(CNN)– If you’ve ever studied astronomy or been interested in UFOs and extraterrestrial life, you’ve probably come across something called the Drake Equation.
One side of the equation asks how many civilizations in our galaxy it would be possible to communicate with. The other side gives all the variables that add up to that number, including the average rate of star formation, the approximate number of planets in those stars that have developed intelligent life, and the ability to target broadcast signals .
“Depending on how you calculate it, the answer could be zero or a billion,” said theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack, author of the brand new issue The End of It All (Astrophysically Speaking).
Astrophysicist Frank Drake, who formulated the equation in 1961, said it was actually a way to “show everything I needed to understand to predict how difficult it would be to detect extraterrestrial life “.
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Frank Drake speaks at a talk on the possibility of life on other planets at the Hierba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on October 7, 2015.
Mack put it bluntly: “The point of the equation is to show how little we know.”
If the numbers are difficult for professional scientists to calculate, it is even more difficult for us earthling mortals to make those predictions.
That’s where the imagination comes in. For generations, we’ve used our creative minds to guess whether aliens exist, what they might look like, and how we’ll greet them and ourselves, whether with a sign of peace or an x-ray gun.
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This image from the 2015 Defense Zone video, labeled Gimbal, shows an unexplained object in the center.
“It’s nice that as soon as we imagine aliens, they start to look a lot like us,” said Chris Impey, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.
“A few centuries ago, they arrived in Paradise in galleons. When zeppelins were invented, aliens flew in airships. After World War II, they arrived in flying saucers, the latest and greatest technology imaginable.”
Anthropomorphism, putting things that aren’t human into human form, is a constant. For starters, this also applies to the belief in extraterrestrial life forms.
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“It’s nice that as soon as we imagine aliens, they start to look a lot like us,” said Chris Impey, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.
“A few centuries ago, they arrived in Paradise in galleons. When zeppelins were invented, aliens flew in airships. After World War II, they arrived in flying saucers, the latest and greatest technology imaginable.”
Anthropomorphism, putting things that aren’t human into human form, is a constant. For starters, this also applies to the belief in extraterrestrial life forms.
Valid belief in extraterrestrial visitation
According to a 2018 Chapman University study, 41.4% of Americans believe aliens have visited Earth at some point, and 35.1% believe they have recently.
There are understandable reasons for such beliefs, Impey noted.
Some people have been convinced for decades that the US government has been keeping secrets from long-distance visitors since 1947, when they believe an alien spacecraft crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.
“When you know the family won’t tell you everything they know, start filling in the blanks yourself,” Impey said. “The videos, the stories of Air Force and Navy pilots who beat up a mysterious spacecraft, all of these things add up. It’s just the family connecting the dots too quickly.”
Scientists and many civilians buy into the saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
As a brand new CNN story has revealed, for years government and military officials have ignored UFO sightings reported by military and civilian pilots, mingled with the kind of extraordinary evidence that could corroborate extraterrestrial sincerity. The Pentagon, which classifies UFOs as unidentified aerial phenomena, has confirmed the authenticity of the videos and photos that accompany these reports.
However, before the all new erupted and continued forever, an elusive cone of silence was established around the whole UFO issue, at least as far as the US government and military were concerned.
Unprecedented discovery in an asteroid sample 0:35Fiction fills in the blanks 
While we wait for the science of UFOs and signs of extraterrestrial life, entertainment is filling in the blanks with movies like ET the Extraterrestrial.
Popular Civilization fills in the blanks, voicing UFOs and their otherworldly passengers in vehicles like Comic-Con, movies like Independence Day and ET the Extra-Terrestrial, and the classic TV series Star Trek in its daring pursuit of new life and new civilizations.
Additionally, there are a variety of conspiracy theories, some benign, some foreboding, with grim warnings of misappropriation and unwanted experimentation.
Impey called the UFO problem a “cultural, unstudied monstrosity”.
Nonetheless, he cited the late astronomer Carl Sagan’s call for all panelists to keep an open mind, “but not so open” as Sagan put it, that “their brains will drop.”
inquire about paradise
“The family always wondered if we were alone,” said Stephen Strom, former associate director of the Home Optical Astronomy Observatory.
The fact that popular principles are different from scientific principles does not invalidate our hope of finding life forms from other worlds.
After all, the question is not only whether we are alone, but whether other civilizations have taken better care of their planets than we of the earth.
So the question is “can so-called complex civilizations avoid self-destruction”, as Strom put it, and can we learn more about them before it’s too late? These are some of the most pressing questions we can ask ourselves today.
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Of course, most space scientists disagree that extraterrestrial life arrives on Earth via spacecraft in humanoid form. One of those who did, the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking, feared that if extraterrestrials came this way, they would probably be on a mission to destroy us.
That doesn’t mean space scientists aren’t serious about finding extraterrestrial life.
“Do we think there are aliens out there? Mack asked. We don’t know where, but it’s almost certain there are.
“It is very unlikely that life evolved in a work across the cosmos; the kind of physical processes that were supposed to happen on early Earth are probably things that happened countless times on distant worlds,” he added.
We are likely to learn more about other forms of life from rovers, spectrometers and the chemical examination of distant atmospheres, he added. If we do, word will spread quickly.
As Mack said, “Family positively wants to understand.”
– Gregory McNamee writes about books, science, food, cosmography and more from his home in Arizona.