[Q&A+] Fermi Paradox Special | Q&A 349
Can the difficulty of interstellar travel the answer to the Fermi paradox? Or maybe it's the fact that we can only apply it to our galaxy and not further? Or maybe we can even find life in our solar system?
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Comments (13)
Amazing as always, and I respect what you said about the journalist, but there is a difference you reach people such as myself that have college level education and you intrigue me and encourage me to educate myself further, but as per your request, I will check them out
According to Abi Loeb, Oumuamua *was* one of those smart rocks! Just sayin'!
There was a movie in the 1960s that was about the bonus question, except the duplicate Earth was in the L3 Lagrange point of this solar system. In Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969), an astronaut is confused when his trip around the Sun seems to take only half as long as it was supposed to take. However, he quickly discovers that everything on counter-Earth is the mirror image of everything on his Earth. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, famous for Space 1999 and numerous puppet adventure shows, wrote the script along with Donald James.
Lol I didn't know about that movie hehe. I think scientists have proven there is no large object at the sun L3 just by measuring the wobble of the sun. But you know, cool story for sure.
There seems to be a contradiction between what is being looked for and what we observe on Earth. Life on Earth started very early, but it was a very primitive life. Would SETI and its ilk be able to detect such primitive life on other planets. Looking for technologically advanced life of the type we presently have on Earth did not happen so early in the Earth's history but took many billions of years to develop, and we cannot foretell how long it will even last before it dies.
There are some signatures of life that can be observed even if no technology is present. For instance, if there is a significant percentage of O2 in a planet's atmosphere, that almost certainly means there is life present because O2 will normally react with other elements. As far as we know, the only way free O2 can be found in an atmosphere is if life produces it.
Inert bodies can travel between stars exactly because they are inert. The question is how would life survive for such prolonged time periods that such interstellar travel takes? There would have to be certain constraints for such a life-form to take to undertake such a journey. The most important issue is that it must live a very long life, but also a very slow life in order to conserve energy (by slow, I do not mean that travel speed will be slow, but that decision times would be slow, and rates of acceleration would be slow). It might even be that in order to conserve energy for such long travel times that its respiration would be so slow that we would not even detect anything that we would recognise as respiration on our own time-scales. The other thing is that since it would have to be very well adapted to travel through space that landing on any planets surface might kill it (its landing on Earth might feel to it as we might feel if we tried to land on the surface of Jupiter), so the most it could achieve is to orbit above the planet.
Simply just needs to be a tartigrade to survive the journey 😁
Why assume that life traveled from Earth to Europa? Maybe it was the other way around, that life on a smaller body started out but because it was smaller it was easier to leave the smaller world and reach a larger world, such as the Earth? Or maybe life started out on a now defunct body, and the death throes of that body was what sent life forth to many other bodies in the solar system?
“What are you doing under this street lamp?” “Looking for my keys. I lost them in that dark alley over there.” “Then why are you looking for them here, under the street light?” “I can’t see in that dark alley.” I think there’s a lot of observation bias. Red dwarfs are easy to find planets around, and they transit very often. But they’re proving to be deeply unsuitable for all the known reasons (tidal locking, extreme radiation). We just haven’t been able to make the right kind of observations (decade-plus long continuous surveys) on more than a handful of K and G dwarfs. It’s simply too early to draw any meaningful conclusions about what’s to be found around the best candidate stars. As for Von Neumann probes and similar, there are two issues. One is that interstellar travel might just be too hard no matter how you try to do it. The other is that technological civilization might have too much of a tendency to burn out to war, resource exhaustion, etc. very quickly, then revert to pre-industrial and not recover (due to all of the resources needed for bootstrapping an industrial civilization having been used up… no more easily recovered metal and hydrocarbons so now stuck behind that wall). My own opinion is … both.
Just need a Bobiverse version of von Neumann probe for it to work 😁
I gave a question. Could we put cameras, instruments, people etc... on a passing interstellar asteroid such as I3 and use that as our spacecraft to go interstellar and just collect info, pics etc? Thank You Frazier
Yes, but statistically it's unlikely to arrive near another object for a few million years so... But if we find one that has a perfect trajectory to a destination star, your idea is absolutely the best way to get there! Probably just taking an in-solar asteroid and building a habitat inside and then propulsing it to a destination of our choice could be one of the best ways to move a lot of xyz to ABC destination.