What Kind of Space Probes Would be Needed to Explore the Galaxy for Life?
So, what kind of space probes would need to be built to explore our galaxy for signs of life, particularly intelligent life? As already discussed, even the relatively simple problem of whipping by stars in our own galaxy and ever so briefly checking for a civilization is a tough one. The problem, as with all things relating to the universe, is one of scale. The universe is damned big, so big that just traversing relatively small areas like our galaxy is a HUGE technological challenge.
Because of shows like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and lots of other science fiction, it’s easy to think that traveling the galaxy is a relatively trivial thing to do; that the stars in our galaxy are pretty accessible. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Using the simulations run by the authors of this paper as a guide, it would take roughly half the age of the universe to explore only 4% of our galaxy for other civilizations. The simulation was run using eight host probes, each with eight subprobes, and designed to go out and visit roughly 40,000 stars when time it went out. This implies that we would need to build a probe that could last 9 billion years! Pretty unlikely that we could do that, even if we hired Haliburton to build it.
Therefore, in order to search 4% of our galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, we’d need more probes. If we built 200 host probes, each designed to go out an visit 40,000 stars with it’s eight subprobes, then it would take roughly 400,000,000 (four hundred million) years to complete the job. Piece of cake.
So, what would these probes be like?
Technorati Tags: astronomy, cosmology, Extraterrestrial Life
Here’s a laundry list of some of the more basic characteristics, these probes:
- Would be bigger and more expensive than anything constructed by humanity so far.
- Have to be able to function for hundreds of millions of years (billions of years if we only send out eight).
- Need to be self-repairing
- Never fail or get destroyed
Now, it’s pretty unlikely that we’d be able to build anything to last that long, or that we should expect that none of the probes ever get destroyed. One response to this is to use self-replicating, or von Neumann probes. These devices would build themselves and replicate as they searched. This has the advantage of getting through the search faster, but the disadvantage that the replication software could become corrupt or start thinking for itself.
And they might decide that they didn’t wanna go out and do our stupid search anymore.
Self-replicating probes are just as hard to build as conventional ones, so both ideas are out of reach for now, but man what a great journey it would be.
This discussion was based on the following paper: Exploring the Galaxy Using Space Probes.
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7 opinions for What Kind of Space Probes Would be Needed to Explore the Galaxy for Life?
Astronomy Buff - Astronomy from a skewed perspective
Jan 24, 2007 at 8:35 pm
[…] What Kind of Space Probes Would be Needed to Explore the Galaxy for Life? tony | January 24th 2007 - 20:18 Posted in general astronomy, cosmology […]
Rúni Bang Larsen
Jan 25, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Nice read.
I love the way you describe how big Space is.
Sort of makes me think about a quote from the book “The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy”:
“Space, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is.”
Keep it up.
tony
Jan 26, 2007 at 2:10 am
Thank you, I stumbled onto that paper and was very intrigued by it. It was a little strangely written, so I thought I’d make a couple of blog posts about it.
I love that quote. Space is big.
Thanks for the support!
Rúni Bang Larsen
Jan 26, 2007 at 1:33 pm
Np.
The book is strangely written in a sort of a funny way. Sort of makes it special.
Plenty of nice quotes like that.
Matthijs
Jan 26, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Hi Tony!
I’ve been watching your vids and reading your blogs/deepastronomy entries and i’m enjoying them very much! Keep it up.
Back on topic (sort of), I find it very sad that life is so short, we only get to experience a fraction of Space Exploration. I would SO love to be here for the colinisation of Mars, or whatever, if that’s ever bound to happen. I wish there was a way of looking into the future ;)
Excuse me, I let myself go there, heh. Keep blogging Tony. I’m 17 years old from The Netherlands, and I love your articles and vlogs :) Good luck!
Matthijs
tony
Jan 26, 2007 at 4:51 pm
@Rúni Bang Larsen: Yes, I’m surprised actually at the typos. I hope it was reviewed by someone before it was published. All too often reviewers and editors just push a paper through to get it out there. For this paper, it was simple enough that there was nothing Earth shattering about it, the math was simple and the assumptions reasonable. I liked it though.
@Matthijs: Thanks so much! I’m honored to have you here. I promise I’ll try my best to be interesting.
As to your comment about life being so short, that may change soon. Pick up a copy of ‘The Singularity is Near’ by Ray Kurzweil, he’s got some interesting and optimistic notions on how humans will evolve using technology. It made me feel positive that perhaps we’ll be able to design bodies that would allow us to explore the universe. We’re still gonna need to be patient though.
I want to make some videos for AstronomyBuff, any ideas?
Matthijs
Jan 31, 2007 at 3:10 am
A technical singularity sounds pretty interesting indeed, it’s just hard to imagine. Though, A self-improving A.I. with our intelligence and logic and the capabilities of an advanced computing system would make the idea pretty plausible I guess :D
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