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Evolution has produced a wondrously diverse variety of lifeforms here on Earth. It just so happens that talking primates with opposable thumbs rose to the top and are building a spacefaring civilization. And we're land-dwellers. But what about other planets? If the dominant species on an ocean world builds a technological civilization of some sort, would they be able to escape their ocean home and explore space?
A new article in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society examines the idea of civilizations on other worlds and the factors that govern their ability to explore their solar systems. Its title is "Introducing the Exoplanet Escape Factor and the Fishbowl Worlds (Two conceptual tools for the search of extra-terrestrial civilizations)." The sole author is Elio Quiroga, a professor at the Universidad del Atlántico Medio in Spain.
We have no way of knowing if other Extraterrestrial Intelligences (ETIs) exist or not. There's at least some possibility that other civilizations exist, and we're certainly in no position to say for sure that they don't. The Drake Equation is one of the tools we use to talk about the existence of ETIs. It's a kind of structured thought experiment in the form of an equation that allows us to estimate the existence of other active, communicative ETIs. Some of the variables in the Drake Equation (DE) are the star formation rate, the number of planets around those stars, and the fraction of planets that could form life and on which life could evolve to become an ETI.
In his new research article, Quiroga comes up with two new concepts that feed into the DE: the Exoplanet Escape Factor and Fishbowl worlds.
[...] Quiroga's Exoplanet Escape Factor (Fex) can help us imagine what kinds of worlds could host ETIs. It can help us anticipate the factors that prevent or at least inhibit space travel, and it brings more complexity into the Drake Equation. It leads us to the idea of Fishbowl Worlds, inescapable planets that could keep a civilization planet-bound forever.
Without the ability to ever escape their planet and explore their solar systems, and without the ability to communicate beyond their worlds, could entire civilizations rise and fall without ever knowing the Universe they were a part of? Could it happen right under our noses, so to speak, and we'd never know ?
[Source]: Universe Today
[Also Covered By]: Phys.Org
An interesting conjecture worth pondering about !!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday March 02 2024, @11:01AM (17 children)
Is it really more or new concepts? Isn't it just more variables for the Drake equation, or similar? An equation we already believe is somewhat sketchy and filled to the brim with good wishes and hopeful assumptions? The "prison planet"/fishbowl or whatever are just versions or outliers of f(c) (sign of their existence in space) and L (period of interstellar communication). Where they are set to zero, or a very close approximation.
Also if anyone of those are zero. The whole thing will be zero. That said most of them are listed as being fractions or averages so it's unlikely that any of them are actually zero, but that is perhaps by design. It's still just wishful thinking and assumptions.
But is he trying to validate the Drake Equation by saying that we don't know or can't see/find/hear them cause they are trapped on their planet. But they are totally out there, just trapped. Or they don't care about leaving their planet. They might not even be interested in the space stuff (yet). After all for a long time neither were we. The stars, the sun and the moon was just pretty, or scary or divine, things up in the sky. Then someone started to dream about going there ... eons later ... we went there.
In some regard I get the feeling he is trying to Drake it up.
But with that in mind we might as well be alone. While the top comment here was currently modded as being Funny it's also then very apt. We are all alone on our own. So we might as well be alone. Philosophically insightful.
Unless we already know. Cause they have been here but it's getting covered up. But lets say we don't know and it has not been covered up somehow. Which is also a bit far fetched but always an option. Unless proven otherwise are we not alone? Why assume someone is out there when we don't know. Isn't it better to assume alone until we know more but prepare for there being scary things out there.
Also if those things are trapped on their own planet isn't that better for us? More galaxy for us, plus once we find them it will be easier to pacify/exterminate (cause that or those are things we like to do as a species) them with orbital bombardment if they can't shoot back.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 02 2024, @01:48PM (8 children)
>prepare for there being scary things out there.
Most of us don't even prepare well for rising water levels in unusually rainy/windy weather, preparing for something so open-ended as "Aliens are coming!" with a time window of +/- a few billion years, with the whole spectrum of friendly through hostile through indifferent, and the quantity spectrum of nano-probes through joy-riders in 4 passenger family vehicles through multi-solar-system colonization/mining armadas...
Many archaeological artifacts all over Earth seem to point towards "sky people" - but are they pointing at actual sky people, or imagined ones?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday March 03 2024, @01:20AM (7 children)
Especially when someone is paying us not to prepare. I'll note several perverse factors in the US such as subsidized flood insurance and a huge political valuation difference between disaster relief and disaster preparedness making it so that we don't prepare well.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 03 2024, @01:22PM (6 children)
Well, as far as alien disaster preparation goes, I think the first step has already been taken: basic education of a significant portion of the population in recognition of the concept of aliens to speed up global awareness of alien activity on Earth.
