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."

Comments

One of many famous Fermi Paradox answers

[Frobnicator]

The Fermi Paradox was described over a half century ago.

The "somebody has to be first" option is one of many options for why we don't see a Universe swarming with life.

There are quite a few other options. Unfortunately with my faith in humanity, I'm guessing the intelligent species tend to destroy themselves options is more realistic.

Re:One of many famous Fermi Paradox answers

[Anonymous Coward]

One problem with rebuilding a technological civilization is that it's built on the availability of energy resources. You start with wood then coal, oil, gas, then nuclear for example. They tend to build on each other and each one requires the energy production of the one before. If you need to rebuild from scratch you may have already used up the easily available resources from before. Then you would be in a position of having to develop solar, wind, nuclear using only wood/steam powered machines. That could prove to be a great challenge. It may be that there are technological civilizations that used up most of their resources, had a large war, pushed themselves back to the stone ages, and were no longer in a position to rebuild energy production technology.

Re:One of many famous Fermi Paradox answers

[BlueStrat]

Unfortunately with my faith in humanity, I'm guessing the intelligent species tend to destroy themselves options is more realistic.

My view is that intelligent species indeed do not destroy themselves, it's simply that humans have not yet been proven to be intelligent.

If humans are still around in a few millennia, then maybe humans can be considered "intelligent".

Strat

Re:Obligatory Star Trek: TNG episode

[Anonymous Coward]

So, we're those guys after all?

Have you read/saw the news recently?, I hope we survive long enough as a species to evolve into them...I'm not optimistic though...

Re:Depends on your definition of "life"

[Dutch Gun]

3) Complex life does survive, but for some reason doesn't communicate or colonize other worlds (a "Prime Directive", or perhaps they "sublime" in the Ian Banks/Culture sense)

Or because no one has found a way around that pesky speed-of-light barrier, and the vast distances simply make inter-species communication, let alone travel, utterly impractical. This has always seemed, at least to me, the least romantic but most pragmatic answer to the question of why we don't meet aliens, or even hear from them.

Re:Depends on your definition of "life"

[Chelloveck]

Or because no one has found a way around that pesky speed-of-light barrier, and the vast distances simply make inter-species communication, let alone travel, utterly impractical. This has always seemed, at least to me, the least romantic but most pragmatic answer to the question of why we don't meet aliens, or even hear from them.

I can't buy that, either. Intelligent machines must be possible -- after all, we're just meat machines, and unless there's some divine entity handing out souls there's nothing particularly special about us naturally-evolved organisms that couldn't be duplicated in an artificial organism. So it should be possible to purpose-build intelligent machines and send them out as interstellar probes. Make it so the intelligence can hibernate for the journey by powering down.

Now, let's say the probe is only moving about the same speed as Voyager, 17 km/s. We know that's easily achievable. At that rate it'll take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. So let's say our robot probe travels 100 light-years to a nearby star (1.7 million years travel time) and sets up shop. After another 300,000 years it's ready to launch two more probes. Each of them goes 100 ly and repeats. At this rate it only takes 2 billion years to span the galaxy, and we end up with something like 10^300 (2^1000) probes. Maybe we ought to build in a limiter that stops reproduction when a probe hits an already colonized system...

Mind you, that's with some really pessimistic numbers. And it doesn't even need machine intelligence, I just think a machine has a better chance of functioning after a couple million years of travel than a hibernating meat popsicle does.

Re:Obligatory Star Trek: TNG episode

[Anonymous Coward]

Then stop reading the news and go out for a walk.

The news are reported by people who have an economic interest in keeping you scared.
They are about as reliable as the traveling salesman, not every word is a lie, but most of the time emphasis is put on certain details to make you fill in the gaps incorrectly.
One thing to keep in mind is that if something sensational happens than the news will never keep quiet to keep the reporting balanced.
The gaps you need to fill in are the ones where good things happened and where you don't need to be afraid. There are a lot more of those cases than there are of the fear-mongering the news are bullshitting about.