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"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: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:48PM (1 child)
Foolishness. Eliminating potential competitors is plausible. Strip mining the planet is not. You've got to pull the stuff up out of a gravity well. You sure can't use it in place unless you live in a sealed life support bubble. Native life would give you violent allergies. And the air is probably wrong anyway.
But why bother? Just strip mine the lighter moons and the useful asteroids of the system and the inhabitants won't be able to build a competing civilization. They sure can't stop you, or even bother you. They probably won't even notice you are there.
P.S.: Despite that argument, I don't believe it. Civilizations adapted to space will not be short on resources, except perhaps volatiles, and those they can easily get from the Oort clouds. The only way this wouldn't be true is if controlled fusion is impossible, in which case they might also need fissionables. If those are concentrated by ecological processes (as seems likely) they may be too dilute in space to be practical. Even so, it would almost certainly be more efficient to coerce local habitants to mine it for them than to do it themselves ... but I don't believe either part of that supposition, so I rate their combination as extremely unlikely.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:21PM
Because all the moons and asteroids combined are less massive than Earth alone? The entire asteroid belt is estimated to mass only about 0.012% of Earth - its comparative richness is due to the much greater surface-to-volume ratio and comparative ease of mining solid materials rather than the mantle and core with our current technology .
Meanwhile, getting stuff out of our gravity well is only expensive because we use phenomenally inefficient methods to do so (i.e. rocketry). Escape velocity is only 11.2km/s - or about 17kWh/kg: roughly half a gallon of gas per kg. That's all the energy that would be needed by any of a large number of efficient space elevator designs to lift material beyond orbit. Meanwhile the Earth is being hit by roughly 1.5*10^18kWh of solar energy every year, enough to lift 10^17 kg of material completely out of its gravity well. Granted, that's only 1/1000th the mass of the asteroid belt per year - but it's also only using a solar array the size of the Earth - no reason the material from Earth couldn't be used to rapidly build a much larger solar array.
Basically - if you're visiting a star system for it's resources, why *wouldn't* you strip mine the planets as well? What's the down side? Mild inconvenience for your automated mining robots?