All the “might” and “may” in articles about that planet makes me suspicious that the artists impression above will turn out to not be at all correct except for the depicted size
mogged
reminded me of Ad Astra and its soul crushing revelation that the scientists haven’t found alien life despite all the fancy tech.
I watched it, interesting video and accessible approach to the topic.
I couldn’t help but walk away from the video thinking about how many kids enter STEM/non-social science degrees at college and get to fully fledged adulthood before the realisation that social science is pretty fucking important and touches every aspect of our lives.
I probably have a chip on my shoulder because of how much everyone shits on social science as a low paid/dead end career but it’s upsetting an astrophysicists opinions about social science seems to be taken more seriously than an actual social scientist (this is more based on her previous video about gravity being a social construct but a lot of social science constructs are weaved into the Fermi paradox video as well).
So… Dark Forest strike? paint them?
The tallest people on that planet
I’ve been wondering this for years now. Sci fi and even actual scientific speculation tends to assume aliens would be way ahead of us in terms of technology because their planets may have been formed earlier. I don’t think time alone matters. If they don’t have resources, if fhey don’t evolve the same way, if they have more difficulties in doing shit due to any number of reasons… They could be far less advanced than us. Maybe nobody in the entire universe has figured out how to realistically travel between stars yet. Maybe we are the only ones who have even managed to get off our rock.
Imagine humanity in 1000 years. We would be among the stars.
Now imagine humanity in 10000 years, 100000 years or even 1000000 years.
A million years is still a fraction in the cosmic timescale.
It would be nearly impossible to have other civilizations be on exactly the same technological level as us. They would indeed be either much less advanced, or much more advanced.
With all the crazy ass things that can kill us off, I don’t think we’re alone in the universe, but we may very well be alone in time.
The Fermi Paradox might just the the likelyhood to get wiped out from motions to everything and we’re too far away to get contact in this gnat’s ass of a conscious timeline we’re in.
This is mostly uneducated postulation, but I think as we become more technologically advanced, technological advancements (and the knowledge of mechanics necessary to allow for them) become fewer and more far between as advancements occur.
I feel like the industrial revolution was a perfect storm of many advancements all happening in the same blip, and it allowed us to go from Wright to the moon in one lifespan, but 100 years later, we’re still not far from that point, technologically.
I mean, look at radiological half life - that’s the point at which there’s a 50% chance that any one atom will decay, but when that atom decays seems to be mere chance more than anything. It’s perplexing and maddening. But the more we stare at that, the more sure we are in the belief that the void, nothingness, is actually rife with energy just flitting in and out of perceivable existence, affecting observable particles, but we just can’t see this vacuum energy. Almost like quantum mechanics is used as a workaround to try to make sense of those unseen forces (and when we can observe them, it’d likely be able to be described in a more classical sense).
Maybe the industrial revolution gave us some hopium lol, but we’ve been butting our heads into a wall for a century pining for a magical microscope. Maybe in 500 years it’ll all look mostly the same, who knows
The last 75 years of nothing is because of Neoliberalism. It is not conventially profitable to spend government funds on scientific exploration. Government funds are used to counter tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. Along with just stealing the money through various means.
This is just arrogance.
We have only been announcing our intelligence for 100 years. It takes 100,000 years just to cross our galaxy. No-one knows we are here yet.
There’s also the Dark Forest hypothesis - the idea that maybe many alien civilizations exist out there but stay silent because revealing themselves would make them targets/prey to a more high-tech hostile civilization.
It’s not convincing because it’s impossible to hide. You always produce waste heat which would be visible (if you use 100W of solar power, you dissipate 100W in deep infra red into space)
We would expect to see stars putting out an amount of energy for a bright star, but in deep IR as they’re wrapped in Dyson spheres or swarms
I’d imagine any intelligent alien life form would be intelligent enough to realize that they’ve reached a point at which they can simply life in a sustained utopia. Heal the planet, work less, fill time with hobbies and pursuits. Humans have this flaw, and it’s that the mentally ill squander the world’s wealth and use it for dick-measuring contests. A small minority of us will kill their own mother for a job promotion, and the people at the very top want to squander it all so they see another 0 in their bank account, or outrace the other 7 megabillionaires to the dick-measuring contest on Mars. I could only hope aliens aren’t as as stupid. We could just litter the earth with trees, solar panels, 2 br condos, and hammocks, and have AI work for us, but nope. Every single die shrink leads to more transistor density and never any power efficiency because big numbers are better for shareholders. They sold us downstream. If any alien contacts us or leaves a trace they’re most likely just as dangerous to our survival as we are. Space conquistadors
3 body problem is a good book for thought experiments, but it didn’t really discuss the arguments against the dark forest hypothesis
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assumes universal hostility.
