Slashdot Mirror
Billions of Habitable Planets?
cbv writes: "MSNBC has an interesting article about new calculations by Charly Lineweaver and Daniel Grether, both of the University of New South Wales in Australia, which provides an interesting answer to the question on how many potentially habitable planets exist in our galaxy."
Because by the time we can find another one that is, this one won't be.
--Blair
"Keeping up with the Gbrtlrxzes."
if we could actually see these smaller planets.
What will it take to get a program going to actually send people out to them?
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
Where,
N = The number of communicative civilizations
The number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose radio emissions are detectable.
R* = The rate of formation of suitable stars
The rate of formation of stars with a large enough "habitable zone" and long enough lifetime to be suitable for the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of those stars with planets
The fraction of Sun-like stars with planets is currently unknown, but evidence indicates that planetary systems may be common for stars like the Sun. more info
ne = The number of "earths" per planetary system
All stars have a habitable zone where a planet would be able to maintain a temperature that would allow liquid water. A planet in the habitable zone could have the basic conditions for life as we know it. more info
fl = The fraction of those planets where life develops
Although a planet orbits in the habitable zone of a suitable star, other factors are necessary for life to arise. Thus, only a fraction of suitable planets will actually develop life.
fi = The fraction life sites where intelligence develops
Life on Earth began over 3.5 billion years ago. Intelligence took a long time to develop. On other life-bearing planets it may happen faster, it may take longer, or it may not develop at all. For more information, please visit Dr. William Calvin's "The Drake Equation's fi"
fc = The fraction of planets where technology develops
The fraction of planets with intelligent life that develop technological civilizations, i.e., technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = The "Lifetime" of communicating civilizations
The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
I want my own planet. Of course, you're all invited as guests - I should have plenty room.
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
we need to find them first before we can see them
:-P
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Billions and billions of Jupiters...
If only we could live on Jupiter
Wake me up when we find billions of Earths...
I live in a Slashdot world.
"For now, no one knows whether our solar system represents a common method of formation and evolution. In fact, discoveries over the past six years seem to indicate otherwise. Most of the roughly 80 planets discovered outside our solar system are much more massive than Jupiter. They also orbit perilously close to their host stars, locations that would likely prevent rocky planets from forming in so-called habitable orbits.
But experts attribute these findings to the limitations of technology. "
Hmm, WAG anyone? Wild assed guess for those that are AC (Acronmyn-Challenged).
I would bet a terabyte of New Zealand Sheep porn that tomorrow there will be 500 stories debunking this. More "proof by way of media" sounds like to me.
I loved this comment:
'?Our solar system is Jupiter and a bunch of junk,? as Lineweaver puts it.'
Yeah baby, I live on a hurling mass of yesterdays dinner and some junk mail....wohooo.....
Sent from your iPad.
All stars that are similar to our own have odds in favor of having habitable planets. Compound that with the number of similar stars in the galaxy and you come up with a pretty big number of possibly habitable planets altogether. Seems like common sense.
This is of course assuming that life is possible without intervention from a god-being.
If life does exist out there, I hope it isn't full of socialist trolls like our own blair who got fp.
What, if any, businesses are preparing to exploit that life, if possible. This shouldn't seem such a far out idea, after all, 500 years ago someone set sail with three ships across the Atlantic and look how ill-prepared they were for what they found.
Suppose M$/MSN has a plan to spread influence extraterrestrially?
Shudder.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
By the time we have the sufficent amount of technology for exploring the billions of Eaths out there, I am sure we will have plenty of technology regarding space stations. The only purpose I see in colonizing planets is for just mineral mining and for exploration. There should be no need to try and terraform or have to shape the Earth-like planets to our needs, we should just build space stations. At least then we do not have to worry about having insuitable worlds, or worlds that are unproductive. Also, a space station would be customizable for purpose and for people. There is no need to colonize many planets!
Kyle "DotCom" Lynch
...I need some cheeze-its...
I think you'll find that history bears out that it was those on the American continent who were wildly ill-prepared for those who found them.
you do realize the only people you're pissing off are the ones who read at -1, dont you? nobody else sees your shit, so you're really just fucking over the "trolls" (who dont really troll) and crapflooders from trolltalk.
You really should knock that shit off.
- Anomymous Coward
The only original take is that those 'one percents' are getting replaced with percentages actually based in reality.
Speculations like this used to be popular because astronomy was nowhere near the technology needed to actually see planets out there. If I remember correctly, the first true proof of planets around other stars occurred around 1995 when these first gas giants started to be detected.
With the detection methods getting better every year though, it's only a matter of time before we can directly detect terrestrial sized planets around other stars. That's the point where these statistical guesses get kind of silly.
"I bet there's a thousand planets out there!"
"Actually, there are 1422. We can just count them now."
stipe42
www.pcwatch.com
But, my theory is 40 years old.
How is this news and, more importantly, why didn't I get any credit.
.
Regarding earth-like planets with water and rock, the article stated:
...They may be as common as Jupiters, or they may be much less common.
Alan Boss, an expert in planetary system formation at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the new calculations for Jovian twins seem reasonable. Trying then to estimate the number of Earthlike planets requires "a leap of faith, but one which appears to be plausible," he said.
So the headline was a bit much in this case.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
The guy is right that having Jupiter as a shield definitely has made a difference in Earth's ability to support life over the long term; however, he doesn't touch on what might the more significant fact: our solarsystem is located in the boondocks of our galaxy. What this means is there is a whole lot less debris floating around to smash into earth. The closer you move towards the galactic core, the more crap there is and the less effective a Jupiter shield would be.
From Douglas Adams...
Number of Planets in the Universe = infinity
Number of Populated Planets in the Universe = N
n
--------- = 0
infinity
Face it, most of astronomy is based wholey on WAGs. Even Hawking admits most of his stuff is WAG.
.
Y'know - the worst thing about this is - everytime you post it, I get that damn song in my head.
so the argument goes that since jupiter in some manner made life possible for earth, and total destruction for many other planets . . . this doesn't sound like a very intelligent way of going about it at all! "Hey, let's find all the giant planet destroyers because they sometimes, in very rare and complicated circumstances, factor into making possible in their own limited way!" somehow, i don't think so.
