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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: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:02PM (10 children)
You're ignoring exponential growth. If it takes us a million years (5x the age of our species, 200x longer than all of recorded history) to colonize 10 nearby stars, and another million years for each of those colonies to do the same, then in a scant 11 million years we could colonize the entire galaxy.
As for the motive to do such a thing - there may never be any benefit to Earth to colonize other stars, but there doesn't have to be - there only has to be a motive for the would-be colonists. If (probably when) self-sustaining orbital habitats become commonplace, how long do you really think it will take before one of them decides to head out for another star? Whether it be to find new frontiers, or to escape the meddling of a central authority they disagree with. After all, once you're living in a sustainable artificial ecosystem, the only real difference between being in orbit and going on an interstellar voyage is how close the neighbors are. Well, that and solar power - but nuclear is a viable alternative for a few thousand year long road trip.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:10PM (5 children)
Probably when they have a self-sustaining power source not dependent on the sun. Fusion power solves all, right?
A million years to successfully colonize 10 nearby stars might be ambitious, upon arrival it may take hundreds of thousands of years to come to terms with adequate terraforming of the planets they find - and this self-sustaining orbital habitat will need to sustain the population successfully all that time. Chances for failure are extremely high, including political failure after centuries of interstellar travel - will the colony ship population agree on whether to spend a hundred more centuries trying to terraform with the resources that one ship can muster, or go interstellar again to hope for a better place?
The question of whether it would be easier to colonize a Mars-like planet or an Earth-like alien planet is another interesting one... I assume we will eventually colonize Mars, but how long will it take to develop Mars into a self-sustaining industrial base capable of independently launching its own interstellar craft? Thousands of years is easy to imagine, and again there's the nasty problem of early colony failure - easy to try again on Mars, but a Mars-like planet 10 light years away?
Then, considering an Earth-like alien planet with a thriving ecosystem, we become the bug-eyed pale skinned aliens attempting to get a foothold in the alien ecosystem. If the ecosystem has evolved to large animals, even if they're not intelligent they're going to be challenging to live with at first - and did we really travel 10 light years just so we could slaughter another planet full of megafauna?
Still, you're right, whether it takes one million years or 10 million years to establish 10 interstellar colonies, if we can do it at all, we can do it multiple times, and on a timescale of a billion years, 10^100 does pretty well cover the galaxy.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:22PM
Fission does the job too. But fusion is finally starting to get some investment again (the counterpoint to the "fusion is always 50 years away" joke is that funding has been steadily declining so that receiving the total funding needed by initial estimates is itself always 50 years away - progress per dollar has been roughly what was initially estimated.)
Why hold up civilization waiting to terraform planets? You've been living in a self-sustaining habitat for many generations, and now you have all the energy and resources you need to make many, many more. Meanwhile terraforming is likely to be a long-term project that makes interstellar generation ships look like a passing whim in comparison. One that would be greatly aided by having a thriving space-industrial base to provide necessary resources.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:54PM (3 children)
That's not the problem. Once your civilization has adapted to living in space, why do you expect they would want to return to living on a planet? Especially one that has evolved different proteins than they are adapted to?
To live on another planet without bubble-boy caliber life support systems they'd need to kill off all the native lifeforms down to the bacteria and then build it up from scratch. And if it doesn't have native life-forms, it won't have an oxygen atmosphere.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 07 2018, @01:28AM
Maybe.... I can picture scenarios where the alien biology is dissimilar enough that each side's tissues aren't recognized as organic by the others - different metabolic cycles even if they are still carbon-hydrogen based. And if we can't eat each other for nutrition, that might make an interesting start for co-existence.
Of course, there are also the nightmare scenarios where a virus from one side essentially decimates the other, and since the biology is so alien the virus' evolutionary restraint to not 100% wipe out their hosts would be absent. I'm not saying that such a nightmare is impossible, but I would say it is highly unlikely that a virus would find anything at all to successfully interact with, much less take over in an alien cell (if they even have cells...)
