What’s the Economy Like in the Extraterrestrial World?

Economic problems - even on alien worlds?

Does life exist on other planets, and does this life get into financial jams now and again?

A. Pawlowski reports for CNN that scientists are offering new insight into the possibility. “There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy,” said Carnegie Institution astronomer Alan Boss. His prediction is based on the number of “super-Earths” — planets larger than Earth but smaller than Jupiter — that have been discovered orbiting stars outside our solar system.

Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life. Whether or not future life that is discovered can be classified as intelligent life will likely depend upon how long that life has had to evolve, if we use ourselves as the model for life.

What kind of life?

No one knows at this time, but Boss suspects that the life would at least be primitive, like bacteria or multicellular organisms that populated Earth for the first few billion years of its existence. Depending upon how long life has existed on inhabitable, water-bearing planets, the life forms could even be more or less advanced that Earth’s own intelligent civilizations.

According to Pawlowski, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has used a computer model to “create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets.” By studying how life evolves under various conditions on such worlds, researchers concluded that “at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way galaxy since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.”

Goldilocks thinks this is “just right”

These simulations are based on the best educated-guess system currently available to humanity. So far, 330 planets have actually been discovered circling sun-like stars outside our own solar system. The odds are that there are many billions more throughout the universe. Where there are suns, water, oxygen and the proper distance between sun and planet (known as the “Goldilocks Zone“), there will be life. The conditions are “just right.” NASA and other organizations worldwide are eager to discover such worlds.

Boss predicts that scientists should know by 2013 whether life in the universe could be widespread, but I don’t feel we should limit ourselves to such a window. This is a major undertaking with tremendous significance to our knowledge of life and the universe.

Don’t hold your breath for a reunion

“Civilizations come and go,” Boss said. “Chances are, if you do happen to find a planet which is going to have intelligent life, it’s not going to be in [the same] phase of us. It may have formed a billion years ago, or maybe it’s not going to form for another billion years.” Even if there are intelligent life forms who have been trying to communicate with planets like Earth, it’s likely that transmissions would take hundreds of centuries to arrive, which means that the life forms who originated the message no longer exist. Or so we think, if we use the human lifespan as the model…

Even traveling in search of extraterrestrial life would be of no use under humankind’s current level of technology. The fastest rockets available today, said Boss, would take 100,000 years to travel from Earth to the closest star outside our solar system. “So when you think about that, maybe we shouldn’t be worried about having interstellar air raids any time soon.”

Funding for Einstein-Rosen Bridge travel technology, anyone? Let’s get black holes involved, too.