Gliese 581
April 25th, 2007Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
This fascinating discovery portends all sorts of interesting ethical, political, and policy questions. I do wonder how much thinking governments, the Vatican, and others have put into developing a response plan for when life is discovered beyond Earth. It’d be surprising if there were no thinking along these lines, then again, maybe not.
April 25th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
I’ll be a bit surprised if we don’t discover life within our solar system (e.g. bacteria on Mars or one of Jupiter’s moons). But the really exciting/significant finding would be intelligent life.
However, there’s a paradox about intelligent life. Specifically, if it really does exist beyond Earth, why haven’t they already made their presence known?
Consider this:
1) We’ve gone from essentially zero technology to the ability to detect life outside our solar system (even outside our galaxy) in less than 100,000 years. In contrast, the universe has been able to support intelligent life for billions of years. Therefore, if other intelligent life exists, the odds are very strong that they’ve had our levels of technology for thousands, millions, or even more than a billion years.
2) Therefore, they must have known there was life on Earth since perhaps even the time of the dinosaurs.
3) If they’ve known life exists on Earth for thousands or millions of years, why haven’t they stopped by, or at least sent out some kind of signal.
4) We’ve been monitoring for signals from extraterrestrials (via SETI) for decades…and we’ve been looking into the sky for thousands of years. So why hasn’t any ET signaled us?
http://www.seti.org
5) Two possible conclusions are:
a) We’re alone (there is no other intelligence), or
b) They don’t want us to know they exist.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Mark there can be other reasons why id there is intelligence somewhere else we were not contacted.
1)Intelligence can be more recent in other system.
2)Even if there was an intelligent life form on this planet it would take them 20 millions year to contact us. Let supposed that they were able to listen to earth 20 millions year ago there was nothing to listen.
3)Maybe they still haven’t discovered us.
4)maybe there is no one on this planet but there is someone in a solar system in another galaxy.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
If you were intelligent enough to travel across space, would you contact this barbaric world and risk their taking war beyond earth? I think not.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Hi Sylvain,
“Mark there can be other reasons why id there is intelligence somewhere else we were not contacted.
1)Intelligence can be more recent in other system.”
That’s possible. But it’s unlikely, since intelligence is so recent in our system. Let’s say the universe has had life-supporting planets for the last ~10 billion years. Our intelligence (homosapiens) is only about 100,000 years old. That’s one hundred-thousandth of the available time. It seems much more likely that any other intelligences would in fact be much, much (much!) older than ours. They’d likely been intelligent for tens or hundreds of millions of years. At the rate our technology is progressing, even a couple hundred years more advanced than our technology would be almost incomprehensible. (Imagine Thomas Jefferson returning to see the U.S. in 2007. It’s been less than 200 years since he died, but I doubt he could even imagine a place like New York City. Buildings 100 stories tall. Lights. Cars. Subways. Airplanes. Air conditioning.)
“2)Even if there was an intelligent life form on this planet it would take them 20 millions year to contact us. Let supposed that they were able to listen to earth 20 millions year ago there was nothing to listen.”
Well, the Milky Way galaxy is “only”(!) ~100,000 light years in diameter. So if it’s taking them 20 million years to contact us, they are well outside our galaxy.
I’m not saying that extraterrestrials should necessarily know we’re here. But why couldn’t they send signals out that we could detect in our galaxy? For example, SETI has been listening to radio frequencies for several decades. If there are lots of ETs in our galaxy and in other galaxies, why aren’t they sending out radio beacons?
Or to take a visual example, in a couple decades, humans should be able to build a gigawatt (GW, or 1,000,000,000 Watts) laser. Note: The most powerful laser we have now is about 13,000 Watts:
http://www.llnl.gov/str/October02/Dane.html
If we beamed that 1 GW laser at selected planets in our galaxy that we thought have life, they’d be able to see it (after the proper time had passed for the light to get there). In fact, even planets in other galaxies could probably see it with our level of telescopes, if the other galaxies were perpendicular to our galactic plane.
So why haven’t we seen laser lights (even with telescopes) or heard radio beacons?
“3)Maybe they still haven’t discovered us.”
Yes, but it doesn’t seem necessary to me for them to have discovered us, for us to discover them. Like I wrote above, if they have technology not much advanced beyond ours, they should be able to beam light or radio waves that would be seen/heard across the galaxy, or even outside the galaxy (as long as it’s outside the interference of the plane of the Milky Way).
So the fact that our radio and optical telescopes have yet to pick up any signals of intelligence is puzzling, since the ETs could just send signals, even if they didn’t know we were here.
“4)maybe there is no one on this planet but there is someone in a solar system in another galaxy.”
Oh, yes, I’m not expecting any intelligent life on Gliese 581.
It seems to me we already know intelligence and technology of our level must be fairly uncommon, since we haven’t detected anyone yet. (Unless they’re all very advanced, and are deliberately not interested in sending us signals.
Mark
April 26th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Hi Harry,
“If you were intelligent enough to travel across space, would you contact this barbaric world and risk their taking war beyond earth? I think not.”
