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Advanced Civilizations Probably Don't Exist In Our Galactic Neighborhood
schwit1 writes: New observations of the best candidate galaxies now suggest that advanced civilizations are very rare or don't exist in the local universe. Researchers looked at several hundred nearby galaxies that emitted a high amount of mid-infrared radiation (abstract), which could possibly be produced as the waste heat from civilizations using energy on galactic scales.
They found: "The presence of radio emission at the levels expected from the correlation, suggests that the mid-IR emission is not heat from alien factories but more likely emission from dust — for example, dust generated and heated by regions of massive star formation. As Professor Garrett explains: 'the original research at Penn State has already told us that such systems are very rare but the new analysis suggests that this is probably an understatement, and that advanced Kardashev Type III civilizations basically don't exist in the local Universe.'"
Obviously, the uncertainty of these results is quite high. Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume.
They found: "The presence of radio emission at the levels expected from the correlation, suggests that the mid-IR emission is not heat from alien factories but more likely emission from dust — for example, dust generated and heated by regions of massive star formation. As Professor Garrett explains: 'the original research at Penn State has already told us that such systems are very rare but the new analysis suggests that this is probably an understatement, and that advanced Kardashev Type III civilizations basically don't exist in the local Universe.'"
Obviously, the uncertainty of these results is quite high. Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
Perhaps intelligent civilization will originate from Earth and spread across the Universe. Everything has a beginning.