According to new research posted to the preprint database arXiv (opens in new tab), the Milky Way is home to millions of potentially habitable planets, and at least four of them may harbor evil alien civilization that would invade Earth if they could.
The new paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, poses a peculiar question: What are the odds that humans could one day contact a hostile alien civilization?
To answer this, the sole study author started by looking back at human history before looking out to the stars.
The paper attempts to provide an estimation of the prevalence of hostile extraterrestrial civilizations through an extrapolation of the probability that we would attack or invade an inhabited exoplanet.
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He counted the number of countries that invaded other countries. Of the 195 nations, 51 launched some sort of invasion during that time. The US had 14 invasions in that time. Each country's probability of launching an invasion was weighted by the percentage of global military expenditures. The U.S. came top in military spending.
The current human probability of invasion of an extraterrestrial civilization was divided by the total number of countries on Earth.
The current odds of humans invading another planet are 0.028 according to this model. The current state of human civilization is referred to by the probability as well. The Kardashev scale is used to calculate how advanced a civilization is based on its energy expenditure.
The human race has a small chance of invading another planet if the frequencies of human invasions continue to decline over that time.
It's not very likely, but it is possible, until you add up the millions of potentially habitable planets in the universe. According to a 2012 paper published in the journal Mathematical SETI, as many as 15,785 alien civilizations could potentially share the universe with humans.
Less than one of the type 1 civilizations would be hostile towards humans who make contact. The number of malicious neighbors increases to 4.42 when accounting for the fact that modern humans are not yet capable of traveling through the stars.
Since we don't have the technology to travel to other planets, a civilization like us wouldn't pose a threat to another one.
It doesn't seem like much to worry about. The likelihood that humans will be invaded by one of these malicious civilizations is vanishingly small.
Around two orders of magnitude lower than the likelihood of a planet-killer asteroid collision, he wrote in his paper.
The author admits that his model has limitations. The invasion probability is based on a very small slice of human history, and it makes a lot of assumptions about the future development of our species. According to Vice, the model presumes that alien intelligence will have brain compositions, values and senses similar to humans, which may be incorrect.
He said that he did the paper only on life. We don't know what aliens think.
It will be a few hundred more years until we do.
It was originally published on Live Science
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