4 Malicious Alien Civilizations Could Exist in Our Galaxy, Scientist Claims

4 Malicious Alien Civilizations Could Exist in Our Galaxy, Scientist Claims

Thankfully, the chances of them invading Earth are less likely than an asteroid wiping us out.

Thankfully, the likelihood of a malicious alien civilization is vanishingly small, a scientist has found. Phew!

There may be as many as 4.42 in our vast galaxy, but just 0.22 could travel to us.

This research builds a cumulative math model that considers many factors.

Most people agree that we should be monitoring the airwaves, so to speak, to search for other civilizations in the universe—but people strongly disagree about whether we should send our own messages out there. If a civilization is malicious, do we want them to know we’re out here? Are we waving hello to our own executioners?

In a new preprint paper published to the arXiv server in May (meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed), researcher Alberto Caballero, a Ph.D. student at the University of Vigo in Spain, explores a really thorny issue within the community of people who work with SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. SETI’s main job is to listen to the swirling miasma of space in case we ever detect signs of life elsewhere or even receive a broadcast sent by another civilization.

“Active SETI (Active Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), sometimes referred to as METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), is a form of SETI that has been barely practiced since the first interstellar radio message, the Arecibo Message, was sent in 1974 to the globular star cluster M13,” Caballero explains in the paper. Active SETI remains a sore subject because detractors believe we’re drawing attention to ourselves from totally unknown, possibly malicious aliens.

A lot is at play when it comes to the search for aliens in general. The Fermi Paradox is an idea that best sums it up: how can there be infinite planets in our universe with a nonzero possibility of life, but we’ve never seen so much as a glimpse or a whisper of another civilization anywhere? But, of course, that assumes the other civilization will be advanced enough to communicate or travel in space. There could be infinite planets with life forms that are still in the “gloopy pond scum” stage, just starting to develop photo-reactive eye cells, for instance. It may be a billion years before they start walking upright and tweeting reaction gifs.

To estimate the likelihood of an invading nearby civilization, Caballero starts with an interesting premise: how likely are we to invade another civilization that we discover? To calculate that, he compiles the staggering number of times Earth nations have invaded each other as acts of war. This, he says, is a new methodology for calculating the likelihood of a malicious alien civilization.