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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 12 2024, @03:21PM (1 child)
I found Ringworld in my High School library, was my first access to any science fiction novel - young and impressionable, makes a difference.
The Man-Kzin Wars series was publishing while I was in college, so I did read just about all of them - and they were authored by a lot of different people "writing in the Ringworld universe."
Around about that time I also read "the Integral Trees" which I thought was trying just a bit too hard... not that such places don't exist in the Universe, just that you might have to survey several Milky Way sized galaxies before finding one...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 13 2024, @01:27AM
I had about 30 years of SF saturation before I ever read any Niven. By that point I was less interested in hardware and more in characters, which is, shall we say, the opposite of Niven's expertise. What I might have loved 20 years before... at that point in my reading career just bored me.
And now I write my own to suit myself. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.