E.T. Counter:
Berechnet die Anzahl außerirdischer Zivilisationen.

E.T. Counter
Freeware


33 KB

E.T. Counter wendet sich an Hobby-Astronomen, Science-Fiction-Fans und alle naturwissenschaftlich Interessierten. Berechnet wird u. a. die Anzahl der in unserer Galaxis existierenden fortgeschrittenen Zivilisationen. Dabei werden Ihre eigenen Spezifikationen und Annahmen zugrundegelegt. Die Vorgehensweise ist inspiriert von Isaac Asimov und der Green-Bank-Formel.

Sie sind herzlich eingeladen, Ihre persönlichen Programm-Einstellungen für zukünftige Versionen zur Verfügung zu stellen. Schicken Sie sie bitte per E-Mail.

E.T. Counter ist Teil der c't Shareware-Kollektion 2/99. - Lesen Sie die Rezension der c't oder die der ZDNet Software-Library.

Enrico Fermi, Italian Nobel Physicist who built the first self-sustaining chain reaction in the old stadium at the University of Chicago, used to have his graduate students over. He was famous for “Fermi questions” which you could answer without looking up data, such as “how many hairs on a human head”. [...]

The most famous Fermi question was “Where are they?”

Assume a number of stars in the galaxy, a low number that have planets, of those habitable, of those older than Earth, of those a probability of life which can be very low, of those how many have a million years of civilization longer than we have.. etc. You still get a large number, so where are they? Speculation has ranged from “they’re here and we’re them” to “they’re all happy with virtual reality and don’t travel any more” to Sagan’s “they bombed themselves dead.”

Nearly everybody has heard about the enormous dimensions of the universe and its countless stars. The idea was born that it is highly likely that we are not alone, that earth is not the only inhabited planet and that humanity is not the only advanced (?) civilization. Large projects such as SETI have been undertaken in order to make contact to extraterrestrial beings, without success until now. Some of us assume that aliens already have visited earth or still visit it, but the final proof is missing.

E.T. Counter can help us to evaluate the aforementioned assumptions.

Life could be a unique precious gift to the solar system, but it is also conceivable that the galaxy is teeming with life. Lacking a possibility to travel faster than light, how likely is it that we are visited by aliens in view of astronomical distances? How likely is it that we will receive signals from extraterrestrial intelligences, let alone establish a bidirectional contact? How likely is it that we will find an earth-like planet around a nearby star and we will be able to colonize it in the future?

E.T. Counter gives us an idea and offers to experiment with different assumptions.