Super-Earths' powerful gravity could preclude alien civilizations from leaving their planets

Well according to Star Trek yeah lol

 

Hey I'm not disagreeing with you, in fact I hope you're correct I just personally don't think so.

I'm a science guy and while Star Trek was always hailed as the more "science" type sci fi show as opposed to something like Star Wars it still relies pretty heavily on what is basically magic.

The Syfy show "The Expanse" seems way more plausible in 300 years than Star Trek does. Humans colonizing the Solar System and having space military's and whatnot is probable and possible within the realm of actual physics. And if/when humans colonize Mars and get it up and running then the Earth will more than likely go to war with Mars because that's what humans tend to do lol. Warp drives powered by diluthium crystals is supposedly possible in theoretical physics but is basically just magic.

The main difference between theorists of the past and theorists of the past century is the fact that those in the past didn't have Special Relativity. Well it was there but they didn't know about it. So basically their minds were open to just fantasize about whatever the human brain could possibly imagine without restriction. Fast forward to the 20th century and we now have some pretty strict guidelines on what we can actually fantasize about. Everything that Jules Verne foresaw was possible within the realm of physics and he predicted all of this stuff and died prior to Einstein publishing his journal on Relativity. Jules didn't KNOW that this stuff was actually possible he just assumed it was and was right because there was no guideline out there telling him what was and wasn't actually possible.

Now we have a better understanding of physics and can't just fantasize about things at will because we have a rule book that says what actually is and is not possible.

Nonetheless we by no means know everything, not even close. Science is constantly changing and evolving and even though Einstein's theories continue to get verified to this day that still doesn't mean that he was the be all end all of our understanding of the cosmos. We very well may discover something that we couldn't even fathom.

 

I certainly agree about human space flight. The cost vs reward for those endeavors rarely make them worth it. For the most part us sending human beings in space is one of those things that we do so that we can say we did it. It does have it's benefits, such as if we obviously want to colonize Mars we need to send actual people there at some point, but I highly doubt that when the first humans step foot on Mars they are going to discovery anything significant that we didn't already know about from decades of sending robots there.

I'd much rather we dump resources into something like a gigantic multiple linked space telescope system that can peer deep into the cosmos. I'd also personally rather they dump the human Mars mission and pool all of those resources into making a Europa lander. I'm 100x more interested in landing a robot on Europa than I am landing people on Mars. The human Mars mission is going to happen though and will remain the focus for humans for the foreseeable future mainly because "we put people on another planet" is a pretty big deal for humanity.

I'm with you, if it were up to me Mars would get put on the back burner and we'd be launching robots to Europa and Enceladus and building space telescope networks. But unfortunately for us organizations like NASA are at the mercy of Congress and public tax dollars. "The people" want people on Mars. From a pure scientific standpoint there are much better ways to spend our money and part of NASA's job is to sort of keep justifying to the public why they should keep getting money.

Just wait and see. When James Webb launches and the public gets to "see" what James Webb shows them on Google then you are going to have a lot of very pissed off people wondering why we spent $10 billion US tax dollars on that thing because to the general public it's not going to show them anything "cooler" than Hubble has been doing for nearly 30 years because they don't understand what it was built to do.

 

I know which sucks because private companies seem to be doing a much better job than NASA at actually getting things done. Not NASA's fault necessarily, they are at the mercy of Congress and public opinion, two things which tend to change their minds about what they consider priorities every handful of years.

I wish things were reversed. I wish Elon Musk was hell bent on sending a robot submarine to Europa and it was NASA focused primarily on Mars. NASA's Europa lander mission just got scrapped from the budget, again....yet meanwhile ANOTHER Mars rover got approved.

Just a personal bias on my part I suppose but I really don't care about Mars all that much and it's frustrating that Mars gets most of the attention from everybody and most of the money while there are way more interesting places in our own backyard that I wish we would explore.

 

I am of the firm belief that if we find any type of "Alien" life whether it be microbes or multi celled organisms then we leave it alone. If we find anything on Mars then I believe we should leave Mars alone. We probably wouldn't though. Humans have a pretty good historical track record of "accidentally" screwing stuff up due to our curiosity and ignorance.

We are getting better though, science has gotten more responsible over the years. Responsible enough to toss it's probes into gas giants instead of letting them orbit out there forever and possibly smack into a moon that may have life. Or believe they found running water on Mars and ordered the rover to stay far away from it because they didn't want to accidentally contaminate anything that may be here.

Human curiosity is what I worry about. If we found life on another world I think our curiosity would override our responsibility. Science would want to be responsible and not bother it, but science would also be extremely intrigued by it and want to take a sample of it. Not sure which of those two rationales would win out in the end. Plus there would be an enormous amount of outside pressure from the general public and governments to go and see what it is, especially if it's a multi celled organism.

Can't blame folks though. I talk about Europa all the time, if NASA's Europa Clipper mission finds concrete evidence of life under that ice then I would REALLY REALLY REALLY want to send a lander down there and see what it is. The moral half of me says we shouldn't do that we should leave it alone, but the amateur astronomer fanatic half of me would be pretty bummed out if we didn't go look at it.

 

Might be! Who knows?

I saw a movie on Netflix awhile ago about a Europa mission where the astronauts went down there to see what was under the ice and ended up all getting eaten by some huge bioluminescent squid monster thing lol.

 

I think that was the point of what he said...

We find alien life somewhere and start sending probes or people to go and "study" it and we run the risk of contaminating it or it contaminating whatever we sent there. We also run the risk of harming it or altering it's natural development.

The mass movements of people across different parts of the world wasn't a good thing. We look at it now and its not that big a deal but hundreds of years ago with humanity exploring the world it caused A LOT of problems.

Just take the Americas for example. Europeans set foot on America and accidentally killed 90% of the Native population with their diseases. All life has just as right to exist on this planet or any other planet that it may be on. It's HUMANS who tend to forget that and disregard that with our antics.

I'm no hypocrite, I'm obviously a human, and I live in a house that was built on what was probably a forest at one point. But either way we humans don't exactly have the best track record when it comes to respecting nature, or each other. Are we even responsible enough to migrate to another world and start messing around with it? We can't even take care of our own planet.