Fermi Paradox Special | Q&A 349

Can the difficulty of interstellar travel answer the Firmeny paradox? Or maybe it's the fact that we can only apply it to our galaxy and not further? Or maybe we can't even find life in our solar system. And in Q&A plus, what if we discover an exact copy of the Earth with the ISS circling it? What are the odds? All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show. Your questions, my answers. As always, wherever you are across my channel, if a question pops in your brain, just write it down. I'll gather them up and I will answer them here. All right, let's get into the questions. Josh B, what is your favorite mindblowing space fact? Man, I got like so many of these, but I it's hard for me to like pull them up randomly. I have to sort of pull them up in context. It's tough that a grain of sand hitting a spacecraft going at 20% the speed of light would be the equivalent of a bomb going off on the spacecraft. that cosmic rays as they go through your body and cause damage to your DNA, they're the damage they're doing is that they're stripping away the electrons from your atoms of your DNA. Yeah, I there's too many of them. Spaceman legend. If you had to put money on life being found on Europa or Enceladus, which would you pick? Also, is there actual video of planets orbiting other stars? So, which would I pick? Um, I mean, they're all interchangeable. So with Europa, Enceladus, Titan, Pluto series, uh any icy world, you've got this thick shell of ice and then you've got a ocean of liquid water underneath that that is kept warm by some kind of hydrothermal activity. So you've got all the raw ingredients. You've got the raw ingredients for life. You've got the minerals and stuff that are being put into the water. The water is going to be liquid water. And so it's kind of the same environment across all of them. And then the question is, you know, did life form independently on each one of those worlds? That would be cool. Um that would be weird and crazy and cool. Uh or did life get around from world to world? And so then the question is what is the place where an asteroid carrying life from Earth or Mars crash into Europa or Enceladus and be able to deliver the goods? And really it's about getting through the ice shell. With Europa, I mean that shell could be 100 km thick, 80 km thick. Like we just don't know how thick the shell of ice is on Europa. But there could be ways that material is is being transported up and down through the ice on Europa. There could be cracks in the ice where water is welling up and then the water is going back down. And so even if a a meteorite just lands on the surface of Europa, maybe it could sink in and then the life could find its way down into the interior and then life could spread. So I don't really have a preference for which one is more likely to have the life. But the one that is easiest to check is Enceladus. And that's because it is it has the geysers. It is actively throwing this water out into space. And so if you want the answer to that question, you just go and fly through the plumes at Enceladus and taste the ice and find out if there's any life or the chemicals of life and so on embedded into that. So uh you know, it doesn't really matter, but we just go with the lowhanging fruit. Look, look at the places where it's easiest to explore. And then there are videos of planets orbiting other stars. Um there are some really cool timelapse. So do a Google search for HR8799 and you will see a really cool video of exoplanets orbiting around a star. Real video. Todd Gibson Art. Do you think the difficulty of interstellar travel is the answer to the Firmeny paradox? find it incredibly difficult to imagine interstellar travel based on travel times alone, much less grains of sand. I mean, Omu Mua came to the solar system from another star system and it made the trip, made the journey. So, if like dumb rocks can make the journey, why can't smart rocks make the journey? Like, add some robotics to Amu Mua. Uh, give it the ability to steer, a little bit of propulsion, a way to consume the interstellar asteroid to chart a different course or go faster. So, so no, I don't think that interstellar travel is a showstopper for why we don't see aliens. It's time to shout out all the new $5 patrons and above. Gbots, Joseph Donahghue, Mark Parkinson, Nut Watch, Mark Y28, Adriano Trani, R Singh, Alex B, Glenn Samuel, and RM. Join the club at patreon.com/universe today. G. Mole. Given that the Firmeny paradox was strictly limited to possible alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, why do so many misrepresented as applying to the entire universe? Are we alone? I don't think that the Fermy paradox was strictly applied to the Milky Way galaxy. It was just that that was the thought experiment that Fermy did to then ask why where is everybody? um you know that if the universe is big and it's old and life formed early on on planet Earth then life should have formed across the galaxy on many different planets and then people would be going from planet to planet in the way that people go from city to city here on earth and so where is everybody but you know we have ways of observing other galaxies and seeing uh potential civilizations are going to have a a large impact on their home galaxies and so I think what that it beautifully applies to a larger thing. And so the the you know one of these concepts in in astronomy is that you say that you you know we don't live in a special part of the universe that that what we see around us planets moons stars gas dust nebula um pulsars you know all of the stuff that if you go to some random place in the universe some random galaxy in the universe you're not going to see the exact same things but you're going to see roughly the same thing. And so if we see here in the Milky Way, no life anywhere, then that is a representation of what you should expect to see in all of the galaxies, no life anywhere. But if we saw life teeming here in the galaxy, then you would expect to see that teeming in other galaxies as well. So uh yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a perfectly reasonable extension of, you know, if we don't see