Next Door Neighbours

by James Hill PhD

[Dr. Hill will be principal investigator for Cerulean Freight Forwarding Unlimited's X-Prize project. His duties
will include the overall design concept, engine development and application of advanced composites to the
design. Academic Background: B. S., Mathematics, Seattle Central Community College; MS Chemistry,
University of Washington; Ph. D. physics, University of Washington. Relevant Experience: Design of HVAC
equipment for construction companies in Washington state. Experience using SCUBA equipment. Aerospace
Qualifications: private pilot‟s license, with flying time including 175 hour VFR as of January 1 st 1997.
Experience in re-building Boeing 737-200 SP aircraft. Since 1988, commercially building and marketing kits
for 2-seat ultralight aircraft. Design experience includes design of rocket assist equipment, acting as consultant
for a private firm, and part of team designing around-the-world hot air balloon.]

Probably everyone who has studied astronomy has thought about meeting our friends or
neighbours among the stars. You might ask yourself „How will we ever know?‟ or „Where
are they?‟ or maybe „What will they be like?‟ These are at least as common questions as:
„How do we talk?‟ and „Are we really all alone?‟

How can we find out? We are not in a position to go out there among the stars and see them
for ourselves yet. So we just have to look for evidence from here. It‟s been done several
times. Usually the idea is to look at the closest stars for one like our own sun. Then you
deduce a planet like our own at the same distance away from it with the same length day and
perhaps with a large moon just like our very own, and listen for the one thing we know can be
broadcast between stars: radio waves (any pattern out of a number of frequencies). Assuming
that if the conditions are the same the resulting life forms will be the same too.

That‟s not the only way. What we really need to know is how far away is the nearest
extraterrestrial culture for us to talk to? And for that, how many are there within the galaxy?
What does such a civilisation need? A star for energy sure, but what kind? A planet to evolve
on, but does a space-faring civilisation still have a need for planets? You can go ahead and
assume they would have need of some planets (to evolve from if nothing else, and for a base
population to draw talent from, farming or some other activity). The problem being that if
they are an interstellar civilisation they needn‟t use only the same kind of planet that they
evolved on. They could have colonies around any star that had the energy and material to
build one.

Once someone has a space drive with an average velocity of 20% the speed of light (C) or
better, an educated adult can go to another star and raise a child to adulthood there within a
normal life. Since the culture and technology is continuous, the making of a new colony
would be much faster than those of the 15th century settlers even in harsher environments. If
it took 435 years, on the average, to be able to send out starships from a new colony the rate
of expansion would be about 2% the speed of light. A new ship every 20 years or less could
explore or settle every usable site within the whole galaxy after 5 million years.

It seems unlikely that a continuous effort from a single bureaucracy would last that long. Our
only examples of long range efforts are with religions, and they have their fallow periods and
revolutions every century or less. Very few have lasted over a thousand years. The longest
lived united and literate culture from the past lasted just 3300 years from1700 BC to 1650
AD. This was in Imperial China. Even they didn‟t keep up a continuous effort of
development. After a brief flurry of political, agricultural, industrial and cultural invention
there was a long time of stagnation and then decline.

The Aztec and Egyptian high cultures were of the same cyclic nature, without as much
literacy; a century or two of development, a couple millennia of stability and then a rapid
decline. The great library of Alexandria just lasted 700 years. The age of Enlightenment and
the Renaissance was less then half this. It seams that there is only a thousand years between
high cultures‟ peaks and that the period of technological development and expansion lasts
about 200 to 300 years. If this is normal for technological civilisations in general, they have
just enough time to start colonies and collapse before those colonies start some colonies of
their own.

We could do this now. Any starship we could make with off-the-shelf technology would be
big, clumsy and slow. If we use Project Orion‟s engines as a model it would be 50 to 100
Kilo-tonnes mass and travel, at most, 4% C. With current prices, not using the resources of
the Moon, asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn or other ongoing space industries and not counting any
economics of scale, this would cost up to $1.5 Trillion (1012) to put into orbit. The equipment,
labour and material needed might add $100 Billion, but the current launch facilities, if used to
capacity, would cut the launch costs to $300 billion or less. It looks like a starship could be
launched under $1 Trillion! This is within the planning budgets for the decade of 5 of the
world‟s economic blocks even now.

This generation ship can be built for a small fraction (less than 6.8%) of the Annual Gross
Planetary Product (I figured all the Nations‟ 1992 GNP at $23.6 Trillion) if amortised. Over a
20 year period, and it would probably take that long to build, it would cost less than 0.4%
AGPP. All that time the economy would still grow. This too we‟ve done before. Venice and
other seafaring Renaissance nations had to invest vast resources in slow sailing ships. More
than 1% GNP and no returns for 2 to 5 years. With these they used the whole world as their
territory and planted colonies. Communication would be 4 or 5 times this long with
interstellar colonies, but manageable. The real delay would be the extreme travel times of up
to several centuries.

If travel speeds are greater than 2% C, both the new and old cultures can stay in contact
during development of the new colony. They then have 1 chance in 2 of contacting any
colony or the base culture, while they are still either in the development or stagnation stages.
With 6 colonies or more the contact could be continuous. If their starships travel much less
than 2% C this might not be the case and each culture would have to develop without help.
Note that no Terrestrial culture rose phoenix-like from the collapse of its predecessor, each
needed influence from outside.

