Longing for alien life? Forget the Milky Way

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/AP

So far, no aliens. Despite decades-long searches for life on other planets, no alien life has turned up. If you looking to meet aliens, you might do better to search in other universes. (The trouble is no one knows how to do that.) Here’s why we’re unlikely to find alien life in huge areas of our home galaxy.

In 2014, Tsvi Piran of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Raul Jimenez of the University of Barcelona argued in a research paper that there are many areas of the Milky Way that are hostile to the creation and evolution of life. Behind these great barren regions is gamma-burst radiation (GRB). A single GRB produces as much energy in a few seconds as a star like our sun produces in its entire lifetime. Such an immense burst of radiation would any life close by.

Here’s why we haven’t been destroyed, at least not lately. Our solar system orbits 24,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way, while a quarter of the galaxy’s stars and presumed planets are close to the centre. That’s where GRBs are much more common—a planet in that region would endure a 95 per cent chance of being hit by a GRB every billion years.

Since it took life on Earth several billion years to evolve to its current state of affairs, a giga-burst of radiation would knock back evolution on those planets, assuming life generally evolves at the same rate elsewhere. That means that, unless life elsewhere has found a quick way of evolving, if we ever do discover life on planets closer to the centre of the Milky Way, it might prove far less evolved than us. We may be the sole practitioners of advanced intelligence.

So if you want to find extraterrestrials, perhaps we should be looking more at how to make the leap from this universe to an alternative one. We don’t know how to do that yet, but the theory of membrane-enclosed universes bumping against one another like soap bubbles, may be the inspiration for future generations of clever explorers.

As usual, this blog is also in aid of promoting my new novel, Mayhem, which could can read for free on Wattpad or buy at Amazon's Kindle site. If you'd like a free sample for your Kindle, click here.