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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, @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.