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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the own-worst-enemy dept.

"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.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:56PM (8 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:56PM (#689356) Journal

    We're pretty close to becoming interplanetary, which could prevent us from getting wiped out easily. Basically, we have survived the Atomic Age/Cold War this long, developed everything we need to at least land humans and equipment on the Moon and Mars, and started optimizing the relevant technologies to make everything easier (reusable rockets, better solar, computers, robots, etc.). So it would make sense that other alien civilizations could reach a similar level of development.

    Further considerations:

    • Is a nuclear war or another existential threat necessarily a species-killer? Can we bounce back after a nuclear war?
    • Earth has a relatively massive Moon, and reaching it served as a milestone for peaceful space exploration. If aliens don't have a massive satellite, how will it affect their space development? (e.g. if we had no Moon and the closest large target was Mars, there's no way that we would be landing on Mars in 1969.)
    • Do the aliens have to deal with higher surface gravity? Are we average or an outlier? Higher surface gravity could delay the Space Age by decades, making it easier for everybody to get caught up in an extinction event.
    • Will the colonies be sustainable? In some cases, aliens might be able to settle on an adjacent planet with greater habitability potential [wikipedia.org] than Venus or Mars.
    • Will the colonies be considered neutral locations, or will they be targeted in the event of war? Given the fragility of a base on the Moon or Mars, one nuke each could wipe out all the colonists, especially if everybody is clustered in one location.
    • Going interstellar and spreading throughout the galaxy is orders of magnitude more difficult than colonizing Mars... or Pluto. Even if aliens could spread throughout the entire galaxy using self-replicating robotic spacecraft, is there a filter that makes it not feasible? Maybe there is no way to make machines reliable enough to travel interstellar distances (including decelerating to be able to land on an exoplanet, and remaining in working order throughout a mission that lasts centuries or thousands of years).

    That's all I can think of right now.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:15PM (7 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:15PM (#689490)

    Some good points, but I have a few disagreements:

    * The moon, and especially Mars, would likely be very difficult to successfully attack, for the simple reason that they're very far away and have a clear line of sight to Earth - they'll see any missile coming days or months away and have ample time to intercept it. Not to mention that the war would likely be over before long before the missile reached them. The art of nuclear war has generally been to take out your opponent's strategic assets before they can take out yours. Mars simply isn't a strategic asset. The Moon might be, if the war were protracted. Throwing rocks from orbit is a lot cheaper and cleaner than lobbing nukes.

    * I'm not sure going interstellar is actually as difficult as you portray. Doing it *quickly* perhaps, but once we have self-sustaining orbital habitats of sufficient size it's simply a matter of accelerating them to solar escape velocity, and packing enough nuclear fuel to power them on a few thousand year road trip.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:11PM (6 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:11PM (#689521) Journal

      * The moon, and especially Mars, would likely be very difficult to successfully attack, for the simple reason that they're very far away and have a clear line of sight to Earth - they'll see any missile coming days or months away and have ample time to intercept it. Not to mention that the war would likely be over before long before the missile reached them. The art of nuclear war has generally been to take out your opponent's strategic assets before they can take out yours. Mars simply isn't a strategic asset. The Moon might be, if the war were protracted. Throwing rocks from orbit is a lot cheaper and cleaner than lobbing nukes.

      Let's imagine that we put up a lunar colony in the 2020s or 2030s. Will that colony be able to intercept a missile? No, unless they did something totally crazy like fire their BFS return vehicle at it, and somehow correctly intercept it. And that's just for one missile. It could take another decade or three before they have the ability to manufacture anything beyond regolith bricks from local materials. So they remain vulnerable, and those are extra decades during which shit could hit the fan on Earth, leaving perhaps 5-10 people off-world with almost no chance of building a sustainable colony capable of supporting thousands, and eventually returning people to Earth after the dust settles.

      * I'm not sure going interstellar is actually as difficult as you portray. Doing it *quickly* perhaps, but once we have self-sustaining orbital habitats of sufficient size it's simply a matter of accelerating them to solar escape velocity, and packing enough nuclear fuel to power them on a few thousand year road trip.

      Every spacecraft has machines aboard that can fail within years, maybe decades or a century if lucky. It doesn't matter whether it's a generation ship, suspended animation, DNA samples to grow humans later, or uploaded minds. It has to not fail catastrophically en route. It is also sustaining particle damage, especially when traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Adding shielding or encasing it in an asteroid increases mass and travel time, which means more years in which electronics and moving parts can fail, replacement parts can run out, or things could just combust.

