Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2019

26 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019 ASTROBIOLOGY ently both incessantly and with a great vari- ety of different spaceships and, assumedly, crews. Whatever path you want to take to investigate the issue, an empirical approach is inevitable, but we will do our best to offer an objective point of view. Let us begin by evaluating how many tech- nological civilizations can exist simultane- ously with us in the Milky Way. A starting point to predicting this number based on some approximations is by the adoption of the Drake Equation, for which we will attrib- ute values to its variables as conservatively as possible. If we do not decide to deny the existence of extraterrestrial life a priori , we find that other technological civilizations could exist that can communicate using elec- tromagnetic radiation. Their number is prob- ably less than ten if we are particularly strict with the variables of the Drake Equation − and we must be strict if we want to give credibility to the evaluation. Given that we earthlings have dealt with telecommunications for only a very short time, it is likely that other extant technolog- ical civilizations are more advanced than us. They may be theoretically capable of per- forming interstellar journeys, but they are certainly capable of sending powerful sig- WE ’ RE NOT STAYING, WE ’ RE JUST NOT ALLOWED TO SMOKE ON THE SHIP WELL HELLOO, THERE ... ! WE ’ D LIKE TO TALK WITH YOU ABOUT THE KINGDOM OF GOD ... DAMN...