SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
"Alexander Berezin, a theoretical physicist at the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia, has proposed a new answer to Fermi's paradox — but he doesn't think you're going to like it. Because, if Berezin's hypothesis is correct, it could mean a future for humanity that's 'even worse than extinction.'
'What if,' Berezin wrote in a new paper posted March 27 to the preprint journal arxiv.org, 'the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?'" foxnews.com/science/2018/06/04/aliens-are-real-but-humans-will-probably-kill-them-all-new-paper-says.html
In other words, could humanity's quest to discover intelligent life be directly responsible for obliterating that life outright? What if we are, unwittingly, the universe's bad guys?
And if you are not sure what the Fermi paradox is then the link should help, and there is a long explanation of that one in the article.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:51PM (17 children)
The problem with this idea is that you're assuming that various metals are actually rare and valuable. On Earth, they are. In asteroids and elsewhere throughout the solar system, not so much.
Any alien race that just wants mineral resources can easily find it in their home systems and in countless unoccupied systems, in countless asteroids in those systems or even roaming the galaxy like the one that just went through our system.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:42PM (16 children)
True, but there's just isn't very much "stuff" in asteroids, etc. The entire asteroid belt is estimated to have a combined mass of only about 5% of our moon, which has a mass of a little over 1.2% of Earth. So if more than 0.06% of Earth is as resource rich as the asteroids, we're the richer target. There is the small problem of those resources being down in gravity well, but it's probably a safe get that any species capable of interstellar conquest could easily build efficient space elevators. Heck, we've designed several different styles that could be made with existing technology - there's just not enough demand for it to justify the expense. But realistically that expense is nothing compared to the global economy, and would vanish as a rounding error in the face of strip-mining a planet.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:14PM (15 children)
Sorry, no. The Earth has lots of mass, sure, but the crust is mostly just worthless silicates. All those nice minerals we use for interesting stuff came from asteroid strikes over the eons, which were recent enough that they haven't had enough time to migrate towards the core. The core is mostly iron, but accessing that isn't exactly easy. We still can't even drilled past the crust, though we've tried.
If you want valuable stuff like platinum, iridium, etc., and you're a space-faring civilization, your best bet is to look for asteroids that are composed of it, rather than looking for it on planets that have tectonic activity.
As for space elevators, we haven't worked out the technical challenges to make one on Earth. We haven't really synthesized and manufactured (in large quantity) materials capable of the tensile strength needed for that, plus there's other issues (like weather). Now if we wanted to make one on the Moon, that's entirely doable with conventional materials. Even easier on some dwarf planet or large asteroid like Ceres or Vesta. Even Mars is probably doable.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:18PM (9 children)
The crust... you mean the eggshell-thin layer of solidified "froth" around the outside of our mostly-molten planet? The Earth is made from the same stuff as the asteroids - because it was made *from* asteroids. It's just been subjected to billions of years of fluid dynamics based separation, such that most of the interesting stuff isn't on the surface - you have to go deeper.
Asteroids promise to be a rich deposit of valuable ores precisely because we lack the technology to mine the mantle and core of our planet (and because the "waste" ores like iron and water would themselves be valuable for space-based infrastructure) Assuming the same limits apply to a hypothetical species capable of crossing interstellar space to harvest the resources of another star is recklessly close-minded.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:36PM (6 children)
Maybe, but the point is, there's tons and tons of asteroids and planets and moons out there in other star systems, as well as tons of uninhabited rocks right here in ours. What are the chances that the aliens are going to skip over all the stuff in all the neighboring systems, and come straight for Earth? Once you have the ability to traverse star systems and harvest materials from various bodies, raw materials shouldn't be a big problem, because there's rocks all over the place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:14PM
Why mine Earth when there's tons of unoccupied worlds?
Because ore tastes better with Human Butter™ on it.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:32PM (4 children)
Yep, there's rocks all over the place - and we're living on one of the big ones. Maybe it makes sense to start with the little, easily digested ones (asteroids). But if you traveled interstellar distances to collect rocks, how does it make any sense to depart for a new star before you've harvested even 1% of the easily accessible rocky mass of the system you're in? It's not like getting that mass out of its gravity well is that hard - escape velocity from Earth is only 11.2m/s, or 17kWh/kg (half a gallon of gas) - our current difficulties are simply because we haven't invested in any systems to do so efficiently.
