply cannot support the consumption caused by the population explosion, and the Mars immigration development plan that Musk has been working on is also for human civilization in a sense. Find a way out ahead of time and not be wiped out on the earth.

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