https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2020/06/15/there-are-36-intelligent-alien-civilizations-in-our-galaxy-say-scientists/

It’s the oldest and the greatest cosmic question of all: is there anybody out there?

For years all we’ve had is the Drake Equation to help us understand the question, but no indication of an answer. Now a group of scientists at the University of Nottingham think they’ve come up with a new “cosmic evolution”-based calculation that says that there are likely to be at least 36 ongoing intelligent civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy.

The Milky Way, home to our Solar System, is estimated to have 100 billion to 400 billion stars, and roughly one exoplanet per star in our galaxy.

Published today in The Astrophysical Journal, the new paper examines the likely number of Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent (CETI) civilizations in the Milky Way. It assumes that intelligent life comes to occur on other planets much as it has done on our own planet.

A key assumption is that it takes around five billion years for intelligent life to form on other planets, as it does on Earth. Another is that a technological civilization will last at least 100 years—as ours has, thus far. After all, it took 4.5 billion years of evolution before a technological civilization arose on Earth, and was capable of communicating.

The number of civilizations depends strongly on how long they are actively sending out signals of their existence into space—such as radio transmissions from satellites and TV.

The calculation—which says that there could be 36 active communicating intelligent civilizations in our home galaxy—is called the “Astrobiological Copernican Limit” by the researchers.

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