14 DAY TRIAL // In a new study, a team of experts proposes that the elimination of life-centric biases in our way of thinking about the prospective existence of alien civilizations could result in a lowering of our expectations to find it. The work is supported by an analysis of the famous Drake equation.
This equation seeks to determine the number of worlds in the Universe where intelligent life is likely to have evolved. The value it returns is the number of planets that are likely to support advanced civilizations.
It was created in 1960 by University of California in Santa Cruz (UCSC) scientist Frank Drake. The equation features a large number of variables, some of which are mere guesses. The new study takes a harsh look at the calculations.
Investigators David Spiegel (Princeton University) and Edwin Turner at the (University of Tokyo) say that the entire set of calculations is biased by our own perception about how life evolved here on Earth.
The experts are proponents of Bayesian reasoning, which opposes the type of thinking set forth by Drake equation. They believe that the emergence of life on Earth is an evidence of the fact that life is generally rare in the Cosmos.
One of the main tenants of this type of reasoning is the fact that people’s brain are hardwired to make things appear more likely to occur than they actually are. Psychological studies have demonstrated this several times over.
According to the team, people oftentimes forget that life needed 3.5 billion years of evolution to create intelligent life, and that it was nearly stopped dead in its tracks about 5 times in the past, Technology Review reports.
“In other words, if evolution requires 3.5 Gyr for life to evolve from the simplest forms to sentient, questioning beings, then we had to find ourselves on a planet on which life arose relatively early, regardless of the value of [the probability of life developing in a unit time],” the team explains.
We tend to take our very existence as proof that life is common in the Universe, but the new study shows the mathematical evidence for a neural flaw that we have. The tendency to give things more value than they actually have is a product of evolution.