Guest post: It’s not all bad being early
Guest post by Bruce Everett
Been feeling oddly Kantian lately, on account of some considerations about the Drake equation, red dwarfs, and the evolution of the universe. The imminent launch of the James Webb telescope is bringing this on as well.
Several terrible documentaries and an awful lot of bad science fiction makes a bit of a fetish out of the idea of “Ancient Aliens”, largely because the narrative of some kind of idealized past that can return to save us addresses a weird but pervasive need…
I can’t relate to it. I find it a bit puerile to be honest; quit an over-reliance on Sky Daddy; start looking for Space Daddy. Couldn’t stand Stargate, sorry.
And the kookiness of thinking Atlantis was any more real than Mordor, or that brown people can’t build monoliths, aren’t things to overlook, but the emotional need for there to have been Greys from Zeta Reticuli on Earth, stacking rocks and benevolently putting things up people’s bums in the early Holocene is something else, too. F***ing why?
We have a nice stable host star. For the time being at least. 100 million years from now it’ll bake our planet well before becoming a red giant. Complex life will clap out a bit earlier. But until then; nice.
What’s not nice are all those planets currently in the “habitable zones” of young red dwarfs. By which I mean “any red dwarfs” because on the timescale of a red dwarf, they’re all young. Young, cool, and unstable like a dirty burning flame.
So “cool”, planets have to be in close to the star for any heat, and as a result are tidally locked. And “unstable” as in anything that gets close is going to cop an all mighty-star parp to the face on a regular basis on account of really, really big solar flares. Flares that strip atmospheres.
The Milky Way is littered with red dwarfs. Stars like ours? Not so much. We’re odd. Even the configuration of our planets (no “super Earths”, nothing inside of Mercury’s orbit) is starting to look peculiar. (Our moon’s pretty spesh too).
Eventually, as the more common red dwarfs age and warm up, they’ll become more stable, and stop dropping huge star-parps. Their “habitable zones” will migrate outwards to where maybe there’s a chance of planets not being tidally locked. And we already know there are a good number of these systems where further out, there are exoplanets with water ice.
So warmth, water, possible rotation, and no atmosphere-scouring solar flares. Oh, and bonus; these red dwarfs will stay stable for billions of years more than our own star will. Plenty of time for life to establish. Could be easy living for the locals, and there’s a metric-fuck-tonne of these stars out there.
Downside: it’s not been even close to enough time for these red dwarfs to become stable. They’ll stay stable long, but they’ll take a long time getting there. Huge timescales. Longer than the present age of the universe. And certainly longer than our own star has left.
Earth will be long dead and gone before the first of these stars mature.
So… If the galaxy ever does wind up with abundant complex life living on a multitude of red dwarfs, it’ll be a long time from now, which makes us the “ancient aliens”. We’re quite possibly just too early to the neighbourhood to find any neighbours. Whether our descendants live long enough to find any neighbours isn’t certain either.
But it’s not all bad being early. The universe as it stands now is pretty interesting and special. There’s stuff we can witness now that will eventually be impossible to witness. The cosmic background radiation will eventually red shift so far it’s no longer visible – but right now it’s available. The observable universe will recede as accelerating expansion throws galaxy after galaxy out of sight. Large bright stars will form less frequently and our galaxy will cool, dim and redden – a number of the things we find beautiful will be gone.
The Milky Way and Andromeda will merge well before the first stable red dwarf becomes welcoming, so the sky certainly won’t be familiar.
A lot of knowledge will become unobtainable, or at least a lot, lot harder to come by. “Hubble flow”? Wot’s that? “Inflationary period”? Huh? “Andromeda Galaxy”? Who the what now? Wait, there are *other* galaxies?
How much of this knowledge winds up unobtainable depends on how far flung into to future we’re talking.
It seems feasible that we’re first cab off the rank, or at least one of the first, and yet there are people who’ve literally killed themselves over the prospect of there being older, wiser, guide-like space beings out there. There are people who still wish they could bring themselves to. The species that is about to launch the James Webb telescope is also the species that came up with the Heaven’s Gate cult. There’s a class in cosmic humility right there.
Perhaps the space-grown-ups could act like it a little more?