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Interstellar warfare is protracted and impractical.
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Ignores potential cooperation and ethical diversity.
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assumes aliens think like humans
Regarding the first point, I think it just assumes the possibility for hostility, not the universality of it. If there’s a room with a thousand people and I know one person in the room has a gun and wants to kill me, I’m still going to hesitate to enter regardless of the 999.
Also, any intelligence that arises out of evolution is going to have at least the rough concept of violence.
Counterarguments
The 999 are going too overpower the violent 1.
The concept of peace will be known and experience will have demonstrated that it is more valuable than war.
Counter-counterarguments.
That assumes the 999 are in a position to stop the 1. Assuming FTL travel/communication/detection is never possible, reaction ability is always going to be limited. A relativistic projectile aimed at a planet can be a silent civilization killer.
This is more about cautiously reacting to the possibility of hostility in the very high stakes scenario of first contact, not the confirmation of hostility. In the room analogy, we don’t know who has the gun, whether it’s truly 1 person or 0 or 100 or 500, if most or all of the 999 are blindfolded or willing to defend newcomers, whether overpowering the violent one(s) is actually possible due to everyone being spread out and any guns having functionally unlimited ammo, whether other people have already been taken out for just showing up or resisting, and whether all of the above even matters if the aggressor gets a kill shot off before any of the above takes effect.
Evolution is inherently a competition for limited resources with winners and losers, so violence innately comes with the territory. Even grass and trees are in a war for sunlight. The concept of peaceful cooperation may be common due to the individual specialization likely needed for a species to become space-fairing, but it’ll be a higher level, more abstract idea, and the universality of other species applying it more broadly cannot be assumed.
Yes. Those are the book’s arguments. A counter-counter argument is a repeat of the same argument.
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Maybe we aren’t the first, maybe we aren’t the last. What if there is other intelligent life on other planets, but just because of the distance their signals have not managed to come to us and our signals haven’t managed to get to them yet. That should be fairly possible simply because of the how big the universe is right?
There still is the „Early Bird Theory“.
When you look at us, the Earth, life has formed almost immediately after the conditions where given. On top of that the universe itself isn’t even that old. There is a good chance, that Fermi was right but we are just the first ones.
… which makes me think that whatever or whoever designed us had some work left to do. You left in some bugs buddy.
There is a good chance…
Probabilistically, the early bird theory is unlikely. If development of life were to follow a normal distribution, it’d be highly improbable that we’d be in the tails as opposed to the main body.
There’s also a theory that we’re too late, and that our existence is like the remaining microbes in a puddle of water in a desert.
The universe used to be lukewarm with conditions for life to exist everywhere, until it expanded and started cooling.
On a positive note, this could also mean that life lies dormant everywhere just waiting for the right conditions, so that anywhere that has the right conditions also has life.
IMO it is more likely that we’re more early than late (though an argument can be made that there’s a sweet spot in between the two).
When the universe was lukewarm, I don’t think the conditions existed for life to exist everywhere because there hadn’t been enough stellar nucleosynthesis for there to be astrophysical metals (i.e. anything heavier than helium, with the possible exception of lithium at a very low concentration). Not much useful chemistry can be done with just hydrogen and hellium.
Additionally, planetary systems surrounding earlier generation stars are much rarer than those of the same class at the Sun. Planets that formed around earlier generation stars did not have access to a high enough variety of astrophysical metals to create the complex chemistries that chemical life requires and their host stars were likely too short lived to make advanced evolution possible, even if they had planetary systems.
Planets formed around stars younger than/with higher metallicity are much more likely to be gas giants that would have their own set of issues with the evolution of chemical life (e.g. much lower carbon presence).
