In tribute to the 2019 Nobel Prize of physics

This year, the Nobel Prize of physics awards the discoverers of exoplanets. Hereunder is some philosophical thought about exoplanets... I hope you will enjoy the reading...

From anthropocentrism through science-fiction to science

Introduction

As humans, it is very difficult to extract our thoughts from what we are. Our view only can be anthropocentric. As an example, today’s search for exoplanets targets finding Earth-like planets in the hope of finding life there and science-fiction movies generally do only conceive life as a copy of what we know here on Earth. This does not prevent, however, scientist to try to escape what we shall ironically call the “curse of anthropocentrism”. We said “ironically” because in this paragraph we are going to take the opposite. Indeed, we are going to culminate up our anthropocentric view in order to try getting the best of it in terms of science. For that, we shall need to go through a science fiction scenario which we will transform, in the end, into a direction we think would be worth to follow for space observation.

The scenario of political fiction

As far as we can see nowadays, inspiration is not very much at power on Earth. The main source of growth in this beginning of 21st century seems to be globalization with the quick catch-up of developing countries. Some could argue that science and technology are striding along, but a more careful look shows that fundamental science does not progress that much (in particular physics) and technology progress should rather be called “technology improvement”, real breakthroughs becoming relatively rare.

As a consequence, let us imagine that we are in a time when globalization is off. That is, the world is one, the same technologies and same way of life are spread all over our planet. So, where can we find a new growth source?

The idea we want to propose here is to produce the circumstances for an additional globalization. You probably wonder what we mean through this since we just assumed that globalization is over.

Now, what we suggest is to colonize a new planet in our neighborhood. Because we are on Earth, we need what we call a telluric planet. The nearest ones are Venus and Mars. However, Mars is small and cold, and Venus is about the size of the Earth, but very hot.

The science-fiction scenario

Quantum physics has shown that there exists what we call vacuum energy or zero-point energy (ZPE) whose existence has been experimentally proved by what is known as the Casimir effect. What is today believed is that at each instant, some positive energy is created an annihilated in a vacuum. Some people think it would be possible to extract energy from the vacuum. In theory, vacuum energy is infinite, but some figures such as 10^92 J/m^3  are sometimes given as which quantity could be extracted from it.

So, let us imagine we are able to suck up such energy in a vacuum. Then we are able to accomplish real miracles! Let us concentrate on one of those. First of all, referring to the political scenario of the preceding subparagraph, we had better choose Venus, because it is bigger than Mars. Now, our goal is to colonize Venus, but it is far too hot, and the environmental conditions are not favorable at all. Our idea would be to create, there, the same conditions as on Earth and for the longest time as possible. Our idea is that the most economical way would be to terraform this planet. The problem of terraforming is, unfortunately, not obvious. The best to do, we think, would be to move Venus in phase opposition to the same orbit as the Earth, so that it would enjoy the same kind of temperatures. Then, terraforming is easy: just sow seeds and as they will grow, probably with GMO, they will transform the CO2 planet into an O2 inhabitable planet. Once this is done, say in about 25 years, people can move to Venus, colonize it and the second globalization would occur.

Some disgruntled could argue that the gravitational perturbations of gravity induced by Venus on such an orbit would damage the Earth climate through a slight change in the position of Earth around the sun. They are theoretically right. We can easily prove that the impact on the sun attraction to Earth would be about 75x10^-6 . But with 10^92 J/m^3  of energy in a vacuum, we think there would be no problem for managing such a “detail”.

Now, the second globalization can take place for some time and growth again is here. Some kind of recurrence is possible through adding extra planets on the same orbit as Earth, the third being, for example, Mars which we would collapse with some asteroids in order to get it as big as the Earth and so on.

This is a way (probably not the only one) to solve some kind of problems and this would have many advantages. The first of them would be to allow a significant growth of the world population without relying on a finite resource. The second one would be to provide the human race a redundancy against space catastrophes (collisions with asteroids and so on).

Turning to science

At that point, it is time to push our anthropocentrism up. Let us imagine we are not the only representatives of life in the universe. Let us also think that the other representatives are like us and can basically have the same ideas. Let us also assume that we are not the first civilization to have appeared like that. Then, it could be possible that such other civilizations would have accomplished what we described above. They could have reached such a technological level that they would have succeeded in making several planets turn on the same orbit in their solar system.

Now, the search for exoplanets generally focuses on Earth-like planets in the vicinity of stars. With what we said until now, we also could target places where there are 2 or more planets on the same orbit around a star. It could be a clue that there is, there, an advanced civilization. This should add another target to the search for exoplanets.

This basically has 2 implications. The first one is like in Euclid’s axioms of geometry; there were what was called “common notions” which David Hilbert, at the end of the 19th century, proved they needed to have the status of axioms (for example the Archimedes axiom). In our case, the common notion for exoplanet search is life. This means that people looking for exoplanets in reality are fundamentally looking for life elsewhere as on Earth. But even more, we are much more interested in intelligent life, and, in reality, in a more advanced life than ours. The reasons for that may seem obvious, but one deserves being commented. Given the distances from us to such potential planets, even if we detected intelligent life there, it would remain to communicate. Relativity theory prevents us from doing anything for now. But a more advanced civilization might have overcome the problem. They could come to visit us and therefore it could be a source for a new age.

In the end, the second implication is to notice that we pushed anthropocentrism up in some way. This gave us a new direction for searching life in the universe. But this very condition alone, does not imply that life should exist or has more chance of existence on a telluric planet than on any another type of planet. So, we could be surprised to discover potential life, through that way, which would inhabit, say, gaseous big planets or some kind of other unknown bodies up to now. This is the limit and the beauty of anthropocentrism and it can lead to very stunning worlds.

Conclusion

In our search for exoplanets, we should look for several planets orbiting their sun on the same orbit. This should be a serious clue for the existence of advanced civilizations.