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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, 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]