Do foreigners not visit us because the sun is boring?

Do foreigners not visit us because the sun is boring?

Our primary energy source, the most common object in the celestial vault, the most important deity of the ancients, the star that makes life possible: our beloved Sun, can be considered a “second star” by extraterrestrial civilizations, which have set out to conquer the universe.

The solar system, which earthlings consider a safe home in the vast unknown space, may not provide aliens all comfort They seek – starting with his star, With a very short remaining life To invest that much.

question question. This is the hypothesis described in a study accepted for publication inAstrophysical Journal Which offers a new and potential answer to The Fermi Paradox. If only in the Milky Way there were between 100 and 400 billion stars, and each was the potential reference center of a planetary system; If we’re just beginning to dig into the vast catalog of exoplanets, many of which are theoretically habitable: with all these endless opportunities for life, how has no one yet revealed themselves? Are we really alone in the universe?

The most varied answers. Barring close encounters in the near future, the dilemma – whose informal formulation is attributed to Italian Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi – is destined to remain unresolved. However, brilliant solutions have been formulated, between the fields of science and philosophy.

It can be aliens So evolved that you don’t even notice our existence (or, conversely, we who do not notice it); We can They lived in ancient times And they had never traversed roads; Still, aliens have hibernate or Buried under icy crusts; Our contacts may be Obstructed by filters of different nature.

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Eternal homes. Jacob Haq-Misra and Thomas J. Fuches, researchers at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle and American University in Washington, write that the assumption made by many scientists grappling with the Fermi Paradox is that stars are They are all equally attractivefor an advanced alien civilization capable of colonizing others besides its own, and thus attempts to conquer other star systems spread in every direction with the same speed.

This may not be the case at all. “We suggest that an expanding civilization preferably settles on low-mass star systems Spectral class K or on M-type dwarf stars.And avoiding stars with a greater mass to extend their lives inside the galaxy.”

The life cycle of stars of this type (red dwarfs), much cooler and less bright than the Sun, far exceeds the life cycle of all other known stars, because, As Media Enav explains“Its small mass means that the temperature inside is just enough to trigger the nuclear reactions of fusion of hydrogen that ‘ignites’ the stars themselves. Thanks to this, nuclear reactions proceed at a very slow rate, so red dwarfs take longer to finish the hydrogen than the current age of the universe.”

Safe investments. For us humans, there is not much difference between having a star in front of it Still 5 billion years old, like the sun, or 10 trillion years. But for an extraterrestrial civilization that has evolved to plan to colonize other star systems, it would be convenient to be able to better determine where to direct means and energies.

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The authors also calculated in two billion years the time required for an alien group of this type to eventually reach all stars of these classes in the Milky Way: all this assuming that alien invaders moving in waves, not at a regular speed but waiting for the closest approach of the stars selected to save in flight. So it’s perfectly legitimate that they haven’t finished their journey in our galaxy yet (given thatsane man He’s only been listening for alien signals for a few decades) We haven’t yet noticed this work in progress.

Those red dwarfs. The fact that we have not yet obtained a trace of their invasion activities does not mean that they did not actually occur, even in our own galaxy. The authors explain: “The absence of extraterrestrial settlements in the Solar System remains consistent with an expansion limited to half the galaxy, to M dwarf stars or K dwarf stars.” In short, there could be an admired “galactic club” of low-mass stars in full expansion of the Milky Way even at this moment, and we can’t rule it out because we haven’t observed it.

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