Red Star Fly-by

I was fascinated by the Breakthrough Starshot Project to send a probe to another star system. They think it will take 20 years to develop the technology, 20 to 30 years to make the trip, and 4 years to send the pictures back. By then, my age will be triple digits and I just might not be around to see it. So, I decided to create my own version of what it might look like.

I started the animation earlier this year but got distracted with other things. This week I got back to work on it. It is a simulation of what a space probe flying through an exo-stellar system would see. I used the animation program Blender.

I created mini star system in Blender. I tried to make it to scale, so the distances and plant/star sizes were appropriate. I did make the planets on the large side, so they’d show up better. I created a path for the probe and created a camera that followed the route. I had to go back to my old geometry skills to work it out. Wikipedia was very valuable.

I'd dropped it mainly because I had trouble getting the camera to point where I wanted it to point. If the probe was travelling at 20% the speed of light, it would pass through the system is about 7 minutes. At 24 frames a second, that worked out to 10710 frames. To save time, I just specified positions and orientations for only about 30 frames and let Blender interpolate the others. The interpolations were kind of wonky.

I went back and recalculated the positions and orientations for about every 48 frames, or about 190 frames. When the probe was changing direction, or rotating faster, I used shorter time intervals. For the most part it works OK now, although there are a few glitches I need to fix. Some of the interpolations are strange. I don’t understand why.

I created a star scape back ground to make it look more realistic. That took me several tries to get right. I did a test run to see how it looks. I feel good about it.

I have some other changes I’d like to make. My artistic skills leave something to be desired, so I used images of various planets and moons in our solar system. Some of them are too recognizable, so I want to find a way to make something a little more alien. I don’t know how I will do that yet.

I also want to add a few moons to the system. Mainly to help illuminate the dark sides of some planets so they’re more visible.

I hope to get this done quickly, before I get side tracked again.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Super Habitable Planets and the Fermi Paradox

Recently I read that some scientists think that there may be planets more suitable to life than Earth. How does this relate to the Fermi Paradox?

What is the Fermi Paradox?

The Fermi Paradox comes from a question that the physicist Enrico Fermi asked during a discussion of flying saucers in the late 1940s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

When you consider the age of the Universe, it seems likely that civilizations should have developed on other planets. If so, they should have been able to colonize the entire galaxy by now. Since we see no evidence of aliens, the question we need to ask is "where are they?"

Over the years since then, scientists have come up with a variety of solutions to this question. If there are super habitable planets, how can we explain this paradox?

What is a Super Habitable Planet?

René Heller and John Armstrong suggest that many exo-planets may be more conducive to life than Earth.  (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhabitable_planet) Briefly, a super habitable planet would be larger than Earth and orbit a smaller, and cooler, star.

Heller and Armstrong suggested that a planet about twice the mass of Earth would be the most suitable for life. The larger size would help maintain a thicker and more stable atmosphere for a longer time.

Cooler stars, like orange dwarf and red dwarf stars, are much more common that yellow dwarf stars like the Sun. The habitable zone around these star would be stable for longer periods. This would allow more time for life to develop and evolve on a planet in the habitable zone.

There is a lot of room for debate about the habitability of planets. For this post, I will accept these ideas.

Civilizations on Super Habitable Planets

If super habitable planets are common, then why do we se no evidence of them? I think it may be that conditions on these planets make it more difficult for advanced civilizations to develop the technology to explore space.

Michael Chorost in his article "Do Super-Earths Trap the Civilizations On Them?" considers the possibility that the higher gravity and the required escape velocity would make it harder to reach space. (see https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/blog/world-wide-mind/201211/do-super-earths-trap-the-civilizations-them). He concludes that these limitations would not stop development of space travel. I think he is too optimistic and that the additional effort may make it unlikely that these civilizations would explore beyond their own planet.

A second explanation is that civilizations on super-earths may not be aware of space. These planets would have deeper and thicker atmospheres, which would limit their ability to see the stars and other planets in the sky. This would be particularly true of planets around smaller stars. These planets will become tidally locked and life could only survive in a narrow twilight band around the planet. The thick atmosphere and the brighter sky would prevent them from seeing the stars.

Lonely Planets

Another possibility would be planets that are the only sizable body in a solar system. Without an nearby destination, like the Moon and Mars for Earth, there would be no easy first steps. Also, without other planets, the imaginations of civilizations on these planets could not develop a science fiction literature about travel to other planets. With out this fantasy, there would be less drive to develop space technology.

Summary

One possible explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that most civilizations on habitable planets are unable to develop space technology. This may be due to the limits imposed by the nature of super habitable planets on the ability to reach space. The nature of these planets may also limit the ability of these civilizations to even conceive of the idea of travel beyond their own planet.

Earth may be rare, in that it is large enough for a technological civilization to develop, but is also small enough that space travel is relatively easy to develop.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog