This makes Tethys and Rhea very tempting places for permanent occupation - they have abundant ice on the surface (easy to dig if you have a power source) and the delta-v's between them and the surface of Enceladus are between 1000 m/s and 3000 m/s, something chemical rockets can do easily.
Saturn moon 'able to support life'
151–160 of 268 posts
Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely believe that any intelligent species that has enough intelligence to become interstellar will heavily invest in camouflage and become a lurker. Only reacting when something threatens its survival. The universe is like a jungle full of scary things, the only wise move is to watch out, be invisible and not make a lot of noise.
I get your point, but I posit that this is a very human point of view. Once you've cracked the energy needs for interstellar travel, what's the point of raising a war campaign light years away (especially if you need generation ships to attack)? Furthermore, it doesn't seem very intelligent to me that all capable species just hunker down in their own gravity well to die off unnoticed and without having explored the u…
They wouldn't need generation ships. You "just" need sufficient tech to put engines on a suitable astroid and accelerate it to a decent fraction of c; it only needs enough logic to fine tune the path. An invasion force is horribly inefficient vs. just slamming a lot of mass at someone at high enough speed.
And it only takes one massively paranoid, xenophobic species lobbing big rocks at people to ruin the entire neighbourhood.
I don't think camouflaging necessarily means not leaving your gravity well, but if there's someone lobbing big rocks at potential threats, then the only ones exploring will be the ones powerful enough or good enough at hiding for us to be unlikely to spot them unless they want us to. Everyone else will be dead.
It's one of the more compelling answers to the Fermi paradox to me, while at the same time being profoundly depressing. But it's less depressing than the chance that there might not be any other civilizations.
Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'
#153If life is there, completely disconnected from earth life, it would be dramatic. That would mean that our solar system, has life on at least two, out of nine planets. That would seem to indicate that life is a fairly common things on planets. It would allow to adjust the drake equation, to easily predict millions of planets with life. And that would mean a high probability of many advanced, intelligent civilizations…
Based on the developments in exo-planet research along with discoveries like this over the past couple of years, I would conjecture that life is ridiculously common. But by life, I mean microbial life. I would imagine that multi-cellular life is much rarer, and life capable of reaching human-level intelligence and beyond is probably absurdly rare, on the level of something like one species per galaxy. It's all worthl…
On a related note, there has been an interesting episode of BBC's CrowdScience. They reported that robots which go to Mars (to find out about microbial life) have to go through an extreme cleaning process to make sure that they contaminate Mars as little as possible with microbial life from our planet .
Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely believe that any intelligent species that has enough intelligence to become interstellar will heavily invest in camouflage and become a lurker. Only reacting when something threatens its survival. The universe is like a jungle full of scary things, the only wise move is to watch out, be invisible and not make a lot of noise.
Aren't Twitter, FB and selfies a sign of the opposite happening at the micro level?
Despite the occasional swatting, for the most part the consequence of being spotted on social networks is not to have the local lunatic show up to shoot you in the face.
That's a rather significant difference to the proposed idea.
Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's assuming intelligent life always builds an industrial civilization...
How else could they cope with growing needs for goods or, say, entertaiment as their civilization develops? Or would you then argue that intelligent life could develop sort of moratorium on further development in line with their value system?
Or they fail to thrive like humans have. Early humans were few in number and might have nearly died out a few times. We just got lucky.
I've also wondered how a race without something like a hand ever gets around to making complex tools with multiple moving parts. If Dolphins had twice the brain power that they do now, would they be able to build anything? The intelligence of other races may simply fail to be expressed in any way that is noticeable once they are gone. Hell dinosaurs might of been smarter than us and simply unable to use and create tools.
Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'
#156“able to support life“ ... as we know it. The universe being so vast and so diverse, most life forms will probably escape our comprehension: completely different chemistry, environments (pressures, temperatures), time scales, state of matter (plasma based life forms?), or even energy based ones. We are not even looking for such different life forms, since we have already concluded that: - life must be water based - l…
How do you imagine we would be begin to look for the things you're describing?
Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'
#157“able to support life“ ... as we know it. The universe being so vast and so diverse, most life forms will probably escape our comprehension: completely different chemistry, environments (pressures, temperatures), time scales, state of matter (plasma based life forms?), or even energy based ones. We are not even looking for such different life forms, since we have already concluded that: - life must be water based - l…
I'd be curious to see what elements (not chemical elements conceptual building blocks) are required for natural selection to take hold, irrespective of the physical form taken. Surely someone has looked at this on a more abstract level?
Once you have natural selection, intelligence is a conceivable adaptation.
Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'
#158So here's an orthogonal question. In a field like space navigation, where your findings come back after an expedition planned 5-10+ years ago how do you be "agile"?
What is the go to project management style? Can we learn from these disciplines for alternative practices to building software?
Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spiders also produce more pound per pound intelligence. They are solitary. What if they became social? Brain-body ratio is provocative, but not the whole story. Seeing galahs (Australian corvid https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Galah ) socialize in trees in monkey troop-like fashion, dextrous in tooth and claw, makes me believe they are on the way. Though maybe raccons are next. > efficiency is Good Enough I was thinking th…
Here's a crazy idea: What if we picked a domesticated animal such as a pig or dog, and began to breed the species for intelligence? Or any other suitable animal. Only intelligence (and general health), over an extended period. It's believed that all of the modern dog breeds came about in the last hundred or so years. Modern domesticated dogs are definitely intelligent, especially socially intelligent. They understand…
Clifford D. Simak's "City" (1952) consists of a series of bridges between a number of short stories described as legends of "Man" tolds by intelligent dogs to their puppies. The dogs in the stories were able to start communicating with humans thanks to the work of one of the human protagonists, getting intelligent enough to form a civiliation of their own once humans gradually disappear.
It's one of the weirdest apocalyptic sci-fi novels around, in that it describes the end of the human race by isolation and loneliness and resulting escape into an alien world, while at the same time describing dogs creating a thriving replacement.
Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'
#160If life is there, completely disconnected from earth life, it would be dramatic. That would mean that our solar system, has life on at least two, out of nine planets. That would seem to indicate that life is a fairly common things on planets. It would allow to adjust the drake equation, to easily predict millions of planets with life. And that would mean a high probability of many advanced, intelligent civilizations…
Mermaids?