The Drake equation famously asked where are all the aliens given the number of worlds we've found since the first exoplanet was found in 1992. Since then we've found something of the order of 4000 other worlds. But I often wonder where we are looking for those alien civilizations.
If we're looking towards the center of the galaxy, a reasonable choice given that where the stars are located, we're more than likely to find more planets there and thus more potential places for those civilizations to flourish, but the big problem with the density of stars is the possibility of supernova and other cosmic weather, in the form of various radiation. Our planet has it's ozone layer to protect us from the sun's radiation. And given the billions of years it's taken for our ecosystem to evolve to the point where it can sustain us, one supernova would set the earth's ecosystem back to the beginning (probably), stripping out the ozone layer, removing our atmosphere, destroying all the bacteria and plankton, because a supernova close enough to us probably would make all our water evaporate too.
We know fungus loves a good radiation bath, but can fungus evolve into a civilization that can traverse space? Funghi spores probably can survive space, but we are talking about an essentially cooperative species which cooperated sufficiently to produce spacecraft, develop the engineering to allow the spacecraft to function, the science to allow it to traverse space, an education system to support the training of the crew, the technicians that constructed the spacecraft and the scientists to develop the technology to create it in the first place. And no doubt they needed farmers to produce the food to fed all those people in the first place, just like we have.
Even if they have advanced education, farming, engineering... they still need 'entities' aka 'people' to curate, manufacture and maintain those systems.
Tardigrades and fungi might survive space but it's because their species evolved to the point to allow them to do so. And while we look for living tardigrades, fungi and bacteria on other planets, comets and asteroids in our solarsystem, what the drake equation is really about is finding civilizations like ours.
So if we have our telescopes pointing to the interior of our galaxy or more densely populated parts of the galaxy, we should really have them pointed towards the outer edges of milky way instead, because it takes billions of years to construct an ecosystem that will sustain us, and one badly placed supernova will set our planet back to the beginning.
If we're looking towards the center of the galaxy, a reasonable choice given that where the stars are located, we're more than likely to find more planets there and thus more potential places for those civilizations to flourish, but the big problem with the density of stars is the possibility of supernova and other cosmic weather, in the form of various radiation. Our planet has it's ozone layer to protect us from the sun's radiation. And given the billions of years it's taken for our ecosystem to evolve to the point where it can sustain us, one supernova would set the earth's ecosystem back to the beginning (probably), stripping out the ozone layer, removing our atmosphere, destroying all the bacteria and plankton, because a supernova close enough to us probably would make all our water evaporate too.
We know fungus loves a good radiation bath, but can fungus evolve into a civilization that can traverse space? Funghi spores probably can survive space, but we are talking about an essentially cooperative species which cooperated sufficiently to produce spacecraft, develop the engineering to allow the spacecraft to function, the science to allow it to traverse space, an education system to support the training of the crew, the technicians that constructed the spacecraft and the scientists to develop the technology to create it in the first place. And no doubt they needed farmers to produce the food to fed all those people in the first place, just like we have.
Even if they have advanced education, farming, engineering... they still need 'entities' aka 'people' to curate, manufacture and maintain those systems.
Tardigrades and fungi might survive space but it's because their species evolved to the point to allow them to do so. And while we look for living tardigrades, fungi and bacteria on other planets, comets and asteroids in our solarsystem, what the drake equation is really about is finding civilizations like ours.
So if we have our telescopes pointing to the interior of our galaxy or more densely populated parts of the galaxy, we should really have them pointed towards the outer edges of milky way instead, because it takes billions of years to construct an ecosystem that will sustain us, and one badly placed supernova will set our planet back to the beginning.
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