...Billions and Billions...
</sagan voice>
Boy, I'll miss that guy! One of the many people who triggered lots of tech interest in me and made me who I am!
Very high... 30 billion jupiters != 30 billion earths. Just because there is a jupiter sized world (even assuming similar orbit instead of an insanely close orbit to the star) doesn't mean anything else useful formed inside its orbit. However if even .01% of those have conditions even approaching those required for life (like Mars) then chances are good for there to be hundreds of even thousands of intelligent species out of maybe a few tens or hundreds of million worlds of most likely algae and microbes.
So in short, I think this guy is nuts to suggest billions of earths. Maybe millions (tens or hundreds) in the venus->mars range but not billions.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Being out in BFE means a far smaller likelihood of another star passing close enough to perturb the orbits of all the planets in a system. The impact of comets can change climate briefly, but with a huge effect on life; think what a semi-permanent (until the next perturbation) change in climate could do to life which had evolved for a particular set of conditions. A few trips through an over-greenhoused state would be enough to wipe out most everything but extremophile bacteria, making it very unlikely that higher life forms (let alone intelligence) could develop.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Thinking that Earth is the only inhabitable planet in the galaxy or even the universe is so last millenium.
;)
It doesn't take a genius (just a bit of open-mindedness) to figure out that in the vast reaches of just our own galaxy (not to mention the universe) the chances are good that additional systems similar to Sol were formed.
Remember: The absence of proof is not the proof of absence.
On a lighter note, I really hope they'd hurry up and colonize another planet. Then, next time some ecologist gets on my nerves by saying: "THINK OF THE PLANET!" I can retort: Sheesh, it's not like it's the only one we've got!".
And yes, I know I stole that from Futurama
maybe it's 42 billion :)
I've been thinking there should be another factor to that equation. Call it fv = The fraction of civilizations that survive viral plagues.
In this century we've seen ebola and AIDS. In the previous century (IIRC) smallpox, which did a real number on the world's population at the time. We've documented the first cases of these viruses, which suggests to me that they mutated from a formerly innocuous form into one deadly to people.
What would happen today if we witnessed the first outbreak of smallpox? Or something nastier than AIDS, that only becomes deadly after an incubation period of months or years? With our current level of civilization the carriers of such diseases could infect nearly the entire planet before the first bodies started to drop. Could our civilization survive losing 90%+ of the population in every location? Could any?
Perhaps that's why we haven't found any advanced alien civilizations, or any evidence that any ever existed, yet. Perhaps they all fell victim to their own diseases.
Anyone who believes that there is not an assload of planets that could possibly support sentient life is incredibly arrogant.
Anyone who believes that a "god-like being" would only create life on a singular planet is even more arrogant.
Anyone who believes that we will be able to easily find them within the next century is naive.
Anyone who thinks that people will be sent to any such planets found within the current century is a tool.
Remember, the earth is not the center of the universe (unless of course, all points in the universe are equidistant from every other point, then every point is the center of the universe, which would really mean it has no center. But what are the odds of that...).
That being said... I wouldn't mind taking a ride on a monkey fueled liquid nitrogen cooled rocket sleigh to some far off planet and get it on with alien chicks with 2 bellybuttons, like William Shatner.
I am a big, fluffy, cute, cuddly bunny. fear me.
As the article says, Jupiter-like planets can act like a debris-magnet to protect Earth-like planets from comets, asteroids, and the various other junk floating around solar systems. Their immense gravity can either force and object out of the solar system entirely or force it to collide with the large gas giant. (An impact which would leave Earth near-barran for centuries is barely felt on Jupiter gas giant.)
The moons of the Jupiter-like planet offer another possibility for life. Like Europa, gravitational stresses from orbiting such a large planet can cause heat to warm up a normally frozen world. This heat might help melt ice into water (as is thought to be on Europa under the ice shell). And where there's water, life might not be far behind.
Now this isn't to say that life=intelligence. We might be talking about the ET equivalent of bacteria, here. Still, the discovery of ET-bacteria would be a huge matter.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That link redirects to http://msid.msn.com/mps_id_sharing/redirect.asp?ww w.msnbc.com/news/create_p1.asp?URL=www.msnbc.com/n ews/695943.asp which doesn't work because my HTTP filter blocks accesses to msid.msn.com for privacy reasons.
http://www.pc-help.org/privacy/ms_guid.htm has more info about msid shenanigans.
Another habitable planet might be a good idea but we (apparently) won't be needing it very soon (barring the actions of the Bush EPA).
Frankly, I've always wondered why the rush to find other civilizations. Unless we confidently expect to be able to do to them what Cortez did to the Aztecs, I think the best idea is to hope the Earth stays hidden from prying eyes. Afterall, we may be Aztecs to them! And since when has a lesser civilization benefitted from meeting a superior one?
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Doesn't matter how many there are if we can't get them. BC
If there are aliens, where are they?
Sounds silly? I agree. Sounds like "The Fermi Paradox" is too fancy a name for a natural objection? I agree on this too. However, when you think about it, it becomes fairly obvious that it really is the only argument in this debate that is somewhere between strong and very strong.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
Is where Vulcan is and how we can get in touch with them without having to build some dang warp powered rocket...
article? It talked about the composition of the star that was needed to foster life bearing planets, and how those stars were only found in a small ring percentage of the galaxy.
Anyone who believes that there is not an assload of planets that could possibly support sentient life is incredibly arrogant.
Anyone who believes that a "god-like being" would only create life on a singular planet is even more arrogant.
No personal offense intended, but isn't is also then true that anyone who dogmatically asserts the opposite is equally arrogant? Let's remember that science is (or is supposed to be) the search for knowledge (from the Latin sciens, having knowledge). These guys can make their estimates all they want. But the fact is that there is currently exactly one known planet with life: Earth. Later facts might prove them right. But they might prove them wrong, too.
Fact is that if there was life on another planet we would not be able to get there with current technology and understanding of physics. It would take to long traveling at what scientists today call the maximum speed limit 'the speed of light'. Maybe someday when we understand space and time better but not now.
Watch Discovery channel now and then as they already went over alot of this stuff. They made a discovery a while ago and discovered how to detect the 'gas giants' as they call them (jupiter / sturn sized planets) orbiting a star by watching the stars wabble.
