New research challenges the idea life beyond Earth is possible

Recent research reveals that our universe might not be the most conducive environment for the emergence of intelligent life —beings with the cognitive abilities to create advanced societies and communicate in sophisticated ways.

In the 1960s, American astronomer Dr Frank Drake developed an equation to estimate the number of detectable intelligent civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy.

Decades later, astrophysicists from Durham University, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the Universite de Geneve, have advanced this approach. Instead of focusing on our galaxy alone, they considered how the universe's accelerating expansion and the corresponding star formation rates might influence life.

“The research seeks to connect the dark energy abundance with the emergence of intelligent life in a universe—anywhere, and at any time,” says Dr Daniele Sorini, the lead researcher of the study from Durham University.

He further elaborates that their work can be seen as ‘a sort of thought experiment to investigate how the universe would look like if its basic constituents were different.’

Their investigation focuses on a mysterious component called dark energy, which is believed to drive the universe’s expansion and accounts for over two-thirds of its makeup.

Dark energy

Dark energy—a force that causes the universe to expand faster—remains one of the biggest mysteries in science, according to the lead researcher of the project, Dr Sorini.

The researchers wanted to understand how different amounts of dark energy could impact the formation of stars throughout the universe's history, because more stars could increase the chances for life to emerge.

“In particular, we study the amount of stars that would be formed over the entire history of the universe (past and future) if the abundance of dark energy were different. We then link the formation of stars to the emergence of intelligent life,” Dr Sorini tells TRT World.

Their model shows that universes with more dark energy densities could be more efficient at forming stars. In our universe, only about 23 percent of ordinary matter becomes stars, but this efficiency could rise to 27 percent in universes with more dark energy.

To explore this idea, the team examined a wide range of hypothetical universes, from those with no dark energy to those with up to 100,000 times more than our own. Despite finding that some universes might be more favorable for life, they were struck by how close our universe’s dark energy value is to the one that maximizes star formation.​

“Even a significantly higher dark energy density would still be compatible with life, suggesting we may not live in the most likely of universes,” Dr Sorini states, hinting that our universe may not be the most ideal environment for intelligent life that is similar to or beyond the capabilities of human beings to emerge​.

This finding challenges the long-held assumption that our universe’s characteristics are finely tuned for intelligent life and raises questions about whether more favorable universes exist within a multiverse.

“Our conclusion is that, under the assumptions of our model, even universes with very different dark energy contents may still support the emergence of intelligent life such as ours. If the multiverse does exist, this suggests that we may not live in the most likely of the universes: if we pick a random observer in the multiverse, they will generally measure a larger abundance of dark energy than what is observed in our Universe,” Dr Sorini adds, emphasizing that our universe could be an exception rather than the norm.

Otherwise, he suggests that if the multiverse does not exist, our Universe would be an exceptionally rare and unusual occurrence among all the possible universes that could have existed.

Professor Lucas Lombriser from the Universite de Geneve points out that exploring these ideas could change how we think about our place in the cosmos.

“It will be exciting to employ the model to explore the emergence of life across different universes and see whether some fundamental questions we ask ourselves about our own Universe must be reinterpreted,” he says, pointing to the broader implications of this research.