Heck, if you're building something planet-sized out of the materials there's not even necessarily any benefit to doing so - just transform them in place. Or you could do something comparatively easy, like crashing Venus into Earth at high speed then collecting the resulting debris cloud.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:48PM (1 child)
I don't know about y'all but if I was a space faring race with seemingly unlimited technology and the ability to consume entire planets of materials without so much as a burp... I would be consuming the ones that are on MUCH more distant orbits. Like in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort cloud. Why have all the hassle of all that molten metal when you can have perfectly solid metals ready to go and without needing to worry about how to dissipate heat off from your own mining ships.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @11:38PM
Current estimates of the total Oort cloud mass is about 5x that of Earth, scattered across a volume of about 10 cubic light years. Does that really sound appealing to you?
Besides the basic thing about metal - one of the basic first things you do with it, for basically any purpose, is to melt it and cast it into a convenient starting shape.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:25AM (1 child)
Off by 3 orders of magnitude. It's 11.2 km/s, actually.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:49PM
Nice catch - but on double checking my calculations were correct (17kWh/kg), I simply left out the "k" while typing.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 08 2018, @01:40PM (1 child)
And because even if we wanted to get at the core, it would be environmentally destructive. #JeffBezos
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @02:08PM
Not necessarily - a borehole, or even volcano-diving mining rig could get down to the mantle relatively non-destructively, and then remove material that's probably pretty devoid of life. Extracting material fast enough near the surface it might cause unusual tectonic activity - but I bet if we went down a thousand miles first, the effects would be spread out across a wide enough area to be lost in the noise of normal mantle turbulence.
I mean yeah, if we strip-mined the core of magnetics and radioactives it'd probably set us on a pretty grim path - but the quantities are so insanely beyond anything we've ever had access to, that I'm not sure how realistic that would be . You can only encase the entire surface of the Earth in so many miles of iron before mining more becomes a bit redundant.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:27PM (4 children)
Mostly just worthless to us... I'll note that the most recently evolved proto-life on Earth is based on silicon substrates.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @02:10PM (3 children)
Is it really proto-life if it's incapable of self-replication? (Software can replicate, even evolve, but that's logic-based, not silicon - that its current environment is silicon based is completely incidental)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 08 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)
Thus: proto-life. When it is self-sufficiently reproducing, from mining operations through to production of all machinery required in the supply chain, then it is life. For now, it somewhat resembles a virus.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @06:07PM (1 child)
Even proto-life needs to replicate, otherwise it's just a complex system. Imperfect replication is what allows it to evolve and maybe become life. Viruses are something else entirely, but they still actively reproduce, even if theydo so by hijacking the replication systems of other organisms.
All we have right now is a collection of tools. Maybe some day we'll be able to assemble them into something resembling independent proto-life, but for now even basic von-Neuman self-replicating machines are beyond our reach. Once we manage those then maybe we've got proto-life - let them replicate imperfectly, while competing for limited resources, and perhaps they'd eventually become life. For now we've just got incredibly crude machines, not even on par with a strand of self-replicating RNA.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 08 2018, @06:20PM
By that definition, pet rocks in boxes were proto-life. They were some, and they convinced symbiotic creatures around them to make more, reproducing in the millions.
By the time computers/robots are doing everything from mining through building their own factories and power plants, I imagine they're going to have not only production mistakes, but also adaptive algorithms throughout the process. They're not spreading like fire right now, they're reproducing and evolving with assistance from us, and they've worked their way into our ecosystem to the point that we will suffer quite a bit if they leave - you might say we have self-inflicted our dependency upon them.
Yes, and no... they are crude in their size and dependency upon specific environments/energy sources. An individual embedded processor may not be on par with a strand of self-replicating RNA by some measures, but a system fully loaded with power source, I/O, actuators and software to drive itself would seem to be more impressive on any scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g [youtube.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]