False reports are an inevitable consequence of this education, just like the uptick in rare disease self diagnosis based on Dr. Google, but I am willing to bet that Dr. Google has also resulted in higher rates of the positive rare disease Dx in with all the false positives. Lyme disease being one particular poster child, but the bigger effects are probably in the long tail of truly rare stuff.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 13 2024, @01:32AM (5 children)
OT side note: while Lyme gets blamed for all manner of ills... turns out when ticks are present it's actually endemic (hardly a surprise), and those ills are probably coincidental. There was a large study in Wisconsin a couple decades back that found around 40% of both people and dogs had Lyme antibodies without ever having shown Lyme symptoms.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 13 2024, @02:39AM (4 children)
As I understand it, Lyme looks a lot like syphilis under the microscope and a lot of Lyme carriers/sufferers were mis-diagnosed as having syphilis, and treated for it somewhat ineffectively...
I just call it a Dr. Google poster child because it wasn't until after the internet, and the "I have Lyme" believers community got some organization and data, that Lyme seemed to start being taken seriously by the mainstream medical community. Of course there's a whole bag of symptoms attributed to it that may or may not be causally linked - just like so much else out there.
Mainstream medicine has little to be proud of in terms of accurate Dx and treatment rates... so many people suffer from mis-diagnosis year after year until they finally luck into a Dx and treatment of what they really had and then "poof, magic, aren't we wonderful?" Well, yeah, cool that YOU cured my brother's plantars warts in a week, but those 8 other jerk-offs that blamed the symptoms on everything but plantars warts for nearly five years... yeah, not making the community as a whole look too sharp. Even scarier is: maybe he didn't have plantars warts, but the treatment for them worked on whatever he had... a lot of "practical practice" works that way.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 13 2024, @03:28AM (3 children)
Yeah, very aware of the problem of mis- or absent diagnosis. For 30 years I got "You're not overweight, so it can't be your thyroid." And then "You test in range, so it can't be..." BEEP, wrong...
Tho I'm croggled that anyone would fail to do a gram test and distinguish a bacterium's type before using a gram-specific antibiotic..Lots of crap can be hard to ID under the microscope; that's why we have these tests.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 13 2024, @03:15PM (2 children)
>I'm croggled that anyone would fail to do a gram test and distinguish a bacterium's type before using a gram-specific antibiotic
Had a friend who had a little white spot on her chest - not exactly under the bra, but close. In her regular checkup she asked her M.D. about it and he glanced, out of the corner of his eye from across the room, and pronounced "fungus." and wrote her a script for steroid cream. He wasn't wrong, but how often do they make those snap calls because "it's (almost) always fungus" or "Lyme is really rare, and has never been confirmed south of Vermont." or "I'm paranoid that my female patients may construe my examination as sexual abuse so I'm just going to guess" and they're actually wrong.
The AMA has put our M.D.s on a pedestal and trained them to think of themselves as infallible deities whose time is too valuable to be bothered with things like un-billed examination time or tests that might be called un-necessary (and low profit.)
As I understand it, the limited capacity of the residency program is their excuse for why they consistently under-supply our market with M.D.s - in my mind that's a serious structural failure that needs to be addressed. In their minds, that's keeping demand for (and self-worth estimation and compensation of) M.D.s high - which they seem to think is good. I'm all for the AMA looking out for their (self) membership, but not at the expense of the people they serve - and they've been progressively "boiling the frogs" abusing their patients more and more, for decades.
In the 1970s my pediatrician had a lab in her office, staff to culture swabs and tell you within less than a day if you had strep, mono, staph, or likely a virus, and prescribe antibiotics (or not) and rest/isolation recommendations accordingly. Ain't nobody got time for that anymore, apparently. Now if your infant has a mild fever (above the guidelines for vaccine administration) you're instantly given a script for broad spectrum antibiotics - nuke 'em from orbit, just to be sure. Side effects for the infant or society at large? Not considered, just gotta make sure we can keep those vaccines pumping in on schedule - wouldn't want to have to think too hard at the next appointment about how to adjust the schedule due to delays in earlier course administration.
>Lots of crap can be hard to ID under the microscope; that's why we have these tests.