And for you real space fanatics http://www.spaceref.com/ and www.space.com are great sites.
Lastly I cant type and spell so don't point out my typoes and spelling errors it is really laim.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Great, as soon as they reveal their locations their going to get spammed.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Our universe is probably a mere atom inside a larger universe, and these radiation bursts are simply the efforts of their Einstein trying to split us.
What are... humans?
I'll take SWords for 1000, Alex.
If you live in a space station, you have to keep building out the station in order to create room for more people. That's a lot of effort.
But if you colonize planets, everyone can have a lot of sex to fill the place up, and the offspring can go build their own homes!
Less work! More sex!
That's why planets are more attractive than space stations!
how the fuck does one calculate population by dividing inhabitated locations by the total number of locations?
Can anyone tell me the difference between a 'metric buttload' and an 'Imperial buttload'? Thanks.
We've got chemical rockets. We can pretty accurately estimate what a fission rocket, fusion rocket and an anti-matter rocket can do (in order of increasing power), and frankly, it's not that damn impressive compared to the insane distances of space.
Radio signals? How should we send, what solar systems, what frequnencies, what intensity, what signal type? Likewise goes for listening. SETI is looking at one extremely small area of the sky, and yet it needs an extremely powerful signal, only the most powerful of radars aiming precisely for earth would be detected. And even then it could be put off as static, or a burst by some natural phenomen.
We could use a Warpdrive and a Sub-space communications system. But some sci-fi isn't going to be sci-fact ever, of course there's no telling which in advance.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Depends on what you classify as the "universe". IF you classify the expanse of space, then I'd agree with it being "unbounded". But if you classify the "universe" as the matter contained within it, there is a finite "volume" to the universe, of which is constantly changing, but not infinite. Ad nauseum, really.. :)
Shouldn't this article be marked as redunant since the fact that there are billions of habitable planets out there should be painfully obvious in the vast expanse of the universe. I think the more interesting calculation would be to determine how many doubtful people there are out there.
OK, so, i'm not going to spurt alot of scientific fact (mainly because I don't know many scientific facts, and I really wish i did, and envy those who do). But, say there are millions and billions of habitable planets out there. Does that really surprise anyone? I mean, if you look at how [life] happened on earth, people usually refer to it as a 'one in a billion shot'. So, factor that into a googleplex of stars and so on and so forth (into infinity) why wouldnt' there be billions and billions of habitable, probably life sprouting, planets? WE'd be naive to think anything but. It makes me upset when i hear, mainly, but not limited to, religous types claim that we're the only species capable of life and contact within the entire universe (and beyond, but i'm not even getting into that realm right now, dealing solely with our universe). And that since, there is no direct mention of aliens (but plenty of indirect) in the bible, that therfore, they don't exist, and if they do, they must be surreal creatures that don't really exist in god's world.
Then we must begin to try to comprehend the alternate plane/universes of existence. Wherein, we stop lookin at what is physically before us in plain sight (so to speak) and look into the alternates that are available to us. Forgive me if this is below what most of you think on. Once we begin to unravel the fabric of space/time then we begin to open up a million possibilities. The most notable of which is teh ability to go to parallel universes (think sliders, and not event horizon hehe). But, not only does this open up that venue, but just think about travelling within time. To before we began to ruin our planet. oh hell, planets in our own solar system were, at one time, or in the future, fertile. Who says we can't go back in time (or forward) to a time when a planet (not necisarily out planet, we've seen the negative effects of that in the back to the future series). I'm not saying that this is an immediate fix to the impending problem of our planet becoming an iced earth.... but, you'd be surprised how close scientests (and otherwise, those of you who know what i'm talking about, know what i'm talking about) are to making leaps and bounds in the scientific fields here. They have to, or else we're not going to be around to be the first poster any longer!
NGTV|3
I'm not saying that god doesn't exist, merely that he is not necessary - hawking
But not the worlds that have developed life or advanced civilizations. There's a big difference.
Its also fair to wonder, how many spacefaring civilizations are there? By that I don't mean, how many have launched someone into space, but how many have actually colonized worlds outside of their home solar system?
It has been shown, that given extremely slow, but reasonable travel times between stars, and assuming it would take 500 years (for an already technologically advanced society) to develop a world and the rest of the solar system, then advance on to the next one. With this in mind, such a civilization would only require about 3 million years to completely colonize the galaxy. Considering the billions of years the galaxy has existed, 3 million years is but a brief moment in time. If it was going to happen, it would have already happened.
Now consider our own situation. We're 4.3 light years from the nearest star. We're in the perfect location to drop off a few test subjects (humans with no technological knowledge) and see what happens. It would take a long time before they'd discover what really happened. And others could observe and reflect in that time.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I don't care how many worlds there are in the Galaxy. I'm NOT going to wear a red shirt when I beam down to one of them.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Don't forget that the degree of axial tilt AND periodicity of axial tilt oscillation are thought to play a huge role in climate change cycles, and therefore the formation and evolution of life.
How many planets of the right size, right consitution, right size and distance and periodicity of large satellites, right distance from sun, right periodicity of solar orbit, right periodicity of rotation, right frequency of asteroid collisions, right strength of magnetic field, right type of sun, right stage of solar lifecycle, right stellar neighborhood (no local supernovae). . .
Seems pretty farfetched to me.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The reasoning reminds me
How many people surf the web?
If only 1% of those people come to our site, WomenWithoutBras.com, then, at a $10cpm, we will make 42 billion dollars a month, wow!
Want to buy some stock?
Eventually, when we stop sending astronauts into orbit to monitor mice having sex, and put up some decent astonomical instruments, we will be able to image some Earth sized worlds, and then we will forget all about the statistics.
Amen.
That you, Jessie?
.
Boy, I'll miss that guy! One of the many people who triggered lots of tech interest in me and made me who I am!
Tech interest? This is the guy who, when he found out that Apple had a project with an INTERNAL code name of "Sagan," had his lawyer write Apple some nasty letters.
Apple complied by renaming the project to "BHA," the meaning of which you could guess from the subject line of this message.
