Space is hostile.
The vast expanses of interstellar space provide some of the darkest but also coldest places
possible in the universe.
Any conception of loneliness we have on this planet, whether it be wintering over in an
antarctic ice station, sitting on a submarine passing through point nemo, or orbiting high
above in the international space station pales in comparison to the utter loneliness of the
expanses of deep interstellar space.
Even entire star systems you might encounter could be devoid of any others, perhaps most
of them are, and might provide only scant raw materials and a rare glance at a sun.
As a result, right now we envision crossing interstellar space in two main ways.
The first is robotically.
Robots, at least if they aren’t artificial generalized intelligences, do not get lonely.
Though maybe AGI does, we shall see.
But regular robots simply function and follow through with their task until they stop functioning
or complete their mission.
On our level, this includes both mechanical failure, abandonment, but also nuclear decay
as the plutonium pellets we must use to power our outer solar system probes heading into
deep space decay too far to continue to provide meaningful power.
Any probe above and beyond this will need a better power system, perhaps hydrogen fusion
using bussard collectors or some other means of long-distance propulsion.
The other idea is traveling the distances ourselves in what would presumably be multi
generational ships.
This is usually envisioned battlestar galactica style, with either some gigantic ship or self-sufficient
city embedded in a hollowed out asteroid or o’neill cylinder where people are born,
live life, and never leave their self sufficient traveling island until it gets to the intended
destination, which could take thousands of years, and throughout, there’s always the
risk of something failing so catastrophically that the whole thing collapses.
These are themes often found in science fiction.
In the original movie Alien an implied very old but defunct starship is found complete
with its dead and mummified pilot.
Here, the culprit was coming up against an aggressive alien organism, but it could just
as easily be a failure of a critical system, or chain of systems, that might cause an interstellar
starship failure.
Another example would be Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, where a ship is not
defunct, but somewhat dormant awaiting its true destination.
You might say that interstellar travel is just too difficult for biologicals, it’s
simply far better to stay at home and leave it to the mindless robots.
But you could also envision a hybrid scenario, where the utility of biology, and the utility
of technology are merged.
In short you send a robotic probe to navigate the vast ocean of interstellar space only
to print out hybrid customized technological biological beings to populate whatever exoplanet
you’ve chosen to set up shop at.
Any of these scenarios are plausible, but they often grandly envision future technologies
that we have only just begun to envision and flesh out that might not work out in practice.
An example of this is suspended animation.
This trope is everywhere in sci fi from stasis to freezing in carbonite.
It provides a convenient way to get humans from point A to point B while avoiding the
trials and tribulations of conscious deep space travel at sub light speeds, and the
crushing but resource expensive boredom that would come with it.
Barring this, there’s always faster than light speeds.
But as we’ve developed technologically, these tropes have aged.
As far as we can tell, faster than light travel is a unicorn that the universe just doesn’t
allow you to do, or if it does, it requires massive quantities of energy such as in an
Alcubierre warp drive.
Suspended animation has proven problematic, if you want to freeze someone you not only
have to essentially fill them with antifreeze to mitigate cellular damage, you must also
mitigate things like one’s own body’s natural radioactivity accumulating a fatal
dose.
The way past this is the invocation of far future nanotechnology that can repair cells
and especially DNA from the base upward on an atomic scale.
The reality here is that while it is within the realm of plausibility, it’s only just
so.
Nanotechnology on that level is almost certain to take its time in repairing an organism
that’s been in deep freeze.
You can only generate so much heat before your vaporize your rather complicated patient.
It may actually take centuries to wake someone up, and that still assumes that memory in
humans isn’t some kind of standing wave that when it’s gone, it’s gone, rather
it’s something that can be recovered.
We don’t really know the answer to that yet.
But what we can do with interstellar travel is take a look at what we, as humans, do.
How have we managed to ensure our own survival on our own world, which can be quite hostile
in its own right, and how do we apply that to space?
One thing we are sure to do is plan for it, and this is something we appear to have always
done.
In a recent video I mentioned the idea of talley-like marks in 25,000 year old cave
paintings as being instructional on how to survive the local environment, what to hunt
and when, and done in such a way that even people from far away might be able to interpret
the marks.
This actually could have been far more prevalent at the time than we know.
We have the bias that we have protected caves that sheltered not only our human ancestors,
but also their paintings.
What we don’t really know are things like what did they carve into trees?
After all, humans love signposts, we generally put them up everywhere from crosswalks to
stop signs and we even make some attempt to make those things universal enough that almost
anyone living on planet earth can understand them no matter where they are from.
It’s possible we’ve always done this, with instructions preserved on rocks and trees
that have long since disappeared.
Or you could do it via oral or song traditions, such as with the Aboriginal peoples in Australia,
where maps were encoded in songs passed painstakingly down generation after generation.
Point is, the idea of calling each other on the phone and communicating or sending emails
is not new, just the form of communication has changed.
As far as messaging, humans have done this apparently since time immemorial.
We live in a world of messages.
But we also go further.
In hiking, ill used cabins can be found in remote places where hikers will leave spare
supplies for anyone else that might find the cabin and stay the night.
This extends to the human exploration of space.
The international space station for example sports a medical kit, and is normally kept
stocked for as many months as possible.
As we expand out into the solar system, we may well leave defunct stations and spacecraft
stocked just in case someone gets into trouble out there.
The interesting thing about this behavior is that it may actually be something alien
civilizations recognize and do, perhaps on a far greater scale than a single star system.
And they may also do it on a much bigger, more capable scale than we can currently imagine.