Any beings that could travel to Earth from anywhere outside our solar system would be so advanced beyond us that our wars would be no more dangerous to them than observing two chimps fighting is dangerous to us.
In any contact, the danger would almost certainly be all to us, not to the ETs.
April 26th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Even traveling at sublight speeds an inteligent species could explore and colonize an entire galaxy in a few million years, with the first colonies spawning subsequent colonies and so forth until the species has spread to every habitable corner of its galaxy. Therefore the first inteligence in a galaxy will be the only inteligence if it is exploitative or hostile – like us. If it is benevolent then perhaps it will avoid planets with the potential to develop their own inteligence, and will mask its own presence until it determines a new species has reached a chosen point in its evolution. I doubt we have reached that point, and won’t until we send out first unmanned and manned interstellar missions out into the galaxy. At that time we will learn whether we are the first inteligence in our galaxy.
If we are the first, will we leave room for other inteligences to develop in the future?
April 26th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
I think that this new planet could be a dopple-ganger of ours now. What if it’s our Earth, in another zone, same people, same daily routines and that they have discovered us but only at the same time that we made the discovery. It’s a lot to think about. Who’s to say that the next step we take is to inhabit this planet and in turn they do the same? Anything can come from this, but I guess we’ll have to find out in time.
April 28th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Mark -
You’re being simplistic. It’s not our weapons in our hands, it’s the potential of us getting our hands on their weapons/technology that would be the concern.
April 28th, 2007 at 8:11 am
Harry,
You write, “You’re being simplistic. It’s not our weapons in our hands, it’s the potential of us getting our hands on their weapons/technology that would be the concern.”
Well, I hate to be a geek and reference Star Trek, but I *am* a geek, so I guess it’s appropriate.
There’s an episode where the Shelliac want to take over a planet that has earth colonists on it. (Their ship had taken a wrong turn a couple hundred years before, and they’d settled on a different planet than expected.)
Data uses a phaser to disable most of the colonists’ aqueduct system. And when the colonists want to fight the Shelliac, Data points out, “There will be no ‘fight.’ They’ll wipe out every last one of you from orbit. You’ll never even see the beings who kill you.”
That would be the same thing will ET technology. There would be no way of our acquiring their technology to fight them or anyone else.
To give an example, suppose I gave you a Russian MiG fighter. Could you then use it against the Russians in Chechnya? Could you use it against anyone? Of course not. First of all, unless you have experience flying a plane, you’d probably never get it off the ground. In fact, since you probably don’t speak Russian, you probably couldn’t even start the engines. And even if by some miracle you could get it off the ground, an experienced pilot (with hundreds or thousands of hours of flight and simulated combat time) would drop you out of the sky like a rock.
And we’re not even talking about technology that would be thousands of years advanced beyond our own. Think of a neaderathal using an M16. First of all, they wouldn’t even have the concept of bullets…so when the magazine was empty, even with other magazines nearby, they probably would even understand that they had to reload.
Like I wrote before, the danger of any contact between any very advanced civilization and a primitive civilization is virtually all to the primitive civilization. Any civilization that could travel to Earth from outside our solar system (which is where they’d have to be coming from!) would be so advanced compared to us that they’d almost certainly have the capability to kill every single human without us ever firing a shot. And the odds that we could ever figure out and use an ET technology against anyone are very low.
April 28th, 2007 at 8:22 am
“Even traveling at sublight speeds an inteligent species could explore and colonize an entire galaxy in a few million years, with the first colonies spawning subsequent colonies and so forth until the species has spread to every habitable corner of its galaxy.”
Yes, that’s part of the reason why most scientists who’ve thought about ET intelligence think it must be extremely rare. If any intelligence can colonize an entire galaxy in a few million years, why can’t we see entire galaxies that are obviously populated with intelligent life?
Further, if a species could colonize an entire galaxy (e.g., the Milky Way, 100,000 light years across), why would the distance between that galaxy and subsequent galaxies be unpassable?
So if there are ET intelligences, why aren’t they already here? Or at least very obvious from radio or visual telescope searches?
April 28th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Mark -
You’re still missing the point. Neandertals’ brains were bigger than outs. What makes you think they could not be taught to shoot a gun? (Speaking of Neandertal, Trinkaus is putting two and two together – http://www.imedinews.ge/en/news_read/35603)
And, extrapolate on the fact we are still here. If E.T. wanted to “do us in” he would have done it a long time ago.
No, they don’t want to unleash us right now any more than we want baboons running wild in New York City. We still have too much aggression. So, we fight wars and slowly weed that out, becoming more and more civilized all the time.
But, we still fight wars.
P.S. Star Trek??? Isn’t that kind of like getting one’s opinions on “global warming” from Alanis Morissette?
April 28th, 2007 at 11:12 am
1) Quote from ‘Suburban Jungle’: “Space. Big. Empty.” Even if we *did* find intelligent and technologically-advanced life on Gliese 581c, it’d take hundreds of years to reach them. As far as everyone should be concerned, it’s impossible to ‘go warp’ or ‘go hyperspace’, no matter what. Now, even a snailspeed colonization of space would require so much time and means (no to mention the enormous difficulties related to a permanent planetary settling), that it shouldn’t be a wonder that even the most advanced civilization could have covered a fistful of worlds in this galaxy only. We folks *need* to remember that traveling in a generational ship is not like taking the bus. It’s a 1-way trip, and it’s quite plausible that the crew would rather stay on the newfound planet rather than hop for another -before a couple generations, that is.
