Scientists at the California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA and Santiago High School have identified the most probable habitat of alien civilizations in the Milky Way. The researchers took into account such a factor as the self-destruction of intelligent beings. This is reported in an article published in the arXiv.org preprint repository.
To assess the prevalence and age of alien civilizations, experts used a galactic simulation model, which takes into account the probability of abiogenesis (the emergence of living nature from inanimate), the rate of evolutionary changes, and the likelihood of the death of a civilization. It turned out that the last parameter has the greatest impact on the number of intelligent civilizations and their age.
According to the simulation results, the largest number of possible alien civilizations inhabits the ring region located four thousand parsecs (one parsec equals 3.2 light years) from the center of the Milky Way. At the same time, more and more civilizations disappear over time, but the inner regions of the Milky Way remain the most densely populated. In addition, most intelligent life forms are young, making them difficult to detect.
The distance from the center of the galaxy to the Sun is 8.5 thousand parsecs.