30 Billion Earths? New Estimate of Exoplanets in Our Galaxy http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/ju piter_typical_020128.html
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
(Of course, I'm asking this because nobody is going to devote such resources and focus on one far-off goal long enough to accomplish it; anyone who does will lose other competitions to groups which do not. On the other hand, if the goal can be accomplished via a number of short-term projects each of which is useful and even profitable in its own right, the grand goal follows almost inevitably.)
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
It has occured to me recently (namely while reading through some of these responses) that we're looking in the wrong place. I think it's more than accepted throughout the world that our world is dying (how quickly is disputed, but dying nonetheless). But, why are we ONLY looking for other habitable planets. Why aren't we exploring alternatives at all? or maybe we are and i'm just ingorant to them (like most things in my world). What, for instance, is being said, and or is in the public realm of knowledge, about conscience uploading, or the transfer of personality to a computer, or like device. Then, where we once needed food, we don't, where we once needed a healthy environment, we need not anymore...
If anyone has any REAL info (not just me rambling like an evangelist) on the subject, would you please keep me informed in some way shape and form. This is a topic that i'm amazingly intrigued by, but know very little of the actual details in it..
I'm not saying that god doesn't exist, merely that he is not necessary - hawking
Let's see... there are 20 amino acids, 19 of those are stereoisomeric (have a mirror image). Outside of living organisms there is no way to isolate l-alanine from r-alanine, for example. So there are 20 amino acids useful to life, 19 that are not.
Now take a small protein, say 250 amino acids long. Do some probability calculations, and see how likely the first protein is. Then remember that it's supposed to generate itself in an aqueous (water) solution; but amino acids rapidly dissociate in water. So if it forms, it won't be around for long.
Assume we have a high density, a vast over-sufficiency from somewhere, of all the amino acids on hand. Further assume they never degrade. Further assume that once a bond is made that helps build the protein we want, it stays around. None of those are really valid, but let's use them to see where we can get to.
So the odds are, for a given 250-element protein, 1 out of 39 (1/39) to the 250th power.
That works out to 1.7x10^398 tries to get one protein. The lowest guesses for how many are needed for the simplest cell are 200-300 of those. As a calibration, the known universe is less than 10^30 inches across.
So how likely is this to have happened by chance? Use your brains, folks, think!!!
Just rationally, isn't it clear that chance had nothing to do with it?
John 17:20
Planets ar a waste of our time. O'Neil colonies ultimately would provide a better habitat for humans than the bottom of a 4000 mile gravity well.
Check out: http://www.highfrontier.com/
The latest calculations made by MSNBC on demand by Microsoft states that there are millions of habitated planets.
CEO Bill G. commented the news by saying: This is a greate time for humankind as this shows the time is ready for MS to really start pushing its newest BORG(tm) technology to new weaker civilications.
Surly if the universe is not far off infintate, there must be an infinate number of plannets, and therefore an infinate number of inhabitable plannets?
Personally, I have to say that I lean towards the conclusions found in Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. I think they make a very compelling argument for there being far fewer earth-like planets than all of these starry-eyed astronomers are predicting.
how can u be so sure about that, for all we know we might find a planet fast.. the only thing that is between us and sutch a planet right now is technology/ science.. so all we need to is get smarter and learn, and break those barriers down. (the only thing that will slow stuff like this down is bureaucracy..)
Science Fiction has clouded our vision of reality. Consider:
Nearest star is just over 3 light years away, so, traveling at 1/10 the speed of light, it would take you 30 years to get there.
1/10 speed of light = 66.9 Million Miles per Hour
Therefore, the problem becomes:
You must somehow build a spacecraft that can travel at 66.9 Million Miles per hour, non-stop for 30 years, and can accomodate a crew for that same 30 years.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0201003
Four days ago I submitted the exact same story that I saw at space.com. I even included a link to NASA's origins project. They rejected it.
It would also require:
Antigravity technology
Replicators
Warp speed (or hyperspace, I don't care which)
and especially, Captain Kirk
Ever heard of a little something called binary black holes?
This little thingies has two tightly focused, _really_ hot jetstreams of radiation going out in opposite directions, but doesn't emitt much in other directions (They're black holes after all, so they suck up pretty much everything that could make them detectable).
Well, now imagine a spinning binary black hole.
It'll be almost undetectable... until it happens to spin so that one of the jetstreams hit a planet and fry it to a crisp.
We _could_ have things like this just around the corner (astronomically speaking) and not be aware of it.
I don't know how common this type of celestial bodies are, but for life, they are definitly a Bad Thing, since they could effectivly "reset" a planet and life would have to start all over again...
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
No, you dont. You must build a spacecraft that can _accelerate to 66.9 Million Miles per hour, and deccellerate a few decades later.
Once you have picked up speed in space there is no additional effort to keep it, since there is very little friction in the near-emptyness of space.
You are right about one thing though.
Interplanetarry travel is a lot harder than most people think...
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
We've had radio-based communication for about a century. We've had the SETI project looking for something other than "background noise", some identifiable pattern...
And yet, we're on the edge of migrating away from frequency-based communications as we've known them to
Ultra Wide Band communications, which look like (GASP!) background noise!
Wouldn't it be ironic to find that we've been filtering out all the LEGITIMATE communications to find aliens?
How would you see where your going in time to react to things ahead of you at that speed. (or faster)
I think it is more than posible to creat a shuttle that could go that fast. Mind you, it would take a few years to get to that speed, and a few more years to slow down.
But still, my first question remainds, at 1/10 the speed of light, I don't know of any good way to see arround you.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
...all stretched out and all that, simply set your Threshold to 0 or above. If you have no idea what I'm talking about and are curious, set your Threshold (at the top of this page) to -1.
Asimov has many life-capable planets out there in this Foundation universe (and several other stories). However, none have developed intelligent life. 90% of earths history was like
that. You'd just see deserts and a little bit of scum in the water. Worms and such developed in the last 12% of the earth's age. Fishes and plants in the final 6%.
I just wonder where we'll recruit a crew of gung-ho fighters with the classic Big Eyes, Small Mouth syndrome....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Do we have all the facts to say for sure that the Moon had nothing to do with formation of life and maybe even of intelligent life on this planet? Our closest neighbour is only 300,000km away from us and it is also a HUGE satellite for our planet. It has a profound effect on this planet, an effect that Deimos and Phobos of Mars can only dream about. How about tides that Moon enforces on our largest pools of water? It is possible that life was created specifically because of these tides, in the puddles of water that were left behind a tide (well that's a theory anyway).
