The Sun will become a red giant in about 5 billion years. It will grow and transform into a ball that will consume and destroy Mercury, Venus, Earth, and probably Mars.
Can humans survive the Sun's red giant phase? This threat may have already been faced by Extraterrestrial Civilizations.
Is it possible that they survived by moving to another star system without spaceships?
Readers of Universe Today are well-versed in the difficulties of travel. The Alpha Centauri system is our nearest neighboring solar system.
It would take us over four years to get to Alpha Centauri if we had to flee the threat of our Solar System.
It will take us five years to get an orbiter to Jupiter. Generations starships are where humans could live for generations while on their way to a distant planet.
Humans would live and die on a journey to another star that takes hundreds or thousands of years if those ships were not there. It is fun to think about but pure fantasy at this point.
Is there another way to escape?
The author of a new research article in the International Journal of Astrobiology says that the stars may not need starships to escape threats.
They could use rogue planets. Migrating extraterrestrial civilizations and interstellar colonization are implications for SETI and SETA. The author is a woman. Romanovskaya is a professor at Houston Community College.
I propose that extraterrestrial civilizations may use free-floating planets as transportation to reach, explore, and colonize planetary systems. These efforts could leave behind technosignatures and artifacts.
She said that she proposed possible technosignatures and artifacts that may be produced by extraterrestrial civilizations using free-floating planets for interstellar migration and interstellar colonization, as well as strategies for the search for their technosignatures and artifacts.
It is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556
If they meet a star and become bound, life will use a rogue planet to transport itself to a more hospitable place. Why couldn't a civilization mimic that?
We think of free-floating planets as cold and inhospitable. Unless they have warm oceans, they are. They offer some advantages.
Romanovskaya writes that free-floating planets can provide constant surface gravity, large amounts of space and resources.
An advanced civilization could engineer the planet by steering it and developing energy sources. If we use controlled fusion, advanced civilizations might already be using it, which could change a frigid rogue planet into something that could support life.
There are four scenarios where the ETCs could take advantage of rogue planets.
The first scenario involves a rogue planet that passes by the home world of an ETC. The number of rogue planets is a factor.
We don't know how many there are, but there are some. Between 70 and 170 rogue planets, each the size of Jupiter, were discovered in one region of the Milky Way. There could be as many as 50 billion of them.
Where do they come from? Most are likely ejected from their solar systems due to gravity, but some may form via accretion as stars do.
The Oort Cloud is a source of rogue planets. If other systems have a cloud of objects like this, they can be a source of rogue planets.
The stars with 7 times solar mass undergoing the post-main-sequence evolution and a 7 times solar mass progenitor can ejected Oort-cloud objects from their systems.
How often can a civilization expect a rogue planet to come close enough to hitch a ride? A study shows that the star W0720 passed through the Oort Cloud about 70,000 years ago.
It shows that objects pass relatively close by, even though it was a star and not a planet. If the studies that predict billions of free-floating planets are correct, some of them may have passed through the Oort Cloud before we had the means to detect them.
The Oort Cloud is a long way away, but a sufficiently advanced civilization could be able to see a rogue planet approaching and meet it.
The second scenario involves using technology to steer a rogue planet. Assuming they have one, they could choose an object from their own Oort Cloud and use a propulsion system to get it to a safe location.
They could build underground shelters and other infrastructure with sufficient lead time. They could change or create an atmosphere with adequate technology.
The second scenario is similar to the third one. It involves an object from the outer Solar System. The dwarf planet Sedna is an example.
In about 11,000 years, Sedna will have an eccentric path that will take it from 76AUs from the Sun to 937AU. The object could be turned into an escape ship with enough technology and lead time.
Civilizations that are capable of doing so would be advanced civilizations that already have their planetary systems explored to the distances of at least 60AU from their host stars.
There are many potential problems. If a dwarf planet is brought into the inner Solar System, it could cause problems for other planets.
If a civilization has already migrated out of the main sequence, the dangers are mitigated. In her article, Romanovskaya talks about the energy needed and the timing required.
The fourth scenario involves objects. There is a critical distance where objects will be ejected from the system rather than being bound to the dying star.
If an ETC could accurately determine when these objects would be ejected as rogue planets, they could prepare them and ride them out of the dying solar system. That could be dangerous, as periods of violent mass loss from the star creates an enormous hazard.
In all of these scenarios, the rogue planet or other body is not a permanent home.
The author says that free-floating planets may not serve as a permanent means of escape from threats.
Free-floating planets have less resources than planets in a solar system. There are no asteroids or free solar energy to mine. There are no days or nights. There are no animals or plants. They are simply a means to an end.
extraterrestrial civilizations would use the free-floating planets as transportation to reach and colonize other planetary systems instead of making them their permanent homes.
Professor Romanovskaya thinks where this could lead. She wants a civilization that does this more than once, not to escape a dying star, but to spread throughout a galaxy and colonize it.
In this way, the parent-civilization may create unique daughter-civilizations on different planets, moons, or regions of space.
She writes that a civilization of Cosmic Hitchhikers would act as a parent-civilization and spread the seeds of daughter-civilization in the form of colonies in planetary systems.
We can't yet manage our planet's climate with any degree of stability because we are in the early stages of protecting ourselves from catastrophic asteroid impacts. It seems far-fetched to think about using rogue planets to keep humans alive. Romanovskaya's research isn't about us, it's about detecting other civilizations.
The activity could create artifacts that show the presence of an ETC. The research article shows us how to detect them. technosignatures could be created by the use of rogue planets as lifeboats.
An ETC could use solar sails to control a rogue planet or use them on a spaceship to reach their destination. The cyclotron radiation is produced by solar sails.
The cyclotron radiation caused by the interaction of the interstellar medium with the magnetic sail would be produced if a spaceship or rogue planet were to be maneuvered.
Another technosignature that could be emitted is waste heat by an ETC on a rogue planet. A technosignature can be detected if there is an excessive amount of IR.
There could be an underlying engineering or technology that causes theIR to be emitted differently across the planet. A mix of different wavelength of energy could be a technosignature.
The atmosphere could hold technosignatures. Evidence of terraforming could be found depending on what was observed.
Astronomers don't know how many rogue planets there are or where they are located. We are at the beginning of figuring these things out. We may get a better idea soon.
The Vera Rubin Observatory will have its first light by 2023. This observatory will be able to see the entire sky every few nights. The biggest digital camera ever made is housed in it.
Transients are anything that changes position or brightness in a couple of days and the Vera Rubin will be good at detecting them. There is a good chance of spotting rogue planets that might approach our Solar System.
There is a chance that some of the rogue planets will have strange emissions or strange phenomena. Scientists are likely to puzzle over them as they did over Oumuamua.
Maybe another civilization has already faced a threat from their dying star. They may have made a huge effort to capture a rogue planet.
Maybe they boarded it and launched it towards a yellow star with rocky planets. Maybe they are wondering if there is life at their destination and how they will be received after a long journey.
The article was published by Universe Today. The original article is worth a read.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