Instead of (or at least in addition to) building machines to sample HVAC airstreams for bio-terror cultures, you'd think we would be working toward in-office culture ID machines - like the blood analyzers and similar that have been around for 30+ years. Instead, we've developed this central specialist infrastructure where your M.D. sends you to a lab-clinic where they do the blood draws / swabs / pee in cup / etc. (and, incidentally, you get lots of waiting room exposure to a broad spectrum of patients from all over town), and then that clinic ships your samples off to a central processing lab (no mixups EVER occur in that process) and they batch-process your shit and get back to you days later telling you: "Well, we are required by law to disclose this result to you immediately: you're HIV positive. Now, these results are frequently false positives, and we're escalating your case to a Western Blot analysis, but it's Friday and they won't read your samples until Monday and you'll get a confirmation or refutation of the HIV positive status next Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest, hopefully. Meanwhile, enjoy your first days post-partum experience with your new baby and your spouse now that we've planted these seeds of mistrust, doubt and uncertainty into your highly emotionally charged heads..." Yes, that was our post C-section experience with our 2nd child and, of course, Western Blot came back HIV negative, late Tuesday afternoon. Well, the hospital did the sample collection without sending us to a clinic, but I'm sure most US residents have experienced the lab-sample clinic more than once in the past 30 years...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 13 2024, @04:45PM (1 child)
"As I understand it, the limited capacity of the residency program is their excuse for why they consistently under-supply our market with M.D.s"
To my understanding, it's because the AMA will only certify something like 470 new MDs per year.
Which doesn't begin to keep up with demand.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 13 2024, @06:14PM
>the AMA will only certify something like 470 new MDs per year.
That's astonishingly low, but:
Not all of those 28,753 go on to complete a residency, get licensed, get malpractice insurance, and actually practice... more meaningless stats from the internet at large:
that puts us at somewhat more than 339996563/33.5*.93*28753 = 380 residents per doctor on an ongoing basis (not accounting for M.D. em/immigration, which at present puts about a 10% boost on the number of physicians, or about 340 residents per doctor).
Random point of contrast:
for a ratio of about 200 residents per doctor.
Do you feel served? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) [wikipedia.org]
83200000/421300 =
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday March 02 2024, @06:37PM (7 children)
The Drake equation is nonsense. It's missing the most important variables, and the ones we know, we're not sure of.
Example: On how many worlds are both a total solar eclipse and a total lunar eclipse possible? What, exactly, is necessary for life to begin in the first place?
People keep talking about the Kepplar (SP?) system, but the solar system has three planets in its habitable zone. Only one has life. Mars may have at one time. Venus is almost a duplicate of Earth. Why is it a hell hole with surface temperatures that will melt lead? CO2. Why is it there? It never developed life!
Why not?
Maybe it did... [mcgrewbooks.com] except, of course, I don't think the solar system is old enough.
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by deimtee on Saturday March 02 2024, @10:04PM (5 children)
While a moon might be necessary, I'm pretty sure eclipses are not. There's a theory that comes into fashion every so often and then gets discredited that the Moon is why our atmosphere is not like Venus'.
I think the difficult thing is the two knife edges we are walking along:
1/ between developing new technology as an old technology becomes too inefficient or expensive to maintain or as a required resource is exhausted. We have wars and international competition driving technology forward, but also using lots of resources. If we fall off that advancement curve, it is over. The large quantities of easy access "bootstrap" resources are gone.
2/ This is a more subtle sociological one. We are on a borderline between being too social and not social enough. Less social and we would never have formed more than small groups and technology would never develop past what a small tribe could achieve. More social would be a trap in the other direction, we would end up with a "one world government" where the main goal of the leaders would be to maintain stability and their power. Technology advancement would be restricted and strongly directed. They would never allow the establishment of an independent off-world group.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday March 04 2024, @10:00PM (1 child)
In some of my fiction, aliens think life can only happen on a satellite of a planet like Jupiter. Here's one where they observe Earth and think life would be impossible (I have a few like that).
We still haven't found extraforgostnic life [mcgrewbooks.com]
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday March 05 2024, @08:39PM
"Life" is pretty hard to define at the lower end. Is a complex molecule that catalyses the production of copies of itself alive?
My opinion is that life will form in any sufficiently complex chemical soup that has a supply of energy to it, keeping it in a temperature range that both allows complex molecules to be stable and provides energy to form unstable compounds.
I think the origin of life wasn't some tiny cell forming spontaneously, but the whole interconnected lightning and meteorite driven soup tending towards being composed of the molecules that catalysed the formation of other molecules in great big "leaky" circular chains of self-production. Evolution of these loops of reaction steps to higher efficiency and less side products (less, but still huge quantities) would result in the circular loops evolving to become tighter. As soon as you get to the point you can apply evolution, you have life.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 12 2024, @03:27PM (2 children)
>The large quantities of easy access "bootstrap" resources are gone.
That depends on your path... we're just starting to tap subterranean hydrogen gas reserves, for instance, and after that we may do some interesting things with solar power and sulfur cycles, not to mention our rather untapped avenue of fission, and the yet to be opened fusion pathway...
