Could 4 extraterrestrial civilizations lurk in the Milky Way and attack us?

The Milky Way is home to millions of potentially habitable planets, and about four of them could harbor extraterrestrial civilizations that would colonize Earth if they could, new research says. .

The study's author, Alberto Caballero, a doctoral student in conflict resolution at the University of Vigo in Spain, began by looking back at human history before looking at the stars.

"This paper attempts to provide an estimate of the prevalence of hostile extraterrestrial civilizations through extrapolation of the probability that we, as human civilizations, will attack or invade an inhabited alien planet," Caballero wrote in the study.

Description of extraterrestrial spacecraft in contact with our planet.

Caballero is no astrophysicist, but he has published a study of the Wow signal - a potential sign of extraterrestrial life - in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Astrobiology.

To arrive at his estimate, Caballero first counted the number of countries that had invaded other countries between 1915 and 2022. He discovered that there were a total of 51 out of 195 countries. Countries around the world have waged some form of aggression during that period. The US tops the list, with 14 invasions counted at the time.

From there, Caballero added each nation's individual probability of instigating an invasion, then divided the sum by the total number of countries on Earth, ending up with what he described as the current probabilities of humans. humans in invading an extraterrestrial civilization.

According to this model, the current rate of humans entering another inhabited planet is 0.028%. However, Caballero wrote, that probability refers to the current state of human civilization - and that humans are currently incapable of interstellar travel.

If the current rate of technological progress holds, interstellar travel will not be possible for another 259 years, Caballero said.

Assuming the frequency of human invasions continues to decline during that time at the same rate as invasions have decreased over the past 50 years, then humanity has a 0.0014% probability of invading another planet when they do. We are likely to become an interstellar civilization about 259 years from now.

Caballero concluded that the number of evil neighbors increased to 4.42 when taking into account civilizations that, like modern humans, were not yet capable of interstellar travel.

The four extraterrestrial planets are not of great concern because the probability that humans could come into contact with one of these toxic civilizations - and subsequently be colonized by them - is very small.

He adds that killer asteroids, like the one that caused the dinosaur genocide, are a 1 in 100 million year event.