The role of the galactocentric distance of a civilization on its chance of contacting other intelligent civilizations
The number of intelligent civilizations in the Galaxy is one of the most important unanswered questions in modern science. A related problem is to assess the chance of contacts among locations with communication capability, assuming they exist. Here we present a model for a communication network tha...
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| Autores principales: | , , |
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| Formato: | Articulo |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
2021
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/177586 |
| Aporte de: |
| Sumario: | The number of intelligent civilizations in the Galaxy is one of the most important unanswered questions in modern science. A related problem is to assess the chance of contacts among locations with communication capability, assuming they exist. Here we present a model for a communication network that allows to estimate the probabilities of causal contacts constrained to a maximum separation between the nodes in the network. The model has three parameters, which we argue comprise the minimum number of assumptions about the statistical properties of the distribution of intelligence in the Galaxy, considering the time variable as a key factor. We make no assumptions about the origin of life or any other factor in the Drake equation, except for the mean lifetime of a node. The model also considers the maximum distance a signal can be detected and the density of active nodes in time, and assumes statistical patterns that are observed in a plethora of phenomena in nature. We analyze many numerical Monte Carlo simulations of the model through a discrete events implementation. The simulation suite allows to estimate probabilities of contacts, the distributions of the waiting times for the first contact and the distributions of the number of contacts as a function of the model parameters, among other quantities. We find that a node has a low probability, for an observing time of some decades, to make contacts to other nodes in the network, except for models that resemble a densely populated Galaxy with longstanding civilizations. The probability of contacts slowly decreases towards to outer region of the Galaxy. |
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