Solar power for steam turbines is some pretty low-tech stuff that can get you large quantities of electricity - not terribly efficiently - but accessible enough for a bootstrap. Back in the Ringworld Universe, the main thing the Pak protectors guarded to ensure successful reboot of their societies after inevitable devastating wars was: knowledge. That can take a lot of time and resources to acquire if you completely lose it, but it's also relatively cheap to preserve.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday March 14 2024, @04:12AM (1 child)
I mix human nature into my estimates of that. Yeah, you could have a society dedicated to harnessing solar steam and powering an industrial society dedicated to getting the species into space. Roughly about the time global true communism produces a utopia here on Earth.
EROEI is what drives the system and burning through the deposits of fossil fuels and easy ores is what allowed us to build to the point where the species is possibly going to expand into space. If we collapse, the hoarding of resources and energy is going to prevent that sort of largesse from happening again. Competition will just be too tough.
Your point about knowledge is well taken, but I was referring to something like a post-nuclear war type of collapse. No matter how much knowledge they have, no society of less than 10's of millions is going to build a chip fab.
Pessimistically, I can see it happening without a nuclear war. Improving efficiency and effectiveness of resource gathering may not keep up with the increasing difficulty, especially on the mining side of things. Austerity measures, "tighten your belt", and similar seem to be the order of the day.
Very soon most western countries are going to hit an infrastructure crunch. 500 years ago they built castles to last forever. 200 years ago they built houses to last hundreds of years. Now they build houses that might last 50 years. Roads are degrading, here in AU they are ripping up country railways for "economic" reasons, it is cheaper to ship freight by trucks. The real reason is that the shippers don't pay for the roads. So we use inefficient trucks to ship megatonnes of grain and ore, and the taxpayer foots the bill to repair the road damage.
That's just a couple of examples. I often see both politicians and businesses taking the short, easy, cheap way and leaving a bigger problem down the road a bit. Forgive me if I don't see your future society working together to build a starship fleet.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 14 2024, @03:13PM
>Roughly about the time global true communism produces a utopia here on Earth.
You know, there was a time that LSD proponents were hopeful that dosing the water supplies of the big cities would trigger a transformation to global brotherhood and enlightenment... I doubt LSD is the pathway, but there may be something, something as simple as a meme (more likely something as unavoidable as a retrovirus) that transforms humans away from the competitive back stabbing war mongers they had to be to get to where we are, into a more fully cooperative society with goals larger than having a bigger palace with more servants than anyone you know of...
>If we collapse, the hoarding of resources and energy is going to
Be any worse than it is today? Today we're extracting and essentially burning through all kinds of resources to make consumer products with lifetimes as short as possible, with a fig leaf of "recyclable" that doesn't happen for the majority of things.
Again, if "human nature" doesn't change, then yeah, doomed. That much was obvious 2000 years ago. A total collapse of industrial society will inevitably cause a shift in human behavior, the question will be: in reality do we become more like Mad Max, or Ghandi?
>no society of less than 10's of millions is going to build a chip fab.
I think that's a reasonable assertion, but a deeper question is: what can you do without chips?
>Austerity measures, "tighten your belt", and similar seem to be the order of the day.
If we keep growing from 8 billion to 12 and 20... the shit will hit the fan sooner or later. Some countries seem to be on a reversal trend already, but globally we're still adding 75 million per year - for a really long time now, what's up with that linear trend? - and the resource issue is a global one no matter how many walls are built.
>Now they build houses that might last 50 years.
That's job security, written into the building codes... make me king, I'll fix it.
>here in AU they are ripping up country railways for "economic" reasons
After the iron curtain went up, Russia ripped up railways in the bloc countries for "economic" reasons too, it was cheaper for the Russians to get iron that way than from ore in the ground.
>the taxpayer foots the bill to repair the road damage.
Effectively, the tax payers are subsidizing the trucking companies. If Aussie truckers live anything like US truckers, I think there are better lifestyles to subsidize.
>I often see both politicians and businesses taking the short, easy, cheap way and leaving a bigger problem down the road a bit.
Human nature, politicians are just a reflection of society at large. Businesses are in competition to extract as much wealth as possible from the populace, in exchange for the lowest cost of goods and services they can get away with.
>I don't see your future society working together to build a starship fleet.
Again, depends on the circumstances... Vulcans land and tell us the Klingons are coming in 60 years... that's a meme that might change things.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Tuesday March 12 2024, @02:54PM
Not because of CO2. Doesn't matter what gas, the real factor is atmospheric density (Ideal Gas law). Venus is hot not because the atmosphere is mostly CO2, but because it's six times denser than Earth's in about the same gravity. Gravity X Density = Friction = Heat. Same as if you overfill a tire.
However, if Venus were seeded to reduce most of the CO2 to calcium carbonate, followed by bioforms to release oxygen, things might change enough to make it marginally habitable. Much as happened on Earth.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.