I'll give a "likely" to this one, something will need to actively "de-rust" the world - which is another nice definition of life: reversing entropy.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @12:52AM (1 child)
Considering that, on Earth, there's a fair chance that the vast majority of life (by mass or species count) may be microbes living miles underground, it might be substantially easier to terraform a dead world via GMO "primordial slime", than it would be to sterilize a living world.
Fortunately, if our solar system is at all typical dead, "easily" terraformable worlds might be far more common than living ones. Though I suppose we might yet find that both Venus and Mars are actually vibrantly living worlds, and that only their surfaces are dead.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 08 2018, @05:09AM
While I agree in principle, it may turn out to be difficult to find habitable planets that are free of life. In fact, that is my expectation, even for the ones with reducing atmospheres.
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(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Thursday June 07 2018, @03:19PM (3 children)
The hopping from one planet to another, even within one galaxy, must still need to beat the rate of space expanding in that area.
Differently put, if a species does not hop faster from A to B as A to B move apart from each other due to space expanding between A and B, then that species will never reach C when the distance between C and B is the distance between earth and their B planet.
For equal distances between A,B and C with C being earth. Species at a A moves to B while space between A,B and space between B,C expands. They might reach it from A to B. But if their speed at which they reached B is (plus at least one time the time they needed to develop the science to do the travel from A to B) is isn't large enough to keep up with the rate of space expansion. Then no way they would ever reach C.
By the time they learn about C, C is already out of reach. Space keeps on expanding. At a ever increasing rate between two points, too.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 08 2018, @02:30AM (2 children)
But it doesn't matter what happens to the distance between two points in the fabric of spacetime, only what happens to the distance between two objects you want to travel between, both of which are themselves traveling rapidly. I believe galaxies are generally thought to be gravitationally bound strongly enough that they're largely unaffected by the expansion of space - it's at intergalactic scales that things are expanding fast enough, and gravity diffused enough, that everything will eventually accelerate beyond lightspeed. An observer in the distant future will think that our galaxy is alone in the universe, but there will still be a galaxy.
Even if it weren't - looking backwards we can say that the galaxy in the past was not substantially larger than it is now - so anything that could be done at it's current size, could also have been done in the past.
Also, the universe appears to be expanding at a (Hubble) constant 67.15 ± 1.2 (km/s)/Mpc, where a Megaparsec ~=3.26 light years. To hop to a nearby star, say 10ly away, assuming your stars were somehow "pinned" to the fabric of space so that it's expansion mattered, the distance between them would be increasing by 205km/s, or about 6.5 million km/year, or 0.68 light years per million years (In comparison, our sun is orbiting the galactic core at a speed of 767 light years per million years). If you can cross between nearby stars in even a thousand years, you'll never notice it.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Saturday June 09 2018, @09:32AM (1 child)
Right, agreed. But that still requires life to appear frequent enough to exist multiple times within let's say one galaxy. That might be true. However, so far we have no proof that this is the case. It might be that life is indeed quite rare and will only occasionally form. For example less than once per one galaxy or only a few times within one galaxy (with galaxy being something that is about the size of our own milky way galaxy).
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 09 2018, @02:05PM
And even without the expansion of space, traveling to another galaxy would be a whole different level of time and difficulty, especially for organic beings - to the point that you might want to take a star along with you.
To imagine that 250 billion stars could take billions of years to produce life even once though - when our own planet seems to have formed it almost as soon as liquid water appeared on the surface? That would suggest that there's something insanely unusual here, which is generally considered poor practice if you want a conjecture to be taken seriously. Or alternately of course that life *didn't* originate here, but came as microbes that evolved elsewhere. Which begs the question - if it only germinated here, then we know panspermia is definitely possible, and that it occurred in our corner of the galaxy, greatly increasing the probability that life exists around other nearby stars. ...Or I suppose that life first arose elsewhere in our solar system (Mars seems a likely candidate) and then colonized Earth - which doesn't fundamentally change the problem, but does allow for a much larger window between "life being possible" and "life existing" than we see in Earth's geologic record, with a corresponding reduction in its probability of occurring at all.