So yeah, the Kantian bit. We’ve stumbled our ape-selves into a position of privilege; the ability to witness the early universe. This may have left us all alone, but it just won’t be possible for most of the rest of the universe’s existence and may be far out-of-view by the time complex life becomes common out there (if ever).
I’m kind of feeling that humanity and its descendants owe any possibly intelligent life that follows in our sphere of influence the information that we gather. Let them make of it what they will, but at least they wouldn’t be deprived of the option.
Space-faring descendants, or space-faring artifacts; either way it’d be nice to pay it forward, knowledge-wise, if there’s anyone to listen. As far as finding meaning in an uncaring universe goes, I’d rate this pretty high as a strategy.
And in the meantime, maybe humanity could take its position in the cosmos a little less for granted. That’d be nice too.
Beautifully written. We spend so much time concentrating on the nitty gritty details of our lives that it seldom occurs to us, even if we have the time, to look at the bigger picture. And pictures don’t get much bigger than that! Thank you for explaining it to us so eloquently and accessibly.
Yes, thank you. Well put.
This cosmic Pay it Forward scheme depends on what’s left of everything on Earth after humanity has finished dealing with the planet the way a bacterial culture deals with a fresh Petri dish of growth medium. If we can slow, then halt, the ongoing anthropogenic omnicide so that there are enough remaining pieces of the natural world to enable Earth to heal, that will be an achievement in itself. That would be something worth broadcasting too.
I don’t know. I like your passion. But I also like writers like Frans de Waal & Carl Safina who remind us that if we want to look for ‘intelligent life’, we might simply look around us. As for possible ‘space-faring descendants’, I rather hope there won’t be any. We’re well on the way to ruining this planet, and I would rather we didn’t ruin any more, though the Elon Musks of this world think otherwise. As for ‘space-faring’, I imagine those intrepid descendants of ours barely having the strength to crawl out of their space-ships after light-years of travel, (doubtless drugged or in cryonic suspension until the landing occurs) and muscular atrophy, only to be treated as a windfall dinner by whatever organisms, large or small, might be around. And knowledge – why assume that intelligent life must be like us? I am reminded of J.B.S. Haldane’s remark: ‘My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’ And in the end, since the universe itself will, it appears, collapse in on itself and come to an end, perhaps to spawn a new universe, that knowledge will anyway disappear, so that I do not see that it has much to do with finding ‘meaning’ (whatever that may be) within an ‘uncaring’ universe or uncaring universes. We don’t know whether the universe (whatever it is) cares or not, though I personally like the Tao te Ching, and the dictum ‘Heaven and Earth are impartial; they treat all of creation as straw dogs.’ I don’t think passing down the knowledge we have gained, and which I respect, makes our lives more meaningful. If we find meaning in this world it is mostly in our relationships with others, as it is in any social species of animal.
A good piece. I’ve been watching Brian Cox’s series Universe on the Beeb which covers this ground with added visuals, and would recommend it, at least for people like me who are ignorant of the detail and just gape in wonder at the idea of galaxies moving further and further away. The science is too hard for most of us and it a series of awe-inspiring vistas and phenomena that we take on trust.
I am pleased that I was brought up in countryside where the nearest city was 9 miles away so we would get the full Milky Way across the sky.
Chariots of the Gods was a big thing when I was a child – the idea that there must be beings like us only bigger and better is fairly prevalent, and that no-one without modern technology would have been capable of building the pyramids. One of my primary school teachers used to preach something like that, about godlike beings who walked among us unknown.
It astonishes me that people aren’t as moved by the sight of the Earth, our home, as they are by the outline of their own native land, or a landmark in it, and don’t want, fiercely, to defend it from destruction.