The “optimal” time frame for the development of complex life on a planet would theoretically vary by its position compared to the galactic bulge its star formed in, i.e. earlier closer to the galactic center and later further out. Being closer to galactic core makes for a higher chance of being blasted by a supernova or other extremely high energy astronomical event, making for a higher chance of mass extinctions.
If most stars/planets formed much before our sun lacked sufficiently complex chemistry, and those formed much after it lack sufficient carbon and provide a host of gravitational/pressure issues that would inhibit technological development even if evolutionary life did arise, it seems likely that most planets potentially with advanced civilizations are of similar ages. With some slightly older examples nearer the galactic core and some slightly younger ones deeper into the spiral arms.
Eh, I don’t buy it.
Humans are proof that life is still possible in our universe. How could all life have died out when life is still perfectly possible?
Only way this is possible is if life didn’t adapt (which I don’t see life doing).
Maybe they just don’t want to leave their planet because it’s dope af
Some humans want to travel even when they’re perfectly happy.
That’s ascribing human motivations to non-humans. They could be fundamentally non-curious, only using their relative intelligence to solve actual problems in their environment rather than pushing for “what if?”.
If you have a species that doesn’t feel a drive to explore they would never leave the place they evolved, then they would be at high risk of extinction when their climate changed with plate tectonics
And perhaps it’s the drive to explore that has humans exploring ideas
Maybe you need to be like us to get into space
Most people don’t feel the need to kill someone, but if their life depended on it, they’d kill in self-defense.
You’re conflating the “need” with the “ability”.
Um. The desire to explore is pretty innate to all life. Not just humans.
How much “exploring” do sedentary lifeforms (plants, mussels, etc) really get up to?
This argument has never really made sense to me. If you picked a random individual lifeform from anywhere in the universe, then yes, there’s a good chance it won’t have much in common with humans. If you take the totality of all life in the universe however, we should see a smoother distribution of behaviors. Human-like behaviors would be within that spectrum by definition and should not be entirely unique.
Let’s say of all the intelligent species in the universe, an average of 1% exhibit whatever motivations are needed to go interstellar, and that 1% of those species got a billion year headstart. Well, due to sampling bias, we should still see that 0.01% represented everywhere.
I was flummoxed for a while because it sounds like this isn’t even related to what I was saying. Until it clicked that it wasn’t.
I only said to be wary of anthropomorphizing non-human creatures. Saying all life explores is assigning the human definition of “going out and charting the uncharted” to all of the exploration that any creature that actually explores does. Other interstellar species could go into space for perfectly practical reasons, like their planet is dying or it’s over capacity and they don’t want to cull their population. Assigning “human wanderlust” as a facet of all (intelligent) life isn’t correct.
I wonder what another being would need of us if it was already able to travel through the vacuum of space while self-sustaining. We’re basically doing that right now anyway.
They’d want our coconuts, I bet. They’re pretty cool, I bet aliens don’t have coconuts. They might have some cool alien fruit to trade for coconuts. Or weed.
Coconuts are mammals
Poetry, fashion, art, exotic pets.
alien pointing at a coconut tree
Look, m’lord! Horses!
Imagine all the room for activities! (Trench warfare)
We make a mistake by assuming that life forms would likely be at the same scale as us. Larger planets would likely develop life forms appropriate for those planets instead of appropriate for ours.
Uh… being smaller or larger does not really change the laws of physics… if the gravity is too high, no fuel has enough energy density to escape the gravity of the celestial body.
If you need 150kg of fuel to get 100kg worth of matter to escape velocity it does not matter how much fuel you have. It will not ever be enough to leave.
Most of the life we see on Earth isn’t even our size!
Life on earth scales from microscopic bacteria all the way up funguses that have an underground network covering thousands of acres.
The chances of us finding life on another planet is pretty slim, the chance of that life looking like us is astronomically miniscule.
Also, of all the millions of species that have evolved on Earth, only one has developed civilisation. We’re an anomaly, not an inevitability. Other planets could be teeming with life, but it’s happy to just chill in the forest/ocean/wherever.
That’s just blatantly incorrect.
Humanity believes that it has the ability to estimate the intelligence of other animals.
And the way that it does so is always by measuring how well the other species imitate human behaviors.