So, how many of those planets have comparable Moons around them?
You can't handle the truth.
I will give you half of my share of the planets if you can tell me how to get there and back, safely and for a reasonable price.
Bush's education improvements were
Sad but true
No matter how badly we mistreat this world, it won't be worse than anything we find out there, unless one happens to have extremely Earth-like life on it already, the kind of place they find all the time on Star Trek, with lumpy-foreheaded humans and grass and spruce trees (foam boulders optional).
By "habitable" they mean planets like Mars and Venus. Places you can live on in extremely well made air-tight shelters, and maybe eventually terraform.
We could have a sustained nuclear war (presumably sustained from off-planet), stripping the planet of sophisticated lifeforms and blowing off half of its atmosphere, and it would still be a nicer place to live than anywhere else in our solar system or anything we're likely to find orbiting another star.
In terms of human habitability, we're taking pretty good care of this one. Wiping out the wilds is sad, but a choice of farms or forests is easy for hungry people. Where it appears unnecessary, done too casually for convenience rather than survival, that is just staying ahead of what the population growth will demand in a generation or two. The pollution looks bad, but it's a feature of short-lived transitional technology, and will tail off before intolerable damage is done.
On the whole, human effort is greatly increasing human habitability of Earth, not decreasing it. The pristine, wild world of a hundred centuries ago couldn't support half a billion humans, while today it supports well over 6 billion, and the way is being made for 10. Even one century ago, it probably couldn't have sustained half our current population. Things probably won't get tight here on Earth's surface until at least 100 billion, by which time we'll be seriously working on these other places to live. As it is, we haven't seriously dented the resources of our planet, just dug around a little at the choice bits on the surface.
it's an equation where you plug three variables in to get the number of inhabited (not just habitable, I believe) planets in the universe; of course you pull the three values out of your ass and end up with anything between 0 and one hundred billion kadgillion (or whatever) quite easily.
There's also the problem of cosmic radiation which is fatal to humans if exposed to it for too long. If I remember correctly, a simple journey to Mars would be impossible to achieve unless there was a way to shield the craft from cosmic radiation. Does anyone know if there has already been a methode developed to deflect the radiation?
What about momentum? How long at 1G acceleration would it take to get to 66.9 Million miles per hour? What fuel?
Combine this discovery with technologies such as global computer networks, advanced robotics designed for many purposes, the ability to genetically engineer any kind of living creature and terraforming technology, and we'll be able to create entire ecosystems that produce some intended results. Call it a computer--or more accurately, a machine--the size of a planet, with its output being anything from mined materials to manufactured consumer and business products to medicines and chemicals that are hard or impossible to produce on Earth. Nobody said the atmosphere on those distant planets need to contain oxygen--they could be saturated mostly in carbon-dioxide so that genetically engineered plant life could thrive, making unbelievable things possible. Imagine... on a distant planet, where plants grow extremely fast, robots cut down millions of trees every day and ship them to Earth. No longer would it be necessary to kill trees on Earth for houses, furniture, or even paper! Materials could be mined from distant planets. Why use up our own oil, metals, minerals and whatnot, when we can mine and retreive it from another planet? Why pollute our own atmosphere to manufacture things if we can manufacture them on other planets and let those planets get polluted? If designed correctly, those planets won't even get polluted! But who cares if they do?! Garbage crisis? No problem! Put it on another planet. The beauty of it is that no human being would actually have to set foot there! The robots could fix each other when they break down, and could be remote controlled from Earth, just like the Mars lander. It would be very beneficial to all of mankind, and would open up unbelievable multitrillion dollar international businesses that deal in interplanetary sales and distribution.
Just keep in mind that there are no difinitive answers, theories or results to this idea. Anything can happen, we coulkd find a billion, and we could find none. The whole idea is onle inductively conclusive.
I once shot a man who posted too many, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
I'm not in the field of astronomy, but i'm going to attempt to express and intelligent opinion anyway. Tell me how i go.
I don't think the fact that a large proportion of planets discovered by us so far are massive indicates that a large proportion of ALL planets are massive. Of course, this is one possibility. I would say, however, that our methods and technology are quite primitive for the task at hand. The resolution of our view of the universe if low and finite (but getting higher). As our surveilance resolution gets higher we might start discovering smaller planets.
aliens with any sense would try to avoid us for as long as possible given our (humans) extreme desire to destroy each other and well if they happen to find a copy of mars attacks then i think were completly doomed never to meet aliens ever
:-)
and given that the universe is infinite for all we know that would imply that there are an infinite number of planets and thus an infinte number of habitable planets
O btw my name is Ford Prefect
Is that metric or imperial?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
colonizing space itself is Much better than trying to colonize planets, read the following links:
e ri ng/ONeill-GK/index.html
http://members.aol.com/howiecombs/sleptrek.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/case_spc.htm
http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Engine
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/settle.htm
..why don't these scientists spend their time, money and intelligence on solving the problems we have here on this planet before we completely destroy it. And how is an Earth like planet that is thousands/millions of light years away going to help us? Oh great....there is a planet with purple algae on it, WE ARE SAVED! =)
... out of all these 'billions' of habitable planets ... how many of them are filled with beings who believe in ancient myths which tell them that they are the only life in the universe as specially chosen by a mythical deity?
Australian immigration minister Phillip Ruddock is reported to have asked scientists to submit a viability report on sending asylum seekers to these planets.
:wq
!= Inhabited planets...
Recall that a couple of decades ago, Carl Sagan hypothesized that planets that could spawn intelligent life could have equal potential to self destruction to Earth... Chances are, if we manage to visit some of these planets, we'll find some ancient broken down probes, and maybe some nuked out cities, devoid of life...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Isn't the basic problem that we are too far away from the next neighborhood to visit it so we can find out if anyone really lives there? The fact that we can't yet, get, or talk, to the next neighborhood has nothing to do with whether or not someone lives there. It just means we don't have the ability to determine that.
So, until Captain Cook managed to get to Australia, did it make sense for Europeans to assume that "there's no life down there"? Probably not, but the point is that whatever Europeans thought or knew had nothing at all to do with the reality of all those people walking around what Europeans decided to call Australia. p? If you support the uniqueness of Earth in the universe, it seems to me that the burden is on you to produce a cogent argument explaining why it is Just Us Humans.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
CatGirls, elves, fae, oh yah! The more planets there are the better the odds are that we may find some sapient humanoids who resemble characters from modern fantasy! Kicking.
/SOOO/ going to rock the galaxy(metaverse? Kickin!) in another few hundred years!
Hell if necessary we can colonize a few billion planets, and if THEY don't have the 'desired' females on them, we can start going into parallel dimensions until we eventually do find the 'desired' 'results'. w00t!
This species (homo sapiens) is
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Earth is in a very uninteresting bit of space.
:p
The question is whether or not these advances in science would have occured had the scientists involved not had so many bodies to observe.
Thanks for your well-informed explanation.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
... they will spell 'intelligent' correctly :)
that's what that poster implied... of course you'd have to accelerate to that speed! Do you expect it to be easy?
As long as you're not talking about etching the picture of the Goatse man onto a gold plate, and send it on the probe, I'm okay with it ;-)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Wow. That may well have been the least informative popular science article I've read in a few years.
If anyone is interested in the results and the technique they used an abstract and the preprint of their results are available here
That's no moon, it's a space station!
You're using her as bait, Master!
3. Such civilizations do not last a long time, and blow themselves up or otherwise fall apart pretty quickly
Or alternatively, civilizations progress at a geometric rate, transcending themselves in a few short generations, so that by the time intersteller travel becomes feasable they have lost interest and moved on to more compelling possibilities (perhaps departing this frame of reference entirely).
Once one hypothesizes a civilization significantly more advanced than our own it becomes difficult to even imagine the technologies they may have, much less what interests they would find compelling, or what goals they might set for themselves. For all we know they are all around us, unrecognized because they operate at levels as far beyond us as we are beyond the simple microbe.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"Some have observed that the level of committment this would require of humanity would be like nothing ever seen before, and which would require devotion that has historically only been commanded by religious quests."
That easy, make it a religious quest. Get someone like Bin
Laden to declare a jihad against the aliens. This way we
can explore the stars and get rid of the fanatics at the same time. Or maybe the Pope will declare a crusade. We haven't had one of those in a while.
Please talk to me
Actually, I have a question. What if Earth were a habitable planet? Aren't there billions of places on Earth that someone can live?
~
MU!
As to the crew issues, you'd probably first build a frickin' huge telescope, big enough to image nearby terrestrial planets. You'd then build an unmanned probe with some snappy AI technologies to investigate promising candidates for colonisation. Then, once you've found somewhere good (it might take several lifetimes, but what's the hurry), you build your starship and the crew goes off to colonise the planet.
Would people go? Looking at our history, I don't see why you couldn't find plenty of people who would. Just imagine it, the chance to own a significant fraction of *an entire star system* :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
And as odd and new-age Boomerish this sounds, it's also the most likely explanation. That is, those civilizations which reach the technological level required to colonize the galaxy lose interest in such pursuits because such things no longer intrigue them - and in fact they shortly thereafter 'disappear', at least to our limited wetware perspective. It's the only logical explanation that accounts for both the lack of current non-human residents here on Earth and the galactic 'silence' we run into at every turn.
Any other hypothesis runs into a host of other unsolvable problems which essentially boil down to 'where is everyone?'. No matter how rare intelligent life is all you need is *one* successful species to fill the galaxy over a relative short time frame - the fact that this hasn't happened requires that you either admit the human race is the *only* intelligence to arise in this galaxy (uh huh), invent a rather lame excuse for why *everyone* has failed, subscribe to some sort of X-Files/Star Trek silliness, or embrace the above explanation knowing that you can't explain what happens to everyone, only that *something* does.
Guess we'll find out in a century or two, assuming we survive the next couple hundred years.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I've been going through the comments and still haven't come accross 42.
boky
That is so like, uh, not true. I get this while logged in: Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@mccarthy.vg.
/.
So much for the "free" and "you can see everything at -1 threshold". Appearently someone got pissed at my "Support the firing of Michael Sims" sig and proceeded to mod down 10 of my comments in about 2 minutes (some in old articles at the bottom of the slashboxes). Hmmm. What sucked is that my subnet was banned as well... one of my floormates that doesn't post often (but doesn't tend to "speak his mind" as much as I do...) was banned from posting here too. He asked me about it and I replied "well that's the communist community of Slashdot for you." The editors are a bunch of liars. He can post again, but my IP has been banned from posting for a few days now. I also liked the 3 flamebait mods to the post that was posed at 1. 1-3 = -2??
I get banned from speaking the truth, but the page-widening posts continue. What does this boil down to? Slashdot is afraid of the truth. I often tend to speak my mind and tell it like it is. I guess some people can't handle that.
Slashdot. We support free speech... that is, if we agree with it.
--cscx
Support the firing of Michael Sims from
there might be a lot but there could be less but there are as many as there are jupiter like planets but what do you call a jupiter like planet but there could also be less then there are jupiter like plants we really don't know.......Do I have this artile about right????
I can't imagine why this and the post immediately below didn't score some "insightful" mods while I've been off acquainting myself with their relevant and useful links.
Beyond the importance and improbability of our moon, I see the Drake equation putting a bit too much reliance on a single estimate of getting from life to intelligent life.
The fossil record makes it plain that bacterial life is relatively easy (or the product of spanspermia, which doesn't change the implications) but that metazoa is hard, one might suspect because the bacteria don't give up easily, being blind to the potential of flourishing as intestinal symbiots.
Even metazoa to intelligence took well over half a billion years, if we equate intelligence for this purpose to the posession of recursive language, whereas we breezed through intelligence to technological in under 100K years, if not without some flirting with self destruction.
The Fermi alternative that we are indeed first still needs to be considered against the possibility that the first may have been less influenced by a cultural duty to subdue the world and instead, when they realised they were unlikely to meet anybody else for a hundred million years (the tail on the probability distribution) have settled for something less than galactic domination.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I couldn't have said it half as well.
Bravo.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Manned interstellar exploration will require exactly what manned intercontinental exploration did: Time and opportunity.
As long as governments have a monopoly on space, we as individuals have no opportunity.
Get government out of the way, and someone will try it. Then it's just a matter of time.
Remember how much hostility NASA reacted with when told that the Russians were going to let a paying customer go into space? That's a hint.
I suggest you read Kings of the High Frontier by Viktor Komen for a good discussion of the matter.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
These basicly two chooses:
1. something unexpected kills all of them,e.g. Trying to measure the mass of the Higg Boson, squashes the planet down to the size of a pea, (lexx)
2. They find an easier way to expand and grow
than travelling through the galaxy. e.g.
Knowledge of Quantum Gravity allows them to build
basement universes, creating space-time, energy
and matter to order. In which case filling the
galaxy becomes pointless. They still might be
a reason to talk to other cilivisions through, and
that is to trade stories and culture.
You have a point. The thing I've been wondering is that what if we are the First Ones, the Ancients or whatever they're called in scifi literature. What if we are the ones who will build Star Gates, ancient artifacts and such. Maybe that's the reason we haven't seen anyone else, because there isn't! Yet.
We'll eventually be able to create our own "virtual" universes, which are infinitly more interesting, since WE'RE effectively Gods there.
If I had a choice between a) slowly trekking through one boring physical universe, or b) freeing my mind from its limited primordial wetware brain, and moving into my own universe(s), I'd choose the latter.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Thanks for the link, I actually ended up reading much of that fellows' paper. I found it a fascinating and quite logical extrapolation of technological trends.......yet, I somehow get the feeling that even a superintelligent collective can't be all good.
"the only thing that is between us and sutch a planet right now is technology/ science."
To put it another way, I always thought that what separated us were Gazillions Kilometers and that the first travellers would have to use cosmic winds...
Best to work on protonics right now than putting work in the Warp Drive 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
a few thousand miles, so you can spin the planet a wee bit more 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Mod parent to +5! Where are my mod points when I need them?
I think he only said "Billions..." and people just tacked on the extra billions, of course, him saying that he never said that means he actually said it! ;)
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
You know what this means, in 2-300 years the title "Miss Universe" will actually mean something.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
"Alan Boss, an expert in planetary system formation at the Carnegie Institution of Washington"
Now I'm sure Mr. Boss knows more about the subject than most people, but can anyone really call themselves an expert in a process we know to be happening all over the Galaxy (and most likely Universe), but for which we have only one observable study object? (And even that is 5 billion years after the fact, so much of what we "know" is conjecture.)
I mean, expert on our own solar system, yes, but planetary system formation in general?
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
When Earth is the ONLY planet where i can have SEX, DRUGS and ROCK'n ROLL ???
Recent events and research reports concidered, I'd say the number of inhabitable planets is zero. None. 0.
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
Seems to me that's just self-delusion. Who says the physical universe is boring? Your own universe will be limited by your intelligence and creativity. We are no where near figuring out everything in the real universe yet. That goes to show that a personal universe would be less interesting than the real one. If one thinks that the universe he creates is more interesting, doesn't that imply he thinks the universe should cater to his whims? Seems egotistically arrogant.
I value other people and the interactions I have with them. I wouldn't get that in a personal universe, or if I did, those people would necessarily be less than I am. Only an infinite God (which you and I are not) could create an "interesting" universe.
Constitutionally Correct
Most of life and our civilization burns hydrogen compounds for energy. This is water or hydrocarbons. The moon appears to outgassed most of its water and hydrocarbons eons ago. Might be a bit ice in some the perpetually dark polar craters- but not a whole lot. We'd need to import hydrogen from earth or a capture a comet. Comets have lots of water and hydrocarbons.
Perhaps this is presumptuous on my part, but as someone who has played with religion, lucid dreaming, deep hypnosis, and biofeedback, I find the world around me to be far more challenging, entertaining, varied and surprising than anything my nervous system can put together on its own.
Did I mention meaningful?
The prospect of a virtual apotheosis bores me.
Give me real problems to solve, real experiences to explore, real tools to use in implementing solutions.
I'll make my own apotheosis.
There's another darker prospect that doesn't require a robot holocaust to come into being: maybe the effective Gods have been plugged into their realities involuntarily, as a means of pacification. Maybe a population that can wire their pleasure centers for constant activity doesn't feel the need to explore.
all you need is *one* successful species to fill the galaxy over a relative short time frame The fact that humans and any other life form on Earth fills the available space for it doesn't mean that alien life forms have the same behavior. Maybe they are not as expansionists as we are.
On the other side they would need a huge amount of energy to fill the galaxy, and if they have such an energy source and the appropiate technology, they could make anything they need.
the best statement that I agree with is that "the surest sign that there is life out there is that they have not contacted us
You wouldn't. Assuming we could build the tech to accelerate to that speed, we would also be able to build the tech to deform space around the ship, rendering anything in our way completely irrelevant.
Let's see, we have a sample size of 1 (Earth/Sun) out of several hundred billion stars in our galaxy. Yeah, that's enough to make a conjecture on the population of Earthlike planets in the galaxy. I don't see how this calculation is any different from the ones scientists have been making in the complete absence of evidence for decades. We simply don't have the data. This is mental masturbation.
There are some seemingly odd probabilities at play here, one of those that I am interested personally in is due to the fact that, we human beings, intelligent life, are really RARE. Even on a world that has had a very nurturing Sun, and very ULTRA stable periods of time with regards to ideal conditions for life to evolve.
I am using the Earth as a model, but out of the billions of years, and the millions of species, only one became intelligent, to be using slashdot today. I think that speaks VOLUMES about the probability of intelligent life out there in the Galaxy.
We are talking about galactic time, as well in terms of intelligent life and its probability on a very very nurturing planet, which I think the Earth is an ideal model of.
If intelligent life is so common, it would seem to me you can't make the same argument about given enough time (Billions of years) and simply because there are "so many" of those possibilities, doesn't make it common. Intelligent life isn't common on earth, only one species has it. It is very very VERY uncommon.
There was huge amounts of time, Galactic time, on earth and only ONE intelligent life form evolved. I think that speaks volumes about what we can expect out there we we explore space. We may very well be alone, or if we are not, the other race is so far advanced I would think we would have very little in common to initiate communication.
(All this thinking about lasers, and radio waves is so quaint. SETI and the people who run it are pretty naive about research into these sorts of areas. Nobody in thier right mind would use radio waves to communicate, or any sort of electro magnetic wave. The distances that a space faring race would have to cover, would solve the problem using a form and method of communcation that doesn't have these issues. You can bet it is a science far beyond our understanding, and methods to detect.)
If we are to use the Earth as a model, and assume it represents the normal progression of life, if given the right conditions, habitable earth like planets are probably very rare.
If we use the Earth as a model, intelligent life takes galactic time to come about. That would mean there may be only 1 or two other intelligent races in our galaxy.
I don't buy into the belief that habitable earths are common place. We have 9 planets in our solar system, only one is habitable, not all nine. We also know that life zones around stars are very fragile, and stable computable orbits in these zones only allow at most one planet during the lifetime of a star. Please note. Life zones around stars change as they go through stellar evolution.
We also know our sun is not an "ordinary star" as we are lead to believe in our physics text books only published 5 years ago. It is FAR too stable as far as its output goes. Most stars observed are NOT AS stable in stellar output as our sun, but go through cycles of instability, or are just unstable due to thier composition as they evolve.
It requires, many many MANY things to come together to make a habitable planet, and just counting stars that have similair stellar output as our sun doesn't equal large numbers of habitable planets out there.
In fact, you may even need a certain CONFIGURATION of a solar system for life, let alone intelligent life too come about otherwise, you have impact events that snuff it out totally. Jupitor reduces the large impact bodies in our solar system for example, because of its large gravity. Sucking up big rocks that would otherwise destroy all life on earth in an instant of galacitc time should they impact earth. Solar systems without large planets like Juptitor, life probably won't get the chance to take root because there is nothing to stop large impact events from frequenting the planet in the habitable zone.
It is clear you need galactic time spans of stability to bring about intelligent life.
There are so many unique, and very unlikely things about our solar system that the more systems we look at, I would be willing to bet, probably seem very alien too our own solar system configuration, but probably represent the statistical average "Joe" solar system.
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Only an infinite God (which you and I are not) could create an "interesting" universe.
Evidence to support this assumption? None.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
On the flip side, there's absolutely no reason to believe that over the lifetime of the entire galaxy that no species has arisen which doesn't want to expand. All you need is curiosity and an appreciation for different scenery.
And you don't need a huge amount of energy to fill the galaxy. Using ramscoop ships you could ship tens of thousands of colonists in leapfrog from one system to another in relatively short order, effectively colonizing all habitable planets within a speedy (galactic) time frame. It wouldn't matter at all if the civilization remained coherent so long as a *single* one of these colonies developed successfully and continued the chain.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
On the flip side, there's absolutely no reason to believe that over the lifetime of the entire galaxy that no species has arisen which doesn't want to expand
OK, I must admint I'm a little pessimistic about how many *intelligent* species could arise. The fundamental requirement for intelligent life to evolve is an extended period of almost perfectly stable conditions. It took life 3.5 billion years to produce us, on other planets evolution may be slower. We know what happened to dinosaurs, even Jupiter could not save them, and it could be worse.
Suppose there are "humanoid" species, willing to expand. The article says there are about 30 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, but it is just about 16 billion years old. Then "filling the galaxy" means filling 2 planets every year. This is highly unlikely...
"Why they aren't here?"
"They are here, just hiding" - FALSE! If they are willing to expand and fill the galaxy, they would simply blow us off the planet. Anytime in our history a superior civilization met an inferior one, that was catastrophy for the latter. And they was both humans. Expansionist aliens would treat us as we treat animals, or worse.
Maybe they are not here, because they are fighting each other in an endless war, or have destroyed each other.
Maybe interstellar flight is much more difficult than we think it is. What about navigation close to light speed? "Generation ships" are possible but maybe only a few individuals would accept it. They won't ever see their destination, only their chlidren will (IF the mission succeeds). And they literally have to put their lives on it.
They found better places to go.
They can terraform any planet, and don't need to travel so far.
They don't live on planets.
Self-evident. No assumption. If you disagree, you have some serious delusions of grandeur.
I suppose if you're so self-absorbed that you're only interested in what you yourself can imagine, then I suppose such a universe might be interesting. Personally I find it more interesting to be challenged by the things I could not have imagined for myself.
Constitutionally Correct
If a planet is exactly tidelocked, there would be a small habitable strip of land near the terminator (the boundary between the freezing night side and the roasting sunward side). It used to be thought that Mercury was exactly tidelocked, and I remember an interesting piece of science fiction about the inhabitants of Mercury's terminator.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Such civilizations do not last a long time, and blow themselves up
The most energetic events in the universe -- far more energetic than supernovae -- are gamma-ray bursts, and they're quite a mystery to astrophysicists trying to figure out how a natural process can give rise to them.
I think I've figured it out. They're not a natural phenomenon, they are advanced weapons, used to take out entire solar systems. (The shock wave probably destroys all life in neighboring solar systems as well.) Sadly, this weapon has been re-invented over and over again in different parts of the universe. We see gamma-ray bursts in all directions of the sky. From the distance in light-years, we know that some of them happened billions of years ago, and some of them happened less than a billion years ago.
Or maybe they're not weapons. Maybe they are accidents that occur when a civilization performs very high-energy physics experiments.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
(* An alternate version of 2 is that interstellar travel is far more difficult than we think it is. Right now, it doesn't seem much beyond the boundaries of current technology to launch "generation ships," which power systems. *)
If we don't care how long it takes, we could build such ships right now. It would require a Jupiter-sized budget and a lot of plutonium, but do-able.
It would be a multi-generational colony(s). Sort of like Mormons In Space.
The number of people terrorists can kill doubles every few decades or so. At this pace we better start thinking of putting our eggs in other baskets. One of these days Osama's will be able to easily build nukes. The ability crawls down the feedchain surely. And don't even start about bioterrorism or nanoterrorism, etc.
Were doomed! Let's get building!
Table-ized A.I.