An explosion in our ability to detect planets in other solar systems has made astronomers increasingly confident that it's only a matter of time until we discover life on other planets. Astronomers just discovered methane on a planet 63 light-years from Earth -- a sign that life just might exist. Here's what Carl B. Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, said following the discovery in this fascinating Washington Post article by Marc Kaufman.
There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and probably a hundred billion other galaxies with as many stars as ours, so it seems highly unlikely that there are not Earth-like planets orbiting some of them out there, waiting to be discovered.
I find the idea of life on other planets enormously uplifting: life is a miracle. But the idea of our civilization finding life on other planets fills me with apprehension. After all, civilization "discovering" new worlds teeming with life is nothing new to us: we've been doing it since agricultural civilization started expanding from Mesopotamia millennia ago.
But for as long as we've been discovering these new worlds, we've been destroying them, whether it was the Clovis people slaughtering the woolly mammoths, mastodons, and giant beavers that used to make North America home, the Sumerians turning wetlands and forests into wheat fields, or our own civilization slaughtering everything from the dodo to the bison to (just last year) the Baiji dolphin formerly of China's Yangtze River. And now we're turning our attention to the world's remaining tropical forests.
Of course, it's not only natural worlds we're destroying; it's also indigenous people, from the Native North Americans felled by massacre and disease to the Tibetans now being made a minority in their own homeland.
So what will happen when we contact another planet as full of life as our own but as defenseless to the onslaught of agricultural civilization as Earth? Will the oil companies tout it as the solution to high gas prices? Will palm oil producers turn their attention away from destroying the tropical forests of Southeast Asia towards destroying the forests of some distant planet? Will we double or triple or quadruple our home planet population by turning some far-off wetland into a big feeder lot for our livestock?
If we have any capacity to learn from the ongoing destruction of our planet, in the tradition of Star Trek, we must establish our own Prime Directive for the future. You never know -- first contact could come far sooner than we think:
Observe, but do not contact.
It's very human to think we'll be able to walk the hills and sail the seas of some distant new Earth. But who knows what diseases we'll bring -- or what diseases we'll become infected with. How will our civilization be able to resist colonizing some distant planet when we can't even resists colonizing the last pristine bits of our own?
This Halloween, cut flesh for the climate
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Comments
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David Roberts Posted 5:33 am
24 Mar 2008
grist.org
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caniscandida Posted 6:20 am
24 Mar 2008
If so, possibly we should all be locked up.
Anyway, my reaction was like DR's. Even if we deduce the existence of life on a distant world, the chances of our ever physically reaching that world and interacting with the life forms are awfully small.
The matter of space flight is alluded to in this recent essay on the late Arthur C. Clarke, the changing relationship between science and sci-fi, and the decreasing interest in space flight on the part of recent sci-fi authors, by the learned sci-fi critic David Itzkoff:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/weekinreview/23iztkoff. ...
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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BrianSchmidt Posted 7:12 am
24 Mar 2008
And if there's anyone out there intelligent enough to talk to, the odds are that they're far more advanced than we are and that we're the ones who should be concerned about the effect of cultural contact.
For real, space environmental issues, consider Earth-orbiting space junk; control and use of potentially-limited water ice resources on the moon; and the appropriate level of effort to avoid contaminating Mars and other potential habitable sites in our solar system. These are issues we need to think about in the same time context as our efforts on climate change (and space junk may be an even more immediate threat).
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Glenn Hurowitz Posted 7:58 am
24 Mar 2008
Of course, this is likely a long way off, but we don't really know what scientists will develop - or exactly how close life-supporting planets are. Indeed, it's possible (though quite unlikely) that underground oceans on moons in our own solar system support life. Better to come up with a policy before we start blasting off to other galaxies, even if it's 1000 years before (time flies at light speed after all).
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javaearth Posted 8:15 am
24 Mar 2008
How about we just fix the one we have now? - All in agreement great!
