Let’s say you’ve picked the perfect spot for building a settlement on Mars. But this opens up some pretty nasty questions. Building…what? And building….with what?
You know, if you take away the lack of air and water, the weaker Sun, the lower gravity, and the toxic soil, Mars isn’t all that bad of a place to live.
What about the middle stages? The march from single-celled organisms doing their single-celled thing to intelligent creatures that can wield tools and leave feedback reviews about them?
Now versions of the Great Filter argument had been around for decades (just like Fermi was not the first person to ask where everybody is), but the most comprehensive form of the argument comes from Robin Hanson in 1996.
Where is everybody?
For decades that question was merely a part of physics legend, the kind of thing grad students overhear when their advisors take them out to dinner.
How do you tell how old an astronomical object is? I mean, the next time the Moon is in the sky, take a look at it. How would you even begin to answer that question?
A set of instruments shut off almost 50 years ago are still producing useful results. It’s the seismometers left by the Apollo missions to monitor moonquakes, which as the name suggests are earthquakes but on the Moon.
Neil Armstrong almost made a mistake. He had found an interesting rock sticking out of a formation. Curious to see what the rock was made of, he needed to examine its interior more closely. So he reached for his hammer and took a swing.
If you want to get to the moon, you need to spend an enormous amount of resources developing, creating, testing, and deploying a variety of spacecraft and technologies.
Universe Today