The first concept here is a SETI emergency beacon.
We often see SETI signals as intentional communications between civilizations saying hello to each
other, or merely detecting each other’s radar.
But it could just as easily be messages of utility.
One example here would be a sign post, perhaps saying to any passing travelers that a certain
element, such as phosphorus which may be rare in the galaxy but still eminently useful,
can be found in abundance in this particular star system.
Or you can flip that around, don’t come to this star system because we’ve already
been here and picked it over.
They may even do this by means of transmitting or otherwise depicting the structure of atoms
in hopes of being understood.
We did this with one of the plates we affixed to our pioneer spacecraft, the depiction of
a hydrogen atom, though there to show the hyperfine transition because otherwise while
hydrogen is useful, it’s also the most common element in the universe and is everywhere
in a galaxy.
But there are elements that may be of use that are a lot rarer than that.
And that brings us into an enigma of a star that I’ve made videos on before, but warrants
another look due to a few developments, It’s known as HD 101065, or Przybylski’s Star
and it has a chemical profile unlike any other star we’ve ever seen.
Peculiar isn’t a strong enough word here.
Located about 356 light years away, it shows two really strange things.
The first is that it has underabundances of some metals that it really should have more
of including iron and nickel.
These elements are everywhere thanks to supernovae, and entire metallic meteorites fall frequently
on earth made up of a mix of the two materials, often along with carbon interestingly enough.
But in the end, this underabundance is unusual, but not earth shaking.
Metal poor stars exist, and the ranges are all over.
But the problem is that HD 101065 isn’t metal poor in the sense we usually see that,
rather it’s poor in common metals.
What it does show are high abundances of metals like caesium, neodymium, thorium, ytterbium,
holmium, strontium, uranium, yttrium, scandium, niobium and so on.
Not metals of enormous commonality, but they do occur in nature so it’s a head scratcher,
not a norm for a star, but not show stopping magic, rather that some odd circumstance is
going on with this star.
But it doesn’t stop there.
A number of years ago researchers looked more deeply into the spectrum of this star and
found something very odd indeed.
Now I have to caveat this, it’s never been clear just how reliable these measurements
were and they have never been confirmed, but they are still widely cited.
They detected elements that should not exist in any real abundance in nature outside a
lab.
Yet, there they were.
These included the scary ones, the transuranic elements.
This includes Berkelium, Plutonium, Actinium, Neptunium, protactinium, americium, californium,
and Einsteinium which the longest isotope has a half life of 472 days.
If the detections are correct, and that’s actually a big if because this is one complicated
star and misinterpretation is very possible here, especially when dealing with elements
we normally only see in a lab, but if so this star becomes a candidate technosignature.
In fact, pending confirmation, it would be the strongest candidate we’ve ever seen,
above even the Wow signal.
On a more solid footing in the detection were other radioactive elements such as technetium
and promethium, which are hard to envision having in a star unless it has really heavy
transuranic elements decaying.
Promethium’s longest lived isotope is only just over 17 years, so whatever is going on
with this star, it’s rapidly replenishing these elements.
If this all can be confirmed, we’re either going to have to take a serious look at it
as a technosignature, but also if there is some nuclear process that allows nature to
occasionally do this that we aren’t aware of.
Either way, it’s strange and new.
There’s always been a hypothesis that transuranic elements eventually hit an island of stability
far up the periodic table.
How this would be reached is unclear, you’d need something like a neutron star bombarding
it, and no such thing appears present but more recent work suggests that it might simply
be hidden from view from our perspective, but there’s an issue.
It should be producing large amounts of deuterium and it’s not.
From a SETI point of view, the idea has been that if you want to send out a message to
the galaxy, salt your star with elements that do not appear in nature.
This idea was originally applied to plutonium by Sagan and Schklovskii, and that is present.
But hello, we’re here may not actually be the message.
Rather it may be saying that if you need these rare elements, and you’re in the neighborhood
of this star, they are available.
On the other hand, it can also be interpreted as aliens dumping nuclear waste into the star.
Back to the idea of survival rations however.
This is unlikely, you would not leave food for an alien because the chances of biological
compatibility on that level are extremely low.
We can’t even digest the most common carbohydrate, wood, here on earth much less digest whatever
an alien might be eating.
But what you can do is create something that can universally make whatever you need should
you encounter one in a star system with sufficient resources.
We could call it the von Neumann survival machine, and it would be a 3d printer essentially
that could be stationed in a star system that can be used to print out whatever any passing
species might need, from nutrients to proteins.
Learning to operate alien technology you might run across actually could be easier than decoding
a radio signal, since you have on site examination abilities.
It might be marked with a radio beacon that you only see at sufficient distance to make
use of it, but you don’t need to see such a thing halfway across the galaxy.
That would require too much energy for something unlikely to be useful.
It could even go so far as to be able to copy and print out, or alter, your genetic code,
or make copies of itself and populate the entire galaxy with such oasis probes.
In this hypothetical model not yet well explored by sci fi, there is somewhat of a sore thumb
however.
If a radio beacon is how these objects might be located by travelers, then we have not
seen evidence of this in our own star system.
There could be any number of reasons why, but it may be so simple that inhabited star
systems are not used for their raw materials in deference to those already living there,
or there’s simply nothing interesting enough in this star system to bother leaving a beacon.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently worried about low
temperature life leaving replicators of this nature.
You go in hoping for a hamburger after a long journey living on algae rations, and the best
it can do is a -179 celsius hydrocarbon soup with nourishing iron chips that takes four
centuries to print.
Well, they meant well anyway and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online
book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.