It doesn’t take into account whether those other animals care to imitate human behavior or whether they know they’re imitating human behavior or whether they want to imitate human behavior. And it most certainly doesn’t understand how well those other animals’ intelligence applies within their own niches. You can’t test animals’ intelligence by testing how closely they behave to human beings when operating mimicking human niches and human goals.
Speaking as someone who’s autistic, I’ve done the research on that. In autistic people, there seem to be a higher number of certain specific neanderthal genes. I’m also very gifted, and work in STEM.
Neurotypical human beings are BLOODY TERRIBLE at recognizing any type of intelligence that is different than neurotypical human beings. It is ASTOUNDING how bad they are at it.
Neurotypical people can’t even recognize the intelligence of autistic people. And good luck determining our goals. Other people think I am stupid when they first interact with me, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’ll just say that revealing too much here would reveal my identity, and I’m not going to do that, but I have a list of accomplishments that I literally couldn’t imagine most neurotypical people accomplishing, and I know many other autistic people who are very intelligent. Does this discount neurotypical intelligence? No, not in the least, and it’s not intended to. But it does demonstrate that Fermi’s Law could be nothing more than humanity’s inability to identify other forms of intelligence. And hell, whether you even consider autistic people to be a different kind of intelligence, that’s not even referencing animals.
What neurotypical humanity HAS developed is not the only civilization, but the only widespread manipulation of the environment in ways that significantly distorted the environment in such a way that their presence was undeniable long after an absence. That’s not the same thing.
Damn. As if the atmosphere wasn’t enough of a hurdle already, they gots dumpys too
If the planet is massive enough, getting to orbit becomes a real challenge because fuel consumption scales roughly exponentially with the mass of a planet (delta-v formula, rocket equation).
This leads to an almost sharp cut-off for the maximum mass that a planet can have so that a rocket which utilizes chemical fuel (e.g. methane+oxygen) can still reach orbit successfully. This maximum mass is roughly 10^26 kg.
For reference: Earth’s mass is around 6*10^24 kg.
I propose going to the south pole and just letting go??
I did not know that. It’s because it interferes with gravity? I’m dumb sorry
Not enough gravity, the atmosphere will drift away from the planet with the help of solar winds etc. Too much gravity, and the ammount of fuel you need to leave the plannet weighs more than the rocket the fuel is being used to lift can carry.
Even in our current ships, most of the fuel used to leave orbit is really used to carry the other fuel you need later.
That’s interesting! Thank you!!
What if, and hear me out… Giant trebuchet?
If anything, it’d be a bias towards spaceplane designs over straight up rockets. As long as the atmospheric density relative to the gravity supports it, offloading some of the acceleration to high atmospheric flight using ram/scramjets can massively reduce the launch vehicle mass (don’t need to carry oxidisers for the flight stage).
That being said, it also would be a bias against high orbits and space exploration in general; safe re-entry is tricky enough on earth.
I suspect that atmosphere composition makes different options more or less viable.
The difficulty/cost getting to orbit probably also would influence where a space elevator lands in terms of developmental priority.
We really are in the Goldilocks Zone, aren’t we?
Well, yes. In the middle of the goldilocks zone that is based on the environment we are adapted to is where you would expect to find us :p
Anthropic principle ftw
Haha fair point.
Only if there are not sentient life forms on that planet capable of getting off it
I wonder at what point it is worth building a
space elevatorspace pyramid.Just keep stacking rocks until you’re a few dozen miles away from the edge of space.
yeah this idea actually exists, i think it’s called a mass driver, which is essentially a very high-speed rail gun, that shoots objects directly into orbit without the object having to have much of a propulsion system itself.
This obviously only works if the object isn’t slowed down by atmosphere, which means you’ll have to launch it from high enough up.
This is where the pyramid comes in. You can, of course, also utilize naturally occurring mountains, if your planet has any. These mountains would have to be rather high, though. Like on earth, maybe 100 km. The highest we have are 8 km.
Technically this is just a subtype of Verne gun. Which fun fact kinda existed. Back in the 60s HARP fucked around with a power charge based one down in Baja to achieve sub orbital space flight for a satellite.
Also Sadam Husein wanted to create one so do with that what you will.