2) The signals to space: I can’t remember when SETI covered Gliese 581, but it would’ve been a darn longhsot to reach our ‘new Earth’ at the first shot, especially since the planet is located far closer to its sun than we thought, AND at that time a dim red dwarf wasn’t considered a proper target for exploration… Anyway, assuming we hit jackpot a 10 years ago, it’d still take not less than 21 years for a signal to reach us. Yes, the ETs should reach the signal, interpret it, decide what send back to us -I believe that the consultations would take not less than one to two extra years…Oh, yes, and they would have to AIM at us.
3) the signals from space. The idea of intercepting their own broadcast signals is simply ludicrous After 20 lightyears, any domestic TV or radio signal would be totally lost. Furthermore, the close sun would make a powerful interference source.
4) Did they find us at all, in the past? If they’re aware of our existence as planet, it is possible that they’re waiting for us to tell something, just as we’re doing with them. From now on, we’ll have to wait not less than 40 years to learn if this is the case. I hope that, given a very specific target, this time SETI will send as much information as possible.
5) for now, I’ll wait to see if the spectrometric analyses will tell us if Gliese-581c will harbor a suitable atmosphere…
April 28th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
“You’re still missing the point.”
No, you’re missing the point, Harry. You seem to think primitive savagery is exportable like some kind of viral or bacteriological disease.
That’s overwhelmingly contradicted by available evidence here on earth. Just look at the primitive savagery going on in Dafur right now. Or the primitive savagery in Rwanda in the 1990s. Was or is anyone on earth honestly worried that the mindless violence in those countries would somehow spread to the rest of the world…that somehow we’d all end up ethnically cleansing other people?
No, instead we watch films like “Hotel Rwanda,” or TV shows like “60 Minutes” and think, “Boy, what incredibly screwed up places. Thank goodness I don’t live there.” There’s no reason to think that if ETs came to earth it would be any different. In fact, the situation would be even more likely to be isolated. At least people in Rwanda and Dafur are humans…they know about cars and airplanes. How do you think humans could even get off of earth, to export our wars to the rest of the galaxy?
“Neandertals’ brains were bigger than outs. What makes you think they could not be taught to shoot a gun?”
I think they could be TAUGHT to shoot a gun. But I don’t think they’d be any substantial danger to homosapiens even 1 mile away–let alone a country or a continent away–if they were simply given guns. They’d be much more likely to kill one of themselves than any humans. Probably they’d take it back to their cave, fire it and kill or wound one of their family members, and decide that guns were very bad news.
“And, extrapolate on the fact we are still here. If E.T. wanted to “do us in” he would have done it a long time ago.”
Yes, that has been pretty much my point since the start. We haven’t ever had any contact with ET intelligence. Therefore, it seems like two strong possibilities (though there are of course many more) are that there are no ET intelligences, or they are deliberately hiding themselves.
“No, they don’t want to unleash us right now any more than we want baboons running wild in New York City.”
“Unleash us?” We’d be no more danger to intelligent beings on other planets than Hutus and Tutsis are to us here in the U.S. In fact, we’d be orders of magnitude less dangerous, because they could come to Earth, but we couldn’t go to their home planets (unless they took us there with their technology).
Once again, when two civilizations meet, the evidence on earth is overwhelming that the danger is almost exclusively to the civilization with the more primitive technology.
Violence and primitive technology are not communicable diseases. Let alone communicable diseases that could magically be communicated across light years.
April 28th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Sorry Mark, your frame of reference is irrational, and you continue to make my point. There are very small genetic differences between Homo sapiens.
It was well illustrated when you said: “Once again, when two civilizations meet, the evidence on earth is overwhelming that the danger is almost exclusively to the civilization with the more primitive technology.”
which you did not integrate with your previous statement: “There would be no way of our acquiring their technology to fight them or anyone else”.
Which is exactly the point. Eventually, and well before our warlike ways are bred out of us, (or rather statistically eliminated) we *would* have their technology through trade, if they let us join their “club” now…
We have more purging to do.
April 28th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
“Which is exactly the point. Eventually, and well before our warlike ways are bred out of us, (or rather statistically eliminated) we *would* have their technology through trade,…”
Through trade!?
What in the world do you think we could possibly have that some civilization 1000+ years advanced from us would want?
And even if we had something they wanted, if they knew we were warlike, why in the world would they give us their weapons for something they wanted?
Why not give us 80-inch 3-D roll-up TVs instead?
Also, don’t you think it would be a relatively trivial matter for a civilization even 50-100 years advanced from us today to destroy that part of the human brain that allows humans to kill?
June 4th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
When we begin interstellar explorations we will find a “primitive” alien race and our first thought will be to observe from afar, preventing “contamination” in all manner.
Would this not be the intelligent thing to do ?