So the first question is which stars have planets. Here we have an interesting fact: The
angular momentum of our own system is mostly in the planets and not the sun. This is in
spite of the fact that the sun has virtually all the mass. Sol just spins too slowly. This is true of
other stars as well. There is a discontinuity in their spin along the H-R diagram at the F2 spot.
Stars smaller then this would most probably have lost their angular momentum to a retinue of
planets. The stars to look at for signs of civilization would be redder than F2. The redder the
star is, the more of them there are for cultures to come from.

Where to stop looking at the lower end of the main sequence on the Hertzsprung-Russell
diagram is not so easy to determine. Life processes, like chemistry in general, are sped up or
slowed down by the amount of energy available and red light quanta are weaker than blue
light quanta. It isn‟t the actual amount of light that does this, it is the intensity. Very likely
evolutionary processes would be slower near a red star than near a white one. Since colour
can be seen as a function of mass for most stars the smaller red stars would need closer
planets for life and real close planets might be tidally locked and unsuitable. The placement
of satellites around a star might be a function of its mass and spin. This pattern can be shown
by a similar one of the distribution of the satellites around the primary in the four cases we
already know of: Sol, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.

In each case the denser satellites are closer to the primary and the distribution tends to be
proportional to the spin of the primary and its mass. Like Bode‟s law, it isn‟t rigid but it‟s a
good guess that other star systems would have a similar distribution. The less massive the
star, the smaller any habitable zone will be and so the less chance of there being a planet
within it. Only about 1% of the stars are hotter than F2 and 94% are dimmer than K5.
However there are still about 1 out of 23 stars that fall within these limits. It could be as many
as one out of 18 or as few as 1 out of 25. Depending on which data you use for the stars in
our galaxy from 0.68 ( K5) to 1.5 (F2) times as massive as Sol (G2).

What makes a habitable zone? If we assume Earth-like carbon/water/oxygen life it needs the
water to be between freezing and boiling. Without technology, and here you can figure a stick
and a straw hat as technology, an athletic hunter-gatherer needs limits more restrictive then
these. If much of the time the temperatures are colder then 280K or warmer than 310K (44F
to 98F) he‟d have trouble just surviving out in the open. Ground cover, wind and developed
tools change all that.

The planet Venus is 60% hotter than a black body in the same place. The high albedo and the
high greenhouse effect are likely due to the same gases in the atmosphere. For the average
temperature to be 280K instead of 740K it could be seven times as far away (5 AU, or near
Jupiter). Mars, on the other hand, is near the black body temperature at 227K, but would be
comfortable near Earth‟s orbit. It could have a habitable area near the poles if it was as close
as .67 AU (just inside of Venus‟ orbit). This gives a habitable zone of from 1 to 5 AUs out
with planets from .1 to 1 times the mass of Earth and atmospheres over 4 orders of magnitude
(.01 to 100 Atm, mostly CO2).

If you look at the distribution of stars within our galaxy you will note that half are single star
systems and the other half-average 2.2 stars each. In an 11.9 light year radius are 10 singles
(including Sol), 9 doubles and 2 triple systems. Figured as 21 points that have stars near
them, instead of as 34 individual stars, these average about 8.7 light years apart. Actually
there are 5 within this distance to us, including 2 doubles and a triple.

Since most of the stars around here are metal rich Population I stars, they would have the
necessary heavier elements such as Oxygen for life and technology as we think we know it.
For a galactic census of interstellar civilisations we can ignore the older Population II stars
near the centre of the galaxy.

Using the above criteria, one out of every 48.3 or so stars could have life around it without
requiring a high technology (with technology you can live on Mars or at the bottom of the
Ocean). It takes two to talk so we would need to search 97 stars or more to get two, even
though we already know where ONE is. This would give an average separation of 40 Ly.
Allowing for the fraction of greatly varying variable stars this distance would be 43 light
years or two out of 121 stars. The ¾ of the stars redder than Sol are more likely to have life
then the ¼ that are bluer so chances are other civilisations won‟t be looking at our sun for
life. But they would if they detected a radio wave signal from it. They could reply with the
same protocol in just twice the time it takes light to make the trip.

The higher the technology the earlier they could sort out radio messages from radio noise. By
1946 our receivers could detect their own equivalent over these distances. Large space based
interferometers with sophisticated software packages can detect weak signals out of louder
noise detection depending on a function of this sensitivity, the receiver‟s area and the
broadcast power. To pick up a normal transmission from 40 light years away with the
electronics of a backyard satellite receiver dish and a broadcast power of 5,000 kilowatts you
would need a receiver dish a little larger than the Earth. With a million times more sensitive
equipment available it would take a dish only 15 kilometres across. A signal simpler than live
action colour TV would be easier. For example, the pictures sent from near Uranus (over 4
light hours away) used only 125 watts, and could have been sent from 40 light years out with
20 Megawatts if it were beamed the same way.

What were we doing 86 years ago? Or more to the point, when did Earth‟s technology
generate enough identifiable RF noise to be detected over interstellar distances? I would think
that the earliest time would be with the use of the magnetron in 1941 and the latest with the
Masers of 1960 or a little later. We have been giving off smoke signals from our campfires
since then. They could have been detected as early as 1980 or as late as 2005 from this
distance and be sending a reply (as received by us) by 2020. In the “best case” it could have
been in 1990, and at the later maser broadcasting dates and longer average distances it might
take till 2048.

© J.V.H. Hill PhD 1999