• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Fishbowl Worlds: Aliens Could Be Highly Intelligent, But Unable To Contact The Outside

February 28, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A new paper has outlined potential problems we may face in contacting advanced alien civilizations: the potential existence of “fishbowl worlds”.

If you haven’t heard of the Fermi Paradox, it goes something like this: given the vastness of the universe, the sheer amount of time it has gone on for, and the septillion stars out there, how come we can see no signs of alien civilizations, and why haven’t they got in touch? We have found many exoplanets in the brief time we’ve been looking. Surely there must be someone else out there who, like us, desperately wants to find others?

Advertisement

Since it was posed in 1950 by Enrico Fermi, there have been a range of answers, from the benign to the absolutely terrifying. Recent suggestions have included the “oxygen bottleneck“, the idea that intelligent aliens could be forever trapped in the stone age without sufficient oxygen for combustion.

In a new paper, Elio Quiroga, who is a professor at the Universidad del Atlántico Medio in Spain, outlines a few other scenarios in which alien species could be intelligent, but unable to leave their own planet or communicate with others, which he has termed “fishbowl worlds”.



The simplest of these are worlds that are simply too big, making it impossible for alien civilizations to escape their planet’s gravity. In order to escape our own planet, we need to be moving at around 11 kilometers per second (almost 7 miles per second), or 40,270 kilometers per hour (25,000 miles per hour). That’s our escape velocity. Therefore, we require an enormous amount of fuel to get anything to leave the planet, let alone a sizeable payload.

This doesn’t just have implications for physically leaving the planet and finding other species, but for technological progression. A civilization that can’t leave its planet does not have satellite communications, and they are not peering back at us with their version of the JWST. Just as we base our assumptions in finding life elsewhere on our own experiences, intelligent species on these planets “might see space travel, even suborbital, as perhaps unconceivable”, according to Quiroga.

Advertisement

Another, even more fishy fishbowl world could be ocean planets, or hycean worlds. On these planets, creating electrical equipment to enable long-distance communication may be near impossible, if these aliens felt the need to develop the technology at all.

“In an underwater world imbued into a fluid, such as water or liquid methane, where sound signals can be heard hundreds of kilometers away, communication between individuals could be feasible without the need for communication devices,” Quiroga explained in the paper.  “Telecommunications technology might never emerge on such a world, even though it could be home to a fully developed civilization.”

Other possible fishbowl worlds are proposed, including binary systems where it is always daylight and the stars cannot be seen, or a world constantly covered in thick cloud. On these worlds, just like the Krikkit planet in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, caught in a giant cloud of dust, they may not develop the desire to explore outside of their own planet. Let’s hope it doesn’t end like it does with the Krikkit if they ever find out we’re out there.

The paper is published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It
  4. Where Inside Us Do We Feel Love?

Source Link: Fishbowl Worlds: Aliens Could Be Highly Intelligent, But Unable To Contact The Outside

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • As Solar Storm Hits Earth NASA Finds “The Sun Is Slowly Waking Up”
  • Plate Tectonics And CO2 On Planets Suggest Alien Civilizations “Are Probably Pretty Rare”
  • How To Watch The “Awkward” Partial Solar Eclipse This Weekend
  • World’s Oldest Pots: 20,000-Year-Old Vessels May Have Been Used For Cooking Clams Or Brewing Beer
  • “The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated”: 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest
  • Pizza Slices, Polaroid Pictures, And Over 300 Hats: What’s Left Behind In Yellowstone’s Hydrothermal Areas?
  • The Mathematical Paradox That Lets You Create Something From Nothing
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version