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      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:02PM (4 children)

        by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:02PM (#689550)

        You make it sound like hitting targets traveling at thousands of meters per second isn't exactly what the BFS is designed to do (aka orbital docking). But why bother - lets take a load of those regolith bricks and release them as a cloud of flak in front of the missile as we approach it. Easier to hit, and you don't waste the rocket.

        Meanwhile, if we have only 5-10 people on the moon it's not a colony, just a novelty outpost, and is irrelevant to the survival of our species. When you have thousands, maybe millions of colonists fully capable of supporting themselves indefinitely without any help from Earth - *then* you have a colony that's relevant to the conversation. So long as there's the chance of help from Earth, the colony isn't needed to preserve the species.

        As for machine failures - absolutely, but as all of human history shows we're pretty good at fixing*things faster than they break. Meanwhile any colony ship is going to have to provide a fully complete industrial base to jump-start a whole new planetary civilization - self-repair by the inhabitants should be trivial. All the destination is likely to offer is raw materials and solar power - and repair in a closed system consumes no raw materials except energy.

        There's also no particular reason to assume they'd be traveling at any significant fraction of light speed - even 10% would require astronomical power. It seems to me that given the extremely low probability of any payoff for the home system, that the most likely motive for traveling to another star is not to get *to* something, but to get *away* from what you're leaving, and your "ship" is likely to be a self-sufficient "city-state" scale orbital habitat that grew tired enough of outside interference that they decided to remove themselves from it.

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:15PM (3 children)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:15PM (#689559) Journal

          Meanwhile, if we have only 5-10 people on the moon it's not a colony, just a novelty outpost, and is irrelevant to the survival of our species. When you have thousands, maybe millions of colonists fully capable of supporting themselves indefinitely without any help from Earth - *then* you have a colony that's relevant to the conversation. So long as there's the chance of help from Earth, the colony isn't needed to preserve the species.

          5-10 people is all we can hope for from our current poorly defined lunar plans. The orbiting LOP-G could delay significant long-term activity on the surface by the U.S. and Russia. The ESA Moon Village [soylentnews.org] would initially be up to 10 people, scaling to 100 later. Initial missions to Mars will include very few people, even if SpaceX is calling the shots. So we probably have another 50 years to stew on Earth before a full scale colonization effort begins in earnest, and longer for these efforts to set up local industrial capabilities. Can we make it to 2100?

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          • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:47PM (2 children)

            by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:47PM (#689573)

            Can we make it to 2100? As a species I'm fairly confident - we're almost as hard to kill as cockroaches. Anything short of a grey-goo scenario or incredibly ever-engineered superplague is unlikely to wipe us out. As a civilization capable of supporting offworld colonies? I'm much less optimistic. We'll shortly have much more immediate problems to deal with. Which is why any offworld colony would have to work hard to reach the point that they could support themselves. On the bright side, if civilization collapses on Earth, but an offworld colony manages to reach the point of producing advanced technology (computers, solar panels, etc) they'll likely have trade goods to offer in exchange for ecological materials and methane for their rockets to get back to the colony.

            My point was really just that a colony of 5-10 people doesn't matter in a survival scenario except symbolically. If they got nuked in a war, so what? Just means they don't have to watch their only hope of survival dying above them. Even a colony of a thousand people with a self-sufficient industrial and ecological base is likely to collapse without ongoing support and population infusions from Earth. Though maybe not - our species has been down to those sorts of numbers before, and with sufficient automation civilization might be maintained long enough for the population to grow to something less fragile.

            • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:02PM (1 child)

              by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:02PM (#689583) Journal

              Propellants can be produced on Mars. They don't need to trade to get methane.

              I've addressed the rest in other comments.

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              • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:09PM

                by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:09PM (#689585)

                Yeah, but they probably can't take off from Earth using propellant made on Mars - they'll need a local supply at least to get from Earth's surface to orbit.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 07 2018, @04:12AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 07 2018, @04:12AM (#689724) Journal

        Every spacecraft has machines aboard that can fail within years, maybe decades or a century if lucky.

        Humanity on Earth has plenty of machines that can fail with years or decades. It doesn't stop us from making more. And we move through space at roughly 0.001 C. It's not particularly efficient, but it works.