Earth is pretty special, and as far as we know, the only place in the universe with life. But how special is it really? There are billions upon billions of planets in the Milky Way alone; shouldn’t life be common? Maybe, but even if life is common, how common are advanced civilizations? Some new work argues that the answer is: pretty rare. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The new research comes from Dr Manuel Scherf and Professor Helmut Lammer of the Space Research Institute at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz. They considered the composition of the atmosphere and the geology of a planet and came to a concerning realization. Statistically, there might be just a handful of civilizations in the galaxy. The closes

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