Infinite Imponability Drive – Random notes: Aliens · 9:24pm Aug 18th, 2024
Before creating Hitch-Hikers, Douglas Adams had worked as a script writer for Doctor Who. He explained that his new universe provided an outlet for plot ideas that had been rejected by Doctor Who editors for being too silly. He also reacted against the core character of the Doctor. As Who fans know, the Doctor is a hero who, upon learning that the Earth is to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, would work tirelessly to save it by non-violent means, necessitating a series of plot twists of increasing complexity.
Instead, Adams created Ford Prefect, the alien visitor with no motivation to save the Earth, who would instead hitch a lift off the planet on the next passing spaceship, then go to a party. And he takes along his human friend Arthur Dent, who has a pretty miserable time wondering why no one wants to be friends and where can he get a cut of tea.
This all made sense to me as I wrote Infinite Imponability Drive. Introducing ponies into the Hitch-Hikers world could be done very easily, as the both run on a similarly absurd logic. But like Doctor Who, ponies would inevitably save the world, albeit not by quite such a complicated plot, but by making friends with all the humans, ponies, and alien monsters that they meet along the way. Then go to a party.
There are plenty of Doctor Who crossovers on this site. While there are some other attempts to cross with Hitch-Hikers, none of them that I read really did what I wanted, mixing the two together and seeing what sort of culture clash explosion would result.
Anyway, here are some random notes on the serious-ish science referred to in the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Aliens
The extent to which aliens are considered a respectable topic for serious scientists to talk about has gone up and down over the years as fashions change. It is undeniable that the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries ever. The trouble is, at the moment, we have only one data point about life in the Universe. Life has evolved on planet Earth. We have very few ways of testing if it is present on any of the billions of others.
With one data point, there is not much serious analysis we can do, so any discussion about alien life is really just speculation. You might as well write fiction, which is what most serious thinkers speculating about aliens do.
The Drake equation is a well-known formal attempt to put some numbers into it and estimate the number of extra-terrestrial civilizations in the galaxy starting from reasonable astrophysical assumptions about the number of habitable planets, then speculating about the fraction where life emerges, and taking a wild guess at the fraction that end up with technology capable of interstellar communication.
With input parameters that are not known to any precision, you can get whatever answer you want by fiddling with your assumptions. If you fix it to suggest that life is common, then you next have to address the Fermi Paradox – Where Are They? Not much of a paradox – it isn’t too hard to think of reasons why we haven’t yet encountered any friendly bug-eyed monsters. Reasonable answers, suggesting that the challenge of crossing the phenomenal galactic distances is too much, are a bit boring. The best sci-fi writers come up with more complicated solutions, involving technological singularities, or argue that aliens are here and have so successful infiltrated human society that we don’t notice. I rather like Douglas Adams suggestion that our planet is just so incredibly boring that no one in the galaxy pays us much attention.
If you prefer scientific questions that can be probed by current experimental methods, there is a lot going on. Space probes searching for microbial life on Mars are often in the news. And haven’t yet found anything convincing.
One interesting bit of research to watch at the moment is the search for biosignatures from extrasolar planets using the James Webb Space Telescope. As a planet passes in front of its star, the telescope can look at the spectrum of light passing through the atmosphere, and thus scan for the signature of different gases. The first thing to look for is oxygen, which could be a sign of life, but may also be produced in other ways. However, there are other bits of chemistry to look for. These results are starting to appear, with nothing conclusive yet. It is exciting that we can now scan planets in our galactic neighbourhood to look for signs of life. We might soon get a few more data points. Or maybe not.
Going to another extreme, the Breakthrough Listen project have recently published the results of a search for a sign of intelligent life in 97 galaxies. Despite surveying billions of stars, they haven’t found one. However, checking the details, their search was only sensitive to Kardashev Type II civilizations, that is aliens capable of harnessing the power of an entire star and deciding to use it to create a narrow band radio signal to beam at us.
I said something similar when somebody commented asking why the story made so much sense:
Yes. Yes. Yes. THANK YOU! It's really great hearing a serious scientist point out that we have an n of 1 for habitable planets with life, and that without having found other habitable (by Terran standards) worlds or aliens, we just can't know whether life exists at all off-planet, and that the Drake equation is useless because when you dig down, it turns out half of the terms are entirely unknown.