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.

Comments

Evidence of the Great Filter?

[cunniff]

Planets are common. Planets within the habitable zone look like they are common. So, is this evidence of the Great Filter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ?

Re:Evidence of the Great Filter?

[kat_skan]

Even if it isn't rare, and human-like civilization also isn't rare, there's still no guarantee that we would have heard from them by now. Our own radio signals have only reached a tiny fraction of our galaxy, which is just one out of hundreds of billions. The Universe is just so stupefyingly, mind-blowingly enormous it's hard to say how common advanced civilizations are based on evidence from the scant few decades we've been listening for them.

Re:Evidence of the Great Filter?

[invid]

A good candidate for the filter is the ability to do math. Think about how few humans can even do calculus. We might discover the universe filled with semi-intelligent species with number systems with only 3 numbers: one, two, and many.