Are we the only intelligent creatures in the universe?

Lots of websites and articles have all had the same conclusion that at this point in time we don’t have enough technology to be sure if there is life inside our universe but there is for sure a chance.

The article written by Laurence Tognetti for the website called Astronomy explained how there have been many scientists that have searched the skies for radio signals for years and have been unsuccessful. If any intelligence exited before us anywhere out there we would have received some sort of signal or the would have found earth at this point. That doesn’t mean they have stopped searching though the search still continues. Scientists have two equations they are trying to answer, one is called Fermi Paradox, where they attempt to answer the question “Where is everybody”. Even if we where able to create the technology to be able to travel to other life we would not know where to look, “it would be like searching for a needle in a hay stack”(Sunil 2022).

The second equations is called “The Drake equation where they are trying to calculate the number of technological civilizations that might currently exist in the cosmos. The Drake equation has estimated the amount of potential intelligent life in the cosmos to be anywhere between one (us) and 1,000,000. An astrobiology senior undergraduate student in the Department of Aerospace, Physics, and Space Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology researches The Drake equation but still can not have a final answer “even with slim chances, our intelligent civilization exists, so there is the potential for others”(Edmonson 2022)

Yet the question remains: Are we alone?

The article Live Science is questioning that maybe there where intelligence years before life on earth and has since gone extinct. There is also the question that it was just by chance humans got so smart and there could be life on other planets just not intelligent like us “It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke” (Longrich 2019). Our evolution could have just been extremely rare almost less likely then winning the lottery. There is such a large amount of stars and planets out there suggesting that there could be lots of life out there perhaps not evolved like us.

In the article written by Dirk Schulze-Makuch explains the slight different approach from the drake equation by Adam Frank instead of estimating how much intelligence there could be out there today he is researching how much possible intelligence there has been since the beginning of the universe. “A big unknown in the original Drake Equation is the average lifetime of a civilization during which they might be available to communicate with us”(Frank 2016). The time period where there is a chance for communication with other life could be quite short because species could be replaced by machines but the time period could be longer but it is unknown. The question Frank continues to ask: “What is the chance that we are the only technological species and always have been?”

My conclusion to the question: Are we the only intelligent creatures in the universe? There is no evidence of intelligence anywhere else then earth but the chance of there being life out there just not found yet is so high. The unfortunate thing is we might have no way to answer the question because even if we do have technologies to be able to get to a planet with intelligent creatures on it we would never know where to look.

My 10 wonder questions

1. can life exist outside of the solar system
2. how will our universe end
3. what came before the Big Bang
4. What’s inside a black hole
5. Are we the only intelligent creatures in the universe.
6. how did the planets in our universe evolve
7.  How do we measure the size of the universe
8. What happened in the early universe
9. how can astronomy improve life on earth
10. are the laws of physics the same everywhere