An astronomer says he’s identified the odds of intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe based on an analysis of both the likelihood of life developing quickly within a planet’s life cycle and the likelihood the life will be intelligent.
David Kipping leads, yes, the Cool Worlds Laboratory at Columbia University. In an explainer video (below), he describes some background for the question of intelligent life in the universe and concludes, “I’ve never been much for faith—I want an answer.”
Kipping mentions the changing trends over centuries of human imagination: Basically, as soon as people realized what they saw in the sky included other planets, they began to wonder if other planets had intelligent life. An underdeveloped instrument caused astronomers to see “manmade” canals on the surface of Mars during the 1800s.
So what’s an evidence-based researcher to do in the face of centuries of speculation and inadequate information? Turn to Bayesian analysis, a way of using what we do know to extrapolate what we don’t. And to do that, Kipping put Earth’s long history on a replay loop. (Here’s Kipping’s full, very formula-heavy study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
For the rest of the story, see Popular Mechanics here: