Slashdot Mirror
Maybe There's No Life in Space Because We're Too Early
Long-time Slashdot reader sehlat shares "a highly accessible summary" of a new theory about why we haven't yet find life on other planets -- that "we're not latecomers, but very, very early." From Lab News:
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, with Earth forming less than five billion years ago. One school of thought among scientists is that there is life billions of years older than us in space. But this recent study in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics argues otherwise... "We find that the chance of life grows much higher in the distant future..."
Stars larger than approximately three times the Sun's mass will perish before life has a chance to evolve... The smallest stars weigh less than a tenth as much as the sun and will glow for 10 trillion years, meaning life has lot of time to begin on those planets orbiting them in the 'habitable zone'. The probability of life increases over time so the chance of life is many times higher in the distant future than now.
The paper ultimately concludes that life "is most likely to exist near 0.1 solar-mass stars ten trillion years from now."
Stars larger than approximately three times the Sun's mass will perish before life has a chance to evolve... The smallest stars weigh less than a tenth as much as the sun and will glow for 10 trillion years, meaning life has lot of time to begin on those planets orbiting them in the 'habitable zone'. The probability of life increases over time so the chance of life is many times higher in the distant future than now.
The paper ultimately concludes that life "is most likely to exist near 0.1 solar-mass stars ten trillion years from now."
Even on Star Trek, there are many civilizations that decline to join "the club". Star Trek is silly anyway, because it is unlikely that so many civilizations would reach nearly the exact same degree of development at exactly the same time.
Is it though? Star Trek depicts a universe teeming with life, and in that context there will be numerous civilizations at pretty much every level of advancement possible. They show that in the series too: many episodes revolve around an incredibly advanced or primitive civilization, or even talks about distant past civilizations long since gone.
Also, as we learn more and more about physics, we get more and more confirmation that FTL communication/travel is fundamentally impossible. It is highly unlikely that interstellar travel will ever be like taking the train to work.
FTL travel is just the classic exception that allows sci-fi to work. Without it, just about everything in Trek would be impossible, but nowhere does Trek imply that this will happen. Instead, Trek is "assuming this is possible, what could happen?"
On a more serious note, anyone who has sat and given some thought to what the TFS talks about has probably realized that we could be one of the earliest sentient races. The universe didn't start with the ingredients of life. It was brewed in stars and then spread by the exploding of stars and the re-coalescence of that material. That shortens the possible time frame for sentient life
Actually if you actually read the paper (yes I know it's Slashdot so you are excused! ;-) they mention this there. All the ingredients for life, including the heavy elements, are there in the second generation stars which formed a few million years after the first generation of stars which were around ~30MYr after the Big Bang. The large stars which go supernova have very short lifetimes so heavy elements were created and dispersed into the coalescing gas clouds really quite rapidly. So instead of ~13.6 billion years for life to evolve you have ~30+a few million years less i.e. negligibly less time.