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Gotta look at the orange dwarfs. Kurzgesagt just had an interesting video.
I don’t recall this being new, when I was growing up in the 80’s astronomers were citing the unstable nature of red dwarfs as a major filter in the Fermi paradox.
So what’s the reason? They are not consistent enough and changes in light/heat/radiation output would kill any life that arose?
Correct. Its a combination of regular flaring and CME’s and the fact that their habital zone is very close to it.
What a smeg head.
Why has no-one ever gone there and checked? Are they stupid?
There’s hope, Proxima b may have a magnetosphere
I like how you can make whatever claims you want about life in other parts of the galaxy and no one can check you on it.
Here’s why life could actually be abundant on planets close to their star: because I fuckin said so, that’s why! Prove me wrong nerds!
If only we knew how light worked and could come up with some analysis that would suggest one answer over the other. Oh well, I guess you’re right and physicists are just making shit up
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It is a pleasure to meet you Mr Fermi.
I personally like to believe that life is not rare because life fucking finds a way and all that.
Intelligent life is likely not rare. On our planet there are several species that might be considered intelligent like elephants, whales, dolphins, covids etc.
Intelligent, extreme tool building life at a detectable technology level from space is extremely rare. I mean seriously, humans have only been detectable from space for less than 125 years out of the 400-500 million years with large multicellular life on this planet.
We developed the ability for a global extinction event from nuclear warfare 80 years ago and we are currently on pace for a global climate catastrophe in the next 200. At the current rate we’ll be lucky to be detectable from space for 200 years.
Mr Hanson too? This thread is a veritable whos who of extraterrestrial thought.
I personally like where Olev Vinn went with it.
Recently, paleobiologist Olev Vinn has suggested that the great filter may exist between steps 8 and 9 due to inherited behavior patterns (IBP) that initially occur in all intelligent biological organisms. These IBPs are incompatible with conditions prevailing in technological civilizations and could inevitably lead to the self-destruction of civilization in multiple ways.
I somewhat agree with your sentiment. We know only about life on earth and assume we are the norm. There are arguments to make that changing a few parameters will have a negative effect but we might just be a “local optimum” and have no idea what the other local optimums (or even absolute ones) look like.
Then again, we can make educated guesses and I guess the scientists know that that’s what they are doing. But raising research money is easier if you claim to search for alien life.
If you look at stuff like the purple earth hypothises, the Canfield ocean, I’d definitely go with life finds a way.
I don’t know either of these terms. Can you give me a tldr?
Purple earth hypothesis suggests that early photosynthesis wasn’t chlorophil based, but on a simpler molecule (retinal) which is purple colored. The Canfield ocean was supposed to have followed this time yielding a turquoise life, where the ocean was anoxic and sulfidic. That was then replaced during the great oxigenation event which lead to the current green earth.
Ok, I’ve heard about purple earth, just didn’t know the name. And Canfield ocean was the period after or is it an alternative history idea?
Either way, that’s not what I meant to say. People say that the brightness of the star and the distance (see habitable zone) and the main biological atom (in our case cabin) and the combination of DNA and RNA are all essential. Changing just one aspect will have devastating effects and make life impossible. But what if Red Dwarfs have a different habitable zone if you use other main atoms and molecules? Maybe there are other energy sources so the star isn’t that important anyway.
what if they start on a yellow dwarf like we are then turn the star into a red dwarf so it won’t kill us?
While they have similar life cycles, ending up as white dwarfs, red dwarfs are much less massive than our sun. Thus, our sun can’t turn into a red dwarf without somehow loosing a significant amount of mass.
Alos, in the case of our sun, before it becomes a white dwarf, it will balloon up into a red giant and consume everything out to about the orbit of Earth. Any life on Earth at that time will be wiped out even if the planet itself doesn’t get dragged down into the sun.
I fail to mention it, but I had Astro engineering in mind. IE, artificially remove mass from the sun
If you were to do that, the Goldilocks zone would move inward as the Sun’s energy output dropped. So all the life on Earth would still die because the Earth would freeze.
Still, since you have the tech to remove mass from a star, you would also surely have the ability to move the earth inward to keep it in the Goldilocks zone. But that still might not work. Being so much closer to the Sun, the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere might not be sufficient to block flares and CMEs.
but we could remove mass slowly to avoid it from expanding and consuming the earth.
Stellar engineering isn’t talked enough in science fiction
Check out some of Larry Niven’s Known Space stuff. The Pak Protectors built Ringworlds and the Puppetteer homeworlds were moved into a Klemperer rosette formation so they could take them all with them as they fled the galaxy.
