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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 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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