<Useless Miscellaneous Thoughts Series>

<Useless Miscellaneous Thoughts Series>

The possibility of becoming increasingly distant and slimmer as the resolution increases.

There is no life in the solar system other than Earth, so it is necessary to find life in outer space, but due to the problem of distance, it is difficult to find ordinary life, and intellectual life, especially intelligent life that propagates and engages in space activities.

With the improvement of the performance of space telescopes and other observation equipment such as Hubble, Kepler, and James Webb over the past 30 years, we have tracked the near universe at a resolution incomparable to the past. This activity has raised the resolution of the question of the probability of each possibility in the past vaguely thinking, 'There are hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, most of them will have planets, many of them will have life, and many of them will have evolved into intellectual life in light of the great history of the universe'.

Shockingly, it was discovered that the majority of stars in the universe around us are much younger than the sun. Stars that were created much later than the sun made up 80% of their surrounding stars. After each star's solar system is formed, life will only be conceived after a certain amount of time, and there will be time for that life to evolve into intellectual life.

If that time is similar to the time it took for intelligent life to occur on Earth, there is little probability that there will be intelligent life in the universe within hundreds of light years, so there is little possibility that we will find life. (The age of 13.8 billion years in the universe becomes useless around here.)

The following is a follow-up to exoplanets. A significant proportion of the more than 5,500 exoplanets discovered by Kepler and others were Earth-like rock planets. Unexpectedly, however, most rock planets are much larger than Earth, and rock planets on Earth scale were very rare. (Of course, this proportion is likely to fluctuate in the future due to the greater likelihood of finding large planets, but unlike the solar system, giant rock planets are certain to be a universal form in space.) Thus, the term "super-Earth" has also emerged, which refers to planets larger than Earth.

The bigger the size and the stronger the gravity, the more exponentially difficult it is to escape the planet. It is completely impossible to escape the planet by chemical means such as rockets if it exceeds 2.2 times the Earth's gravity. If the difficulty of escaping is so high, even if there were intelligent life there, it would not even think about entering space from the beginning.  

Of course, it is easier to escape if it is much smaller than Earth. It is possible that many planets much smaller than Earth have not been discovered because of our current observational capabilities. However, the problem is that if it is less than 60% of Earth, it cannot retain its own atmosphere due to weak gravity. This is why there is no atmosphere on the moon and Mercury, and the atmosphere on Mars is also very weak. Intellectual life cannot be expected to emerge in a place without an atmosphere.

In addition, various discoveries and analyses of the modern universe are making the possibility of intellectual life increasingly hopeless.

I don't know if we're alone
We are isolated.

But if we don't know its existence anyway, what's the difference between no extraterrestrial life?

But this may be the best situation.

There's a saying that science fiction writer Clark did.

'The fact that there's only us in the universe, and on the contrary, that there's someone else in the universe other than us, both of which give us so much chills.'

Compared to these two scary situations

'There must be someone out there, but there's nothing for us to see with them.'

Wouldn't this situation be a much more reassuring situation