Aliens!

Here is an old thought that I have been meaning to write down for a while. This one came to me while I laying under the stars on a hot Florida summer night and making wishes on shooting stars. Are we alone? Out of all the galaxies with all their stars with all their uncountable planets, can we say with certainty that life isn’t out there?

This led to a related (and prerequisite) thought. Have you spent much time REALLY considering the vastness of space? The sheer distance between us an the next star? Let’s forget all the pesky details like human life span and years required at certain speeds and just focus on one thing: energy. The energy required to cover interstellar distances is immense. As in, take all the energy produced on the planet Earth, and that might get you to the next star. Even if we think we can create wormholes, physicists estimate this would essentially require the energy of the sun to open. (This is all assuming we can’t follow Orson Scott Card’s thinking and simply blip out of existence at one place and back in at another with almost zero energy).

Daedalus: an interstellar spacecraft concept from the 70s, when we still really dared to dream about space. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

Ok, so we need energy. Our current chemical propulsion methods will not do – we only convert an incredibly small fraction of matter to energy this way. Even a nuclear bomb only converts slightly over 0.1% of the mass to energy. So, lets skip antimatter and fusion and whatnot and pretend we can convert matter directly to energy. To put things in perspective, one gram (the weight of about one small paperclip) has the energy potential 21 kilotons of TNT, or the equivalent of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Again, for perspective, Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated at 51 megatons, consumed about 5.5 pounds of matter.

Tsar Bomba

Following that thought, I am going to assume that any civilization that can sail the interstellar seas will have to come at least come this far in technology. But, in my mind, this creates a challenge. Let’s assume for a second that any such advanced civilization is absolutely void of ill-will (no war, terrorism, etc). Regardless of that, can you imagine how difficult it would be to build a technology that would harness that kind of power without a few screwups along the way? We don’t know an easy way to convert matter directly into energy, and whose to say that process is easy to harness? The guy in the lab pulling the trigger on his PhD thesis project could start a chain reaction, and next thing you know, pop goes their solar system…and, maybe, when we see supernovas, maybe they are actually other civilizations reaching this point…which is why they haven’t stopped in for tea yet.