Geologists, often mocked by the fictional physics Nobel Laureate Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory believe the presence of oceans, continents and plate tectonics on Earth is the most likely reason why there is no evidence of advanced extraterrestrial civilisations, according to new research by University of Texas …

Are continents based on tectonic plates?

Continents and tectonic plates are related because the continents sit on top of tectonic plates. The entire crust is made up of these plates, and they are divided into two types: continental plates that are located underneath land masses, and oceanic plates that are located underneath the oceans.

How are oceans formed by plate tectonics?

Answer and Explanation: Oceans are formed when tectonic plates move apart at their divergent boundary, causing crustal extension. This spreading of the earth’s crust mostly takes place along the faults (breaks or fissures) on the lithospheric crust

How do scientists think the oceans formed?

Over vast periods of time, our primitive ocean formed. Water remained a gas until the Earth cooled below 212 degrees Fahrenheit . At this time, about 3.8 billion years ago, the water condensed into rain which filled the basins that we now know as our world ocean

Science has most of the answers, but it doesn’t have one for how life began or why it exists on earth and nowhere else. Why haven’t we run into anyone else so far? So far, the search for extra-terrestrial life has been a Sisyphean task but finally, one group of scientists might have the answer: geoscientists

Geologists, often mocked by the fictional physics Nobel Laureate Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory believe the presence of oceans, continents and plate tectonics on Earth is the most likely reason why there is no evidence of advanced extraterrestrial civilisations, according to new research by University of Texas at Dallas and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. 

Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the paper explores the lack of “active communicative civilisations (ACC)” and suggest that a change to the infamous Drake Equation.

The Drake Equation is a formula which astronomers use to estimate the number of intelligent civilisations in our galaxy capable of communicating with humans. However, we haven’t found any evidence to support this, a mystery known as the Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life existing in the universe and the lack of evidence or contact with such civilizations. Named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked, “Where is everybody?” during a casual conversation in 1950, the paradox highlights the discrepancy between the expectation that the universe should be teeming with life and the reality that we have not observed any signs of it.

The paper believes that they have resolved the issue of the Fermi Paradox with the type of tectonic activity on planets, which affects biological evolution. There’s evidence that a shift from simple tectonics to modern plate tectonics happened between 1.0 to 0.541 billion years ago, speeding up the development of complex life on Earth

We also believe that both continents and oceans are necessary for intelligent civilizations. Early life needs water, but advanced life that can create technology needs land

These factors are very small, which means it’s rare for planets to have the right conditions for intelligent civilizations. This scarcity might explain why we haven’t found any evidence of them

IN A dark and seemingly barren universe, our pale blue dot of a world is a beacon of hope that life is possible. The confluence of factors that help sustain life here are astonishing: from the planet’s rocky crust, broken into tectonic plates that help maintain a breathable atmosphere by releasing and trapping gases, to its distance from the sun. Earth orbits at the inner edge of a Goldilocks region called the habitable zone: a narrow ring that is neither too hot nor too cold to allow liquid water to exist. Every living thing we know of, from a bacterium to a blue whale, needs water to survive.

Given this, it is no surprise that our efforts to find life elsewhere have focused on spotting a carbon copy of our world. Frustratingly, these seem to be few and far between. Of the thousands of exoplanets discovered to date, only a handful are thought to have conditions remotely like ours. Most orbit either scorchingly close to their host star or keep a frosty distance. Others move in loops around two stars, circle long-dead suns or wander the cosmos alone, without the benefit of stellar heat at all. Life on such planets would once have been considered impossible – but that view is changing.

Recent research suggests that these weird and wonderful worlds could be capable of sustaining life after all. It is time to tear up the rulebook and go on an incredible interplanetary journey.

The search for life elsewhere in the Universe seems to be omnipresent, but the truth is that we haven’t found it because we almost haven’t looked for it yet.

Humans are a multicellular type of organisms that live on the surface of a planet near enough their star to have liquid oceans. Our system doesn’t have other similar worlds. Such worlds might be rare in the Universe. Even if they weren’t that rare, at this stage of the technological development of our instruments for detecting them and finding more about them, we wouldn’t know their true nature from distances involving many light-years.

We found life on Earth in bizarre and inhospitable locations, kilometers below the ocean floor and elsewhere in the lithosphere. Some can survive temperatures of up to 120 C/248 F., And all we did when it comes to looking for life on other planets is to send rovers to Mars equipped with relatively simple instruments for detecting life. We also sent some landers to other worlds, and no apparent organisms were running around or flying anywhere, but this is to be expected. Earth is 4.5 billion years old; for the first 3.5 billion years, there was no life on Earth’s continents either. However, the signatures of their metabolism would be detectable on Earth even from a distance already for a long time. There are no as hospitable to complex life other planets or moons in our system.

We can still find at least some microbial life if we look for it, as we haven’t so far that much. We have subsurface oceans on many moons of gas giants and even on dwarf planets like Ceres. Given that microbes can be found deep in the lithosphere of Earth, maybe we will even find them in lithospheres of other worlds in our system too. If it comes to exoplanets, it will be much more difficult, and we won’t be able to detect life directly on them anytime soon. We might find some indirect signatures, like the unusual composition of their atmosphere at most, but we only just started to look for anything at all.

By some estimates, the Milky Way Galaxy could be 150 to 200 thousand light years across. However, the usual estimate supported by most scientists is that the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across.

To put that in perspective, in 1901 Marconi demonstrated wireless telegraphy across the Atlantic Ocean, emitting the first deliberate radio waves from humans on Earth. Since then, we have sent radio signals, television broadcasts, nuclear detonations, satellite transmissions, and internet data outward at the speed of light. However, as these signals travel away from Earth, they weaken considerably, and by the time they reach 120 light years from us, they are likely too weak to be detected from background radiation. Each time a radio signal doubles its distance from Earth, it gets four times weaker.

It’s important to note that while our signals may weaken over vast distances, they don’t simply disappear. They continue to travel outward, albeit at a much lower signal-to-noise ratio, and could potentially be detected by an advanced civilization with sensitive enough equipment. To assume that aliens haven’t found us yet and never will is speculative and not based on scientific evidence.

Looking at the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, it’s clear that the distance our signals have traveled is relatively small in comparison. The bottom image, which shows how far our signals have reached, greatly exaggerates the actual distance. In reality, the signals would only cover a pixel-sized portion of the galaxy.

Our current understanding and technology is limited when it comes to detecting and communicating with extraterrestrial life. While we may not have found any evidence of alien life yet, it’s always possible that we will in the future.

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