[Return to Directory Listing]
Associate Professor, Mathematics
Phone: (239) 590-7178
E-Mail: firstname.lastname@example.orgOffice: AB7 207
Are we alone in this galaxy of hundreds of billions of suns? It's a question of the most profound significance and one that I have been trying to examine in a mathematically rigorous way. My recent research examines how advanced civilizations, if they exist at all, would spread themselves out in both time and space. For example, we know from the historic rate of star formation that the galaxy has been capable of producing planets with environments like ours for almost five billion years. This would strongly suggest that if we are not alone within the galaxy that many civilizations could have had an enormous head start. My computer simulations suggest the first intelligences to emerge could have had whole geologic epochs to explore every nook and cranny of the galaxy long before our emergence.
The pessimist might say this question is moot. That maybe all civilizations have finite life spans measured in thousands and not millions or billions of years because of resource depletion or self-annihilation...or that maybe they simply turn solipsistic. These scenarios, however, would imply a uniformity of motive among all civilizations across both light years of distance and mega years of time. It would take only a small subset of societies to abrogate this uniformity for it to break down, so it is not very likely to exist.
Therefore, if we are not alone in the galaxy, and our uniqueness is a distinct possibility, then intelligent life has evolved on numerous occasions in the distant past, has had tens of millions of years or more to migrate across the galaxy, and has intentionally left us alone each time. The staggering implications of this are what drive my research.
Recent Conference Presentations
Recent Media Articles
Florida Gulf Coast University
10501 FGCU Blvd, South
Fort Myers, FL 33965-6565
(239) 590-1000 or (800) 590-3428