The Impact of the Temporal Distribution of Communicating Civilizations on their Detectability

Abstract

We use a statistical model to investigate the detectability (defined by the requirement that they are in causal contact with us) of communicating civilizations within a volume of the universe surrounding our location. If the civilizations are located in our Galaxy, the detectability requirement imposes a strict constraint on their epoch of appearance and their communicating lifespan. This, in turn, implies that the fraction of civilizations of which we can find any empirical evidence strongly depends on the specific features of their temporal distribution. Our approach shed light on aspects of the problem that can escape the standard treatment based on the Drake equation. Therefore, it might provide the appropriate framework for future studies dealing with the evolutionary aspects of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

17 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in Astrobiology

References in corpus (6)

• Exploring Exoplanet Populations with NASA's Kepler Mission
• A Catalog of Kepler Habitable Zone Exoplanet Candidates
• Relative Likelihood for Life as a Function of Cosmic Time
• Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails
• On the abundance of extraterrestrial life after the Kepler mission
• The habitability of the Universe through 13 billion years of cosmic time

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Longevity is the key factor in the search for technosignatures
• Demography of galactic technosignatures
• Technosignatures longevity and Lindy's law
• Undetected past contacts with technological species: implications for technosignature science