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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: 3, Funny) by SingularityPhoenix on Monday March 04 2024, @09:41PM (1 child)
We don't know what technology will or won't be possible. Technology has come so far in the last 200, 100, 50, even 20 years. Surely technological development can't continue forever. But how far can it go? What will or won't be possible? We have no way to know. Maybe we're near the end of what we can develop, maybe we have discovered so little that other species wouldn't even consider us intelligent.
Maybe we figure out why there is almost no antimatter in the universe, apply the knowledge to directly convert matter into antimatter, use our antimatter rockets for >90% the speed of light travel, and wonder why anyone would use simple nuclear reactions that are as mundane as the billions of stars.
Maybe one day we will spread across millions of dimensions, and talk about how simple 4 dimensional beings are.
Maybe we discover antimatter tech and sterrilize the solar system of life in that same moment.
Maybe one day we NO CARRIER
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 12 2024, @03:43PM
>Surely technological development can't continue forever. But how far can it go?
According to what we think we know so far, there's the heat death of the Universe, but any kind of practical backwards time travel would render that meaningless... Maybe backward time travel requires such enormous amounts of entropy creation that you substantially bring forward the heat death after you use it...
And, of course, if you can hop to parallel Universes/timelines that opens a whole new dimension to explore. Of course, if you can hop out to another Universe/timeline but never hop back to the one you came from that would be a whole new level of faith...
As for anti-matter, we are already creating tiny quantities of it, and it is created in nature as well - but it doesn't last long...
I would advocate thinking of technological development as a high order multi-dimensional map rather than a progression like a timeline. It's entirely possible to "skip over" some areas of knowledge that might be a progression in one knowledge base, but the path taken in the development of another knowledge base might just circumvent a bunch of stuff and hop more directly to "the next thing" through a faster path that misses a lot of things along the way.
In other words: the map of current knowledge looks sort of like a sponge... a million dimensional sponge, with threads of connectivity and lots of gaps.
And what any one human thinks they know is a tiny chunk of what 8 billion of us living know.
And while we're getting much better at preserving and passing on knowledge that we build upon, nearly two humans die per second and not everything they know gets passed on. So there are great chunks of the knowledge sponge that were once known and now forgotten.
Nevermind what the dolphins know that we don't and likely never will...
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