Extraterrestrial Civilizations Archives

February 27, 2024February 27, 2024 by Evan Gough

Some Intelligent Civilizations Will Be Trapped on their Worlds

With thousands of exoplanets discovered so far, astronomers are learning how different planets can be. What if intelligent alien civilizations arise on extremely different habitable worlds? Some civilizations could develop space exploration technologies, but others would be trapped underwater, under ice, or in enormous gravity wells. How could they escape? Image Credit: DALL-E

Evolution has produced a wondrously diverse variety of lifeforms here on Earth. It just so happens that talking primates with opposable thumbs rose to the top and are building a spacefaring civilization. And we’re land-dwellers. But what about other planets? If the dominant species on an ocean world builds a technological civilization of some sort, would they be able to escape their ocean home and explore space?

January 12, 2023January 12, 2023 by Evan Gough

Game of Probes: The First Probe Sent to Another Civilization Won’t Be the First to Arrive

An artist's concept of Voyager 1's view of the Solar System. Voyager 1 is one of our first interstellar probes, though it's an inadvertent one. It has no particular destination. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Zachary and S. Redfield (Wesleyan University); Artist's Illustration Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI).

If we ever detect an Extraterrestrial Civilization (ETC) and start communicating with them, the messages could take years, decades, or even centuries to travel back and forth. We face a challenging 49-minute long delay just communicating with the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, and that’s well within our Solar System. Communicating with an ETC that’s hundreds of light-years away or even further is a daunting task.

It’s even worse if we’re sending probes.