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David Roberts Posted 8:15 am
24 Mar 2008
That would certainly provide more of a moral test than mere resistance to alien overlords. Would we be alien overlords if we had the chance? History does not leave one optimistic.
grist.org
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wiscidea Posted 8:27 am
24 Mar 2008
(1) Similar to our obsession with superior beings right here, creating us, caring for us, and messing with our minds by giving different instructions to each tribe?
(2) Desperate for someone somewhere somehow to step in and save our asses, because it would be so much easier than rolling up our sleeves, learning to get along, and solving our own problems?
(3) We're greedy bastards who hope we can steal technology from someone else and make a buck or use it against others, including the folks we steal it from, to secure ultimate power for ourselves?
Just a couple ideas. Fun question!
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wiscidea Posted 8:34 am
24 Mar 2008
Fortunately, we do not and probably will not have the power to reach them.
It would, however, be interesting the read and comment on their blogs...
Oh crap... I neglected the possibility of cultural contamination. What if they learn about someone like Barack Obama and build an entire religion around Him?!!! Or there's that Star Trek episode where explorers leave behind a book about Chicago gangsters and the locals build an entire culture around it!!!
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Tasermons Partner Posted 1:15 pm
24 Mar 2008
Obviously someone is thinkin' ahead.
Plus, it could be like Calvin and Hoobes said: If there were life on other planets, they've probably gone out of their way to avoid us (lookin' a cut down tree stump).
Then again, we could always go Star Trek and invoke a Prime Directive.
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Pangolin Posted 2:26 pm
24 Mar 2008
First, absent transporter technology and really really cheap space habitats the majority of human beings will ALWAYS be stuck right here on this one planet. An oversized soda can (say 20 miles long by 2 wide) of rock, filled with air and water does not an ecology make. Ecosystems are expensive and important for without them it is hard to breathe.
Second, absolutely free energy for everybody, say a Mr. Fusion that can put out 30 kilowatts, just means that we run into the next set of limitations before we cook off the atmosphere. But we will still cook off the atmosphere given any free source of power without the ability to improve our radiative thermal loses.
Third, who says we aren't alien overlords of other species here on Earth? If you asked the humpback whale or the humbolt squid they might have a different opinion of our role in the ecosystem. We are one species of many and a mere blip in the genetic history of the gingko biloba or the coast redwood.
Finally, science fiction writers are very clear in believing that the true wealth of the Earth is it's genetic diversity. Rock can be had in plenty as well as all varieties of gasses. Solar power is limited but the limit is very, very, very high. What isn't available is the wealth of different genetic solutions to problems found on a single acre of tropical rain forest. That is unique to that one spot and not to be replaced for the wealth of empires. We haven't even cataloged all of the species of ants.
When we understand THIS planet maybe we should worry about those other planets.
Put the Carbon Back
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:21 pm
24 Mar 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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amazingdrx Posted 1:32 am
25 Mar 2008
But sending Cheney and friends to Mars? It's worth taking a chance.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Tasermons Partner Posted 4:28 am
25 Mar 2008
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Des Emery Posted 2:46 pm
25 Mar 2008
But start computing those odds from Day One, when Earth began to form out of that dust cloud surrounding a nascent Sol. Along with seven other planets, many moons and asteroids, and comets, etc.
Each so very different, not at all like cookies in the oven.
Life, we know with certainty ('cause we're it), began to form on an undescribed Earth, developed into many forms each related to all, different in appearance but carbon-based and sharing similar characteristics like breathing oxygen, and surviving in the same way, ingesting nutrients, digesting, and excreting their remains.
But there is a particular discreteness between conception and birth, and the Earth itself underwent a change which allowed life to start under certain circumstances, then altered to allow the development of diversity.
Each tiny step along the way stretches those odds into the point of singularity, reducing the possibility of alien life until only we are left, a cosmic fluke, alone in all the universe.
Or maybe not.
Des Emery
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