anybody here in the Milky Way, why don't we see anybody out there in the universe as well? DB Ireland, smart man, have you ever thought that life on this planet was seated by another interstellar species? I say that considering the improbability of all life development from single cells. Yeah, this is one perfectly reasonable explanation for the existence of life on Earth. that life formed um as soon as it possibly could on Earth. The second the planet Earth had cooled down to the point that life wasn't caught on fire by molten magma, then it formed. And that's weird, right? That if that if you would expect that life would have taken a while to get its bearing, take its time. But no, it just was like non-life to life. And obviously one possibility is that is that that's just how it worked out. Um but it's not what you would expect, right? If you were sort of expecting probabilities, if there's the entire age of the Earth's history, then you would expect life to have formed at some random point along that process. But the fact that it formed as early as it did would lead you to believe that there should be life everywhere across the cosmos. that you know if that's what happened here on Earth that's what should happen everywhere and yet you know obviously back to the Firmeny paradox where is everybody and so one really interesting explanation for that is that either life was was seated intentionally or unintentionally by another civilization so the unintentional is that you could have asteroids smashing into planets blowing debris off into space that debris coasts through space bacteria is kept nice and safe inside for hundreds of thousands, millions of years, and then it lands on some other planet, and then life is not dead, and so it's able to then exploit its new surrounding. Um, and you know, there's like some really cool ideas of like if a comet just passes through the upper atmosphere and then veers off into space again, it could scoop up a whole bunch of material from planet Earth. Like, it doesn't have to crash into the surface of the planet. And so, you know, it's believed that there are tens of thousands of interstellar objects in the solar system right now. And so, they could have come from other solar systems. And they inevitably must be crashing. Like, there are probably there's probably dust or rocks crashing into the Earth every year where it was formed in an entirely different solar system, which is we just haven't found it yet, but it's it's inevitable that it's happened. So, that's the one possibility. The other possibility is that aliens seeded the life here. That's a thing that we're thinking about doing that like how do we get life going on Alpha Centauri or Proxima Centauri? Well, what if we send a spacecraft that's got DNA in it that's carrying bacteria in a frozen state and then it arrives at at Alpha Centauri and then it lands on the planet and then it starts carefully setting out all of the raw material for life. set, you know, releases a bunch of cyanobacteria into the environment and then, you know, we show up a million years later and the planet has got life going. Um, but the problem is that it goes back to the FY paradox. Like, if this is what's happening out there, then where is everybody? Why don't we see any evidence of all these aliens zipping around seeding life from world to world? So, it always comes back to where is everybody? Jurish Slavic, what is your take on the rare earth hypothesis? It seems like we can keep adding more and more variables to the Drake equation, which makes life elsewhere very unlikely. Thanks. So, I mean, if for those of you who are watching my channel and are familiar with my perspective on the Fermy paradox, I think that we're alone in the universe. And so, you know, I I am for the most extreme version of the rare earth hypothesis. But the rare earth hypothesis, it's there's a great book that came out a couple years ago. I read it. It was wonderful. Um, and the gist is that uh while bacterial life is probably very common in the universe, that the raw conditions to create self-replicating organisms are is probably out there. Uh, making the shift to multisellular organisms is probably a lot more difficult that that it's a very difficult step. And this is sort of one of these ideas that's encapsulated in Robin Hansen's great filter argument that you know that there are a series of these steps and each one requires you know only a fraction of of various planets get through these steps and for some reason no civilization seems to get through all of the steps and like the first one might be life forming second might be multisellular life then it might be intelligence and then it might be civilization and then it might be space fairing civilization and not wiping yourself out with a nuclear war. If you agree with the Fermy paradox that we look out into the universe and we don't see evidence that there are civilizations out there, then the rare hurt earth hypothesis that that says, well, like life is really rare, that makes sense. But but for me, um it doesn't go far enough, which is, you know, if you drop one spore of mold onto your sandwich and not thousands of spores of mold or millions of spores of mold that are just freely floating in the air and they're looking for a sandwich to fall on, but you just drop one little spore of mold and then you come back, you're going to have mold all over your sandwich. Like it doesn't take much. And so the same thing goes with life that if you end up with just one planet in the entire Milky Way that makes it all the way through all of the great filters and becomes a space fairing civilization and then they build their self-replicating robots and they send them out to colonize the entire galaxy. Then 10 million years later they have colonized every single planet in the entire Milky Way. And it doesn't matter where they start, right? And so life could be incredibly rare. There could be one civilization per galaxy that makes it into that phase. Well, one is enough. One is enough to completely colonize the entire galaxy. And so, we don't see any examples of that. And so, for me, again, this is just my personal opinion, is that life has to be even