NASA’s TESS Presents Panorama of Southern Sky

Over a lifetime, I’ve done a fair amount of statistical ”analyzing” about ”where are they all?”. Turns out that the bottom-line redux is ”the bigness of space” makes all but the closest and most noisy aliens ‘visible’ or ‘observable’ to us, here, on Planet Dirt. I know that sounds like a banality, but it is also mathematically true.

As a trivial example, today, if we tried with all the observing ‘stuff’ we have, we could not detect the squawking of a civilization, were it to exist, on our nearest neighbor’s purported Goldilocks planet, ~if they weren’t pointing their transmissions directly at us, continuously~. If just squawking across the electromagnetic spectrum, even ‘in aggregate’, their transmissions are basically below the power-of-detectability, here. Because ~space is really big~.

Because 4.1 LY is ~39 trillion kilometers~, or 38.8e15 meters distant.

Because ‘power diminishes as a function of distance, squared’, the power of the entire civilization (there), as listened-for (here), is 6.6e-34 … ‘less per square meter of (our) antenna’, than their entire emission. Actually somewhat worse, but let’s go with that. So, if like Earth, they are emitting maybe 1,000 megawatts of RF at various wavelengths, or 1e9 W, then 1e9 * 6.6e-34 = 6.6e-25 W/m^2 … here. That number goes WAY UP if they actually ~point their transmissions at us~. It isn’t terribly hard to make a narrow-cone transmission antenna that can deliver a megawatt to a cone only 1 arcminute across. To us here, that’d be equivalent to a 12,000,000 megawatt isotropic (broadcast) transmission. 12,000,000 * 1,000,000 * 6.6e-34 = 7.8e-21 W/m^2. Using a 100 meter or larger ‘big ear’, that becomes maybe 1e-16 W.

Which IS at the level of power as received here, on Planet Dirt, from the Voyager spacecraft, now exiting the heliosphere, at the heliopause. So we could hear ’em! But they’d have to be aiming straight at the Solar System, for sure.

The OTHER big take-away was the notion of time itself, human lifetimes, and our ‘persistence’ in both listening and in transmitting energy that might be detected far, far away. Humanity’s ‘radio age’ is barely 100 years old. On a planet that’s had ambling life forms for perhaps 400,000,000 years. Maybe more. More is worse, statistically. There isn’t a single exoplanetary stellar system that we’ve ”pointed” our transmissions at for more than a few dozen hours at a time. And any one of them, WAY less than 10 years. No budget for it, basically.

No persistence.

Clearly one can haul out the good old Unicorn Horn Wand, and wish a future-Humanity that has limitless self-replicating space-manufacturing resources to make HUGE antennae, with HUGE limitless solar power supplies, and HUGE transmitters, with EXQUISITE radio-and-laser detectors. And hundreds, or thousands of them, at no cost at all to Mankind, being self-replicated. Which can light up thousands or even millions of potential target systems with Hi, How Are You Guys transmissions, listening for thousands to hundreds-of-thousands of years. Sure. Yew, unicorn, narwhale horn. All good magic.

Thing is, again, even that is more-or-less in the timeframe ‘framed’ by the human life span. It is far more likely that any space-faring intelligences have ‘lifespans’ which are either indefinite or at least millions of years. Because at millions-of-years, suddenly the Galaxy looks a whole lot smaller. One really doesn’t need to invent warp drives, or wormhole tunneling to acceptably ply the galactic plane, actually visiting places constrained by power-and-the-speed-of-light, if you live a million years. Even if a civilization were to persist without deconstructing itself for millions of years, perish that the individuals do not, even then, interstellar civilization is possible. Just not good Space Opera reading, that’s all.

I have concluded that we’re rather like sand fleas, at this point in our technological nascence. ~Merely 100 years old~. The lifetime of a sand-flea (hours) compared to a great tortoise (150+ years). Or a daisy (1/2 year) compared to an aspen grove (10,000+ years). We’re veritably flitting around like humming birds, compared to the space-faring lack-of-urgency.

Kept in that perspective, it becomes obvious to make several projections which mesh rather well with reality. One, that space-faring entities have been visiting Earth A LOT over the aeons. Life’s progressions ought to be endlessly interesting, if naught but academically. Yet, with hundreds to thousands of visits, over billions of years, their sense of time is simply not matched by us sand-fleas tick-tock rate.

Moreover, as the data from TESS, Kepler and other stellar-occlusion observatories has built up, it is apparent that most-every star has multiple planets. Observationally, since Jupiter and Saturn (and Earth, Uranus and Neptune) all have LOTs of moons relative to their size, and Sol herself has no fewer than 10 planets, with thousands of asteroids and millions-to-billions of Oort and Kuiper belt objects … well, it is no surprise at all that the stars beyond our grasp have huge numbers of attendant orbiting spheres. No surprise whatsoever.

The only real surprise is that there are apparently so few with Earth-like planets at Earth-like orbits which might harbor water in all 3 phases (gas, liquid, ice). Not many at all. Kind of looking like 1 in 1,000 or so. Perhaps TESS will revolutionize this upward to one in a handful, but I kind of doubt it.

This ‘other big statistical finding’ then puts a cap on our expectations, at least for finding other EMF emitting civilizations. If it is one-in-a-thousand, that have planets suitable for and fostering life, then the ”civilization window’ is (insofar as we presently know it) fairly brief. Ours, so far, is 100 years wide. Actually somewhat less. And it is ironically closing, as ‘broadcast’ power is being replaced wholesale with satellite-beamed transmissions. The kind that don’t point outward, to be conveniently detected by the breathlessly waiting patient observers in quite remote civilizations with magic unicorn reception facilities already in place. Not long at all.

These then define why we aren’t seeing the teeming space-aliens. We’re boring. We’re hopelessly short-lived. We’re noisy. We’re hopelessly primitive. Hell, we’re still start-from-scratch-every-time dependent on biological containers for our per-individual intellect and knowledge. Savages, we. Banal, we.

Sand fleas to the Stars.

jsgg