Any environment currently known outside of our home here on Earth is incredibly hostile toward our fragile beings. Even to visit the moon required maintaining an Earth like environment for a, in the big scheme of things, very small blip of time. We have evolved to be part of, and inseparable from our home. Living on an orbital space station requires a constant supply from Earth of what keeps us alive, including a very precise atmospheric pressure, sunlight, sustenance, other beings, and again, only for a very short time. Our existence at all is precisely attuned to our environment. Even gravity is vital to our existence, and not just any gravity. There are huge obstacles to overcome to be able to even exist, not to mention thrive and multiply in any known environment outside of our ecosystem for any length of time, possibly insurmountable ones. The problem lies in how much of our environment we can take with us, but we can’t take the sun or even a small part of it, and the amount of Earth we would be required to take with us would have to be enormous and would very likely damage the planet we would be leaving. We don’t just inhabit Earth, we are inextricably connected to it. To think we could colonize Mars is foolishness. It makes for great science fiction, but any scientist with a good grasp of reality knows the difficulties. The incredibly wealthy people who promote this are deluded and undereducated, and as far as their wealth is concerned, there is nowhere to spend it beyond Earth. It’s self indulgent, and self indulgence would not be a good thing in an effort to live beyond our environment, as it would take a massive, massive collective effort with no room for selfishness or self delusion. They are as fragile and vulnerable as the rest of us, and it’s a perversion of imagination to think a small group of wealthy people could make it happen. There are just some things money can’t buy.
I enjoy sci-fi as much as the next nerd, but it’s not reality, and all the wishful thinking and waste of Earth’s resources won’t make it so.
Tim @3, that Haldane remark also rings true. The physical senses that have evolved in humans and the brain functions that have evolved along with them are also part of surviving in and navigating our environment, and as extraordinary as our imaginations are, and as powerful as our explanatory science is, it is still rooted in very Earthly concerns. There is always the possibility that there are things beyond our imaginations and scientific discovery. I think it would be unwise to rule out that possibility, but also prudent to be highly skeptical of such things. I suppose that makes me mostly a naturalist. It’s easy to imagine the impossible, but impossible to imagine the unimaginable.
Tim Harris #3
Exactly. Pretty much the only thing I’m optimistic about at this stage is that the rest of the universe will be safe from our stupidity and evil. :)
When it comes to the question of life on other planets, it’s one of those questions about which I really am “agnostic” in the “strong” sense (the sense in which we’re often told we should be agnostic about God, although I am not), i.e., I have no inkling one way or the other. I will say this, though. If there is intelligent life out there, I hope they’re so far away that our radio waves will never reach them. It’s embarrassing enough as it is to be human without anyone watching.
Exactly. We have never been alone. We have evolved on a planet full of life. Somehow, for some people, this is not enough. We spend billions of dollars in the pursuit of finding life Out There, all the while we destroy the life that’s Right Here in the pursuit of trillions of dollars. We’re so busy looking for somebody else to have a “meaningful” conversation with, that we fail to hear the symphony that surrounds us.
Quite. Imagine his fury should life be found on Mars, and as a result the planet is put off limits, for the benefit of these Martians.
If we were to expand our concept of “others” to include all the species with which we share Earth, that would be tremendous. At the moment, all other species are considered little more than raw material, “resources” for us to do with and dispose of as we will. Forming such a relationship would interfere with that instrumentalization, which would be all to the better.
A very nice post – thank you!
As you say, based on what we know about the universe WE ARE (at the very least) among the first space faring civilizations. Looking for meaning and guidance from ancient aliens is just another form of religion. God or Mepz&$#*!@zor save us from ourselves! Sorry but it’s time for us to adult as a species. Descent with modification has granted us a rare opportunity – just enough reasoning skills during the infancy of creation to recognize what needs to be done if we are to overcome our genetic programming as nomadic predators prone to despoiling their surroundings and moving on. There is no where else to go, except extinction. Sky daddy is coming down neither from Heaven nor the heavens.
Further, the notion that our own ancients couldn’t have accomplished the great works of antiquity is both dismissive of their accomplishments but even more, it’s dis-empowering of our own. If the Egyptians could erect the pyramids with simple tools, what excuse do we have for not controlling CO2 emissions and keeping sewage out of our water? If the Romans could deliver fresh water from the Alps without a single pump, why can’t we? (FYI: Portland, OR pretty much does the same thing which is why we have the best municipal water system around). We have the tools, the knowledge, and the information that we have no place to go.
Are we the first, at least locally? Who knows. But if we act as if we are the first then maybe we can learn to fix ourselves before it’s too late. Tha information might not help some distant future race, but it sure would help our future descendants.