more rare than one civilization per galaxy. It's got to be one civilization per observable universe or per uh I guess colonizable universe. and that we don't see any examples of any civilizations out there doing this work. And so for me, that feels like we're alone. Paul Wilson, apart from hawking radiation, is there a way to kill a black hole? No. Anything you try to do to a black hole just makes it stronger. And so you would have to starve a black hole. You would have to put it into a box and remove all of the radiation, all of the potential mass that could fall into it. You put it just to absolute zero or just a little bit above absolute zero and then you let the Hawking radiation make it evaporate. But there's no other way to get rid of it. You're stuck with your black holes until they evaporate. Astroter, if you were to buy a smart telescope in the next 3 months, what would you buy? I assume budgets of $1,000 to $2,500. I would probably buy a Sea Star S50 or I would wait for the Pro version of that. And then I have some experience with the Celestron Origin telescope, but it is like $5,000. So that's outside of your budget. It's pretty spiffy. It's a pretty good telescope. And then you've got the Veyonus and so on. And they're all in the I don't know $2,000 to $4,000 range. I don't know exactly what the unicellar or the Veyonus ones cost. Uh but the one that's in your price range is going to be the the Sea Star S50. I haven't tried the Dwarf 3, which is in the same category. Um but it looks like people like the Sea Star S50 better. Did you know that you can get the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free? We call Q&A Plus. This week's bonus question, what if we discover an exact copy of the Earth with the ISS circling it? What are the odds? I'll put a link to that in the show notes. All right, those are all the questions that we had this week. Thank you everyone who put your comments into the YouTube comments. Everybody who joined me for the live show when these questions were recorded, uh we're still on our live stream hiatus back in a little over a week. So, uh stay tuned for announcements about that. Now, I'm going to talk about what I think is the most reliable ways to get news. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrew Gross, Bley Griffin, Brian Barry, Carbon, Chuck Hawkins, Kamar Box Nelson, David Guilton, David Mats, Evan Pro, Hudson Ward, James Clark, Jeremy Matter, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcelitz, Michael Purcell, Monzo, Nick Borquez, Nick Solari, Paul Robot, Rank Kaidu, Richard Williams, Sun Sergeant, Steven Fowler, Mley, Vlad Shiplin, and Wolf Gang Claus who support us at the master of the universe level and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So, you might know, but I am not a fan of social media. No, I am a social media hater. Um, I don't like Facebook. I don't like Twitter. I don't like Blue Sky. I don't like Mass. I like I don't like spending your time on those social media platforms. Now, I have a presence on all of them to some degree or not, but I don't spend any time consuming them because I really resent algorithms deciding what it is that I should watch. I do watch a lot of YouTube. That's an algorithm. I am a hypocrite. uh but what can you do but I really feel like it's important to take control over your uh consumption of media to curate and I you know come back to this again and again and again and in the past I've talked about RSS feeds uh which are really important and like if you h find creators that you enjoy you should be subscribing to their RSS feed and then you can read the news in your time uh you know based on what you're interested in not what an algorithm thinks you should watch and it's trying to make you angry and hate your fellow citizens. But another really powerful way to get the news on a regular basis is with an email newsletter because it's very convenient. You sign up and then it shows up at your email box and if you don't want to get it anymore then you unsubscribe and then you don't get it anymore. And so uh it's a very useful way to get a lot of information. Um I'm there's a couple of newsletters that I really like and I just wanted to share them with you. So the first one is by my old friend uh Dr. Phil Plate, also known as the bad astronomer and he is writing a weekly email newsletter. He's got sort of two versions. One is the free version, one is the pro version. Phil Plate is one of the longest space journalists that I know, explainers, debunkers, and uh it's just a great writer. Next is by Jatan Meta, and he runs a newsletter called Jatan Space. And Jaten is a space journalist, but he specializes in uh information about the moon. And so he's talking about all the different programs, all of the different countries that are attempting lunar programs. He's originally from India and so he also provides a lot of great coverage about what's happening with ISRO and you know that's a space agency that we don't hear a lot about and so if you're interested in finding out what's going on there, I highly recommend uh Jaton Space. Next up is the Rocket Report by Eric Berger over at RS Technica. And you know, I've stated many times, Eric Burgerer is the finest space journalist uh working in the field today. Yes, better than me. Um and so you want to be able to subscribe to his writing so that you get information about what's happening in space every single week. And last up is Orbital Index. And this is a weekly newsletter written by several people who are focused on aerospace news. you know, less of the astronomy, more on the sort of space exploration and aerospace, but again, it's a really great read. So, for all of these, I will put links in the show notes. You can go and subscribe to the various newsletters, and then if you don't like them, you just unsubscribe again. Uh, but then you're able to get this information on a regular basis. And of course, I do a newsletter, too. Uh, you can get that from univertoday.com/newsletter. And if there are other newsletters that you like that I should check out, put them into the comments down below. You won't be able to put links, but you know, if you put the name, I can Google it.