Is it a good idea to colonize other planets?

Don't pack your bags just yet...

If we go by what Star Trek has told us for 60 years, you'll be able to rock up to any mid-sized planet and take a stroll without so much as a pressure suit.

You wouldn't believe that if you had a look around our local backyard.

Venus can melt lead at the surface. The big-boy outer planets don't have a surface to stand on. Jupiter's five times the distance from the Sun as we are, and it gets longer from there. Their moons are cold, airless, and lifeless (probably).

Mars is the "best" choice for setting up shop off Earth. Though that's like saying that eating broken glass with Tabasco sauce is the best choice when the only other option is to drink battery acid. Mars resembles the worst deserts on Earth, only without a trace of water, little atmosphere, pelted by radiation, covered by rogue sand-storms, and there might be sleeping tentacle-monsters we don't know about yet.

That's the best option.

Sci-fi on the tee-vee creates the impression that we're going to find a lot of Earth-like planets out there. That's possible.

But "Earth like" doesn't mean like Earth.

Is RP drinking again? Not yet.

"Earth like" means that we're talking about similarities in the gross physical parameters. Mass, diameter, orbital distance from the local star, surface temperature, chemical make-up.

That sounds optimistic until you realize that Earth-like is very general... while the conditions that support life on our home planet are extremely specific.

Look at how much the climate-change stuff freaks people out and they're only talking about a couple degrees change in the global mean temperature.

That's only one example. There's dozens, hundreds of variables. Air pressure. Chemical make-up of the atmosphere. Gravity. Tides. Moons to create them.

Odds of finding a planet that is dialed in precisely, or even close enough to walk around with minimal protection? I don't know and I strongly doubt anyone can make an honest calculation. But I wouldn't put money on it.

Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 has a line that really brings home the problems with this whole project of colonizing other planets (no spoilers).

It goes like this.

If you colonize a planet that can't support life, you'll have to bring all of your survival needs with you on the trip.

If you find a planet that does support life, you'll have to compete with it... meaning you'll have to bring all of your survival needs with you on the trip.

That's right. Even if we find life out there, which is likely to the point of almost certainty IMHO, there's no guarantee it will be anything like us.

We're not talking about primitive humans with spears and different forehead shapes. Think deeper than that.

We're talking about differences in the fundamental units of life. The genetic code and the amino acids that alien life uses are unlikely to be similar to our own. Everything from the bacteria and viruses and all the other tiny organisms you never think about would be totally different.

Which means you can't eat them. Which means you can't grow your own food without a whole lot of trouble.

And they'd be everywhere, much the way that life on Earth is pretty much everywhere.

It's real easy to forget how much Earth gives us "for free". Air, water, protection from space-rage, gravity. Out in a spaceship, on another planet, you don't get any of that. You have to haul it all out there with you.

Life-supporting planets may be rare, and if a planet can support life you can expect life has already taken over.

The Culture has the right idea. Living on planets is for chumps. If you want to live in space, build luxury habitats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymSjXoGgM_o

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Space is terrifying

Lots of people could be watching you right now (and they aren't in Silicon Valley for once)

The eggheads have made a shocking discovery:

The researchers identified 1,715 stars that could have spotted Earth transits since about 5,000 years ago, which is about when civilizations began to bloom on Earth.

Whew.

It gets better (worse):

... the researchers estimated that 29 of these 75 stars may possess rocky worlds in their habitable zones.

Seven of the 2,034 stars are known hosts of exoplanets that have had or will have the chance to detect Earth just as Earth's scientists have detected them. Three of these seven exoplanetary systems — K2-65, K2-155 and K2-240 — can currently see Earth.

A key tenet of ours around this slice of the cyberspace:

You DON'T want to discover the aliens.

If they're out there, let 'em be.

Why's that? Aren't they going to be fuzzy forehead people with warp drives, just like mass pop culture drilled into your brain for the last 70 odd years?

Far be it from me to challenge what's programming your brain-waves on the TV.

But the puzzle known to normies as "Fermi's Paradox" implies strange and frankly worrying consequences.

Why's it so quiet out there?

All those nearby stars... lots of them with rocky planets in the star's habitable zone... and not a peep.

No signals. No signs of high-energy propulsion. No antimatter farms. No visits from self-replicating probes (maybe).

Earth's about four and a half billion years old.

Best guess is that the median age of planets is close to six and a half billion years with the oldest being around 9 billion.

That's a huge gap.

If Earth is a typical, unexceptional, not-special occupant of the universe, then we should expect the average age of civilizations to be much older than ours.

All modern science does assume this. It's called the Copernican principle. We are not special.

With all the stars out there...

Some of them very old...

And the likelihood that a few of these very old stars ought to have civilizations older than Earth's continents...

Where is everybody?

Maybe they're all dead. Maybe civilizations don't last that long. Maybe they're at a sleepover with Chtulhu.  

You can cook up any number of explanations.

But you mean to say that not one of them sent out self-replicating devices? Not one of them sent out a signal that we’d detect? Not one of them made a neat-o decoration out of stars?

That defies belief.

That should terrify you down to your frozen bones.

It means either that our scientific studies of the stars have gone badly wrong somewhere, somehow...

Or else we are badly mistaken about some of our key assumptions – about how common life should be, about what minds are like, about how species evolve, about intelligence and its motivations... and so on.

Maybe Earth isn't as typical as the scientists and natural philosophers assume.

Maybe there's another reason it's so quiet out there.

Maybe everybody else knows to keep their fool mouths shut.

And if somebody did turn up out there? It might be better to skip the "hello".

Instead of E.T. you might find The Thing knocking at your door.

It might not be as bad as all that. Instead of carnivorous shapeshifters in flying saucers, it might just be that everybody dies out in the cold night.

Though I'd rather have the crazy aliens I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=739jf9DuKEM

PS – If you enjoy these posts, why not subscribe? That way you can receive them directly in your inbox... and you'll get the members-only posts.

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