Now I’m curious what would actually happen if a planet’s species dedicated themselves to making it happen, build a pyramid up to a geosynchronous orbit so you could theoretically throw something (or jump) and it’ll end up in a higher orbit.
The physics wouldn’t work, of course, but I’m curious exactly how things would go wrong and if there were engineering solutions available to get to the next big thing.
Like one thing is how tall can you get before the base encircles the planet (where trying to add more layers just makes the planet bigger and requires bringing in outside material, which means your geosync orbit gets farther).
Though as you add layers, the surface area increases, so your “pyramid” is actually getting wider as it gets taller, at least at the base.
Or if you can get really high without encircling the planet, how high can you go before affecting the centre of gravity? Could a large enough pyramid give the planet a wobble? Cause flooding on the near side and sea level drops on the far side? How high can you build a solid pyramid before the pressure of it all makes the lowest bricks get melty? Would it even matter or does the rest of the weight just hold it all in place? Or would a sufficiently large pyramid just explode because the sides would give out?
Assuming you had a perfectly strong material that could handle it, is it possible to build a tower to a geosynchronous orbit or will it keep moving away as you add mass to the tower? Would such a tower float in place if you kept building it out past that point and then detached it from the ground?
You definitely wouldn’t want to do this all the way to geosynchronous orbit. Just getting it to the edge of space is already ridiculous to the point where it has me questioning how much pressure and heat the stone at the bottom would reach, and therefore how stable it would be.
And for a super earth, getting out of the soupy atmosphere is a challenge in of itself, so getting rid of that challenge would already be an incredible head start. From there you’d just need engines powerful enough to get you up to speed before hitting the ground.
Like one thing is how tall can you get before the base encircles the planet (where trying to add more layers just makes the planet bigger and requires bringing in outside material, which means your geosync orbit gets farther).
Gut vibe tells me that probably wouldn’t be a problem, as the atmosphere on any given planet, even a super earth, is only about as thin as the skin of an apple relatively speaking. And that’s all you’d need to beat here.
Could a large enough pyramid give the planet a wobble?
Absolutely. Though again gut vibe tells me it would probably only be a wobble of a few millimeters, nowhere near enough for anybody to feel it.
Assuming you had a perfectly strong material that could handle it, is it possible to build a tower to a geosynchronous orbit or will it keep moving away as you add mass to the tower?
I think at a certain point you’d be far enough up that you could reasonably just build a space elevator on top of the pyramid out of normal-ish materials like steel. The farther up you start the less of a foot you have in the gravity well, and the less distance your steel needs to support. At that point it would maybe be worth it do build a counterweight and go to geosynchronous orbit.
Another thing to keep in mind, if some civilization was crazy enough to do this, hopefully they’d be smart enough to do it around their equator to reduce the amount of pyramid of doom they’d need to build. But that would probably also mean bulldozing lots of countries and mass migrations.
To put something in orbit, it has to go sideways very quickly. It has to rotate around earth, such that the free-fall causes the curvature of the circle. For Low Earth Orbit, that’s 7 km/s. You have to get it to that speed, just “jumping” isn’t enough. You’d need some kind of railgun or catapult.
Wouldn’t that much stone alter gravity enough to raise the atmosphere?
It definitely would, but I’m guessing you’d run into the issue of stability far before that.
I’m also guessing that the ratio of atmospheric extension to terrain extension would be on the side of terrain extension. Gravity is a rather weak force in comparison to the other forces of the universe.
This would be a fantastic xkcd “What if?” question if it isn’t already.
You underestimate the motivation of sentient species that just want to get away from other members of its species.
Or it’s likely a mini-Neptune type planet with more atmosphere than ground and therefore likely won’t have complex life at all. Or complex life able to try and do that.
They’ve just got to dig a hole down through the core of the planet and then drop craft down the hole to “slingshot” them into orbit.
I love slingshots that pull from all sides at once.
I’d sling that shot
To everyone saying launching to orbit is impossible, I have two words: Orion Drive
Early versions of the vehicle were designed for ground launch, but later versions were intended for use only in space.
I don’t think a ground launch Orion Drive would work without some crazy material science and infrastructure. Like a “flame trench” that can withstand a nuclear blast and a craft that doesn’t rip itself to shred just from the shockwave alone.
so it’s possible, once
