nearby and the planets will darken and cool; a shower of deadly comets will come roaring out of the Oort Cloud threatening civilizations on many adjacent worlds; we will recognize that a nearby star is about to become a supernova. In the really long run, the Sun—on its way to becoming a red giant star—will get bigger and brighter, the Earth will begin to lose its air and water to space, the soil will char, the oceans will evaporate and boil, the rocks will vaporize, and our planet may even be swallowed up into the interior of the Sun.
Far from being made for us, eventually the Solar System will become too dangerous for us. In the long run, putting all our eggs in a single stellar basket, no matter how reliable the Solar System has been lately, may be too risky. In the long run, as Tsiolkovsky and Goddard long ago recognized, we need to leave the Solar System.
If that’s true for us, you might very well ask, why isn’t it true for others? And if it
A more likely explanation, I think, issues from the simple fact that space is vast and the stars are far apart. Even if there were civilizations much older and more advanced than we—expanding out from their home worlds, reworking new worlds, and then continuing onward to other stars—they would be unlikely, according to calculations performed by William I. Newman of UCLA and me, to be here. Yet. And because the speed of light is finite, the TV and radar news that a technical civilization has arisen on some planet of the Sun has not reached them. Yet.
Should optimistic estimates prevail and one in every million stars shelters a nearby technological civilization, and if as well they’re randomly strewn through the Milky Way—were these provisos to hold—then the nearest one, we recall, would be a few hundred light-years distant: at the closest, maybe 100 lightyears, more likely a thousand light-years-and, of course, perhaps nowhere, no matter how far. Suppose the nearest civilization on a planet of another star is, say, 200 light-years away. Then, some 150 years from now they’ll begin to receive our feeble post-World War II television and radar emission. What will they make of it? With each passing year the signal will get louder, more interesting, perhaps more alarming. Eventually, they may respond: by returning a radio message, or by visiting. In either case, the response will likely be limited by the finite value of the speed of light. With these wildly uncertain numbers, the answer to our unintentional mid-century call into the depths of space will not arrive until around the year 2350. If they’re farther away, of course, it will take longer; and if much farther away, much longer. The interesting possibility arises that our first receipt of a message from an alien civilization, a message intended for us (not just an all-points bulletin), will occur in a time when we are well situated on many worlds in our solar system and preparing to move on.
With or without such a message, though, we will have reason to continue outward, seeking other solar systems. Or—even safer in this unpredictable and violent sector of the Galaxy—to sequester some of us in self- sufficient habitations in interstellar space, far from the dangers constituted by the stars. Such a future would, I think, naturally evolve, by slow increments, even without any grand goal of interstellar travel:
For safety, some communities may wish to sever their ties with the rest of humanity—uninfluenced by other societies, other ethical codes, other technological imperatives. In a time when comets and asteroids are being routinely repositioned, we will be able to populate a small world and then cut it loose. In successive generations, as this world sped outward, the Earth would fade from bright star to pale dot to invisibility; the Sun would appear dimmer, until it was no more than a vaguely yellow point of light, lost among thousands of others. The travelers would approach interstellar night. Some such communities may be content with occasional radio and laser traffic with the old home worlds. Others, confident of the superiority of their own survival chances and wary of contamination, may try to disappear. Perhaps all contact with them will ultimately be lost, their very existence forgotten.
Even the resources of a sizable asteroid or comet are finite, though, and eventually more resources must be sought elsewhere—especially water, needed for drink, for a breathable oxygen atmosphere, and for hydrogen to power fusion reactors. So in the long run these communities must migrate from world to world, with no lasting loyalty to any. We might call it “pioneering,” or “homesteading.” A less sympathetic observer might describe it as sucking dry the resources of little world after little world. But there are a trillion little worlds in the Oort Comet Cloud.
Living in small numbers on a modest stepmother world far from the Sun, we will know that every scrap of food and every drop of water is dependent on the smooth operation of a farsighted technology; but these conditions are not radically unlike those to which we are already accustomed. Digging resources out of the ground and stalking passing resources seem oddly familiar, like a forgotten memory of childhood: It is, with a few significant changes, the strategy of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For 99.9 percent of the tenure of humans on Earth, we lived such a life. Judging from some of the last surviving hunter-gatherers just before they were engulfed by the present global civilization, we may have been relatively happy. It’s the kind of life that forged us. So after a brief, only partially successful sedentary experiment, we may become wanderers again-more technological than last time, but even then our technology, stone tools and fire, was our only hedge against extinction.
If safety lies in isolation and remoteness, then some of our descendants will eventually emigrate to the outer comets of the Oort Cloud. With a trillion cometary nuclei, each separated from the next by about as much as Mars is from Earth, there will be a great deal to do out there.[41]
The outer edge of the Sun’s Oort Cloud is perhaps halfway to the nearest star. Not every other star has an Oort Cloud, but many probably do. As the Sun passes nearby stars, our Oort Cloud will encounter, and partially pass through, other comet clouds, like two swarms of gnats interpenetrating but not colliding. To occupy a comet of another star will then be not much more difficult than to occupy one of our own. From the frontiers of some other solar system the children of the blue dot may peer longingly at the moving points of light denoting substantial (and well-lit) planets. Some communities—feeling the ancient human love for oceans and sunlight stirring within them —may begin the long journey down to the bright, warm, and clement planets of a new sun.
Other communities may consider this last strategy a weakness. Planets are associated with natural catastrophes. Planets may have pre-existing life and intelligence. Planets are easy for other beings to find. Better to remain in the darkness. Better to spread ourselves among many “small and obscure worlds. Better to stay hidden.
Once we can send our machines and ourselves far from home, far from the planets—once we really enter the theater of the Universe—we are bound to come upon phenomena unlike anything we’ve ever encountered. Here are three possible examples:
First: Starting some 550 astronomical units (AU) out—about ten times farther from the Sun than Jupiter, and therefore much more accessible than the Oort Cloud—there’s something extraordinary. Just as an ordinary lens focuses far-off images, so does gravity. (Gravitational lensing by distant stars and galaxies is now being detected.) Five hundred fifty AU from the Sun—only a year away if we could travel at 1 percent the speed of light—is where the focus begins (although when effects of the solar corona, the halo of ionized gas surrounding the Sun, are taken into account, the focus may be considerably farther out). There, distant radio signals are enormously enhanced, amplifying whispers. The magnification of distant images would allow us (with a modest radio telescope) to resolve a continent at the distance of the nearest star and the inner Solar System at the distance of the nearest spiral galaxy. If you are free to roam an imaginary spherical shell at the appropriate focal distance and centered on the Sun, you are free to explore the Universe in stupendous magnification, to peer at it with unprecedented clarity, to eavesdrop on the radio signals of distant civilizations, if any, and to glimpse the earliest events in the history of the Universe. Alternatively, the lens could be used the other way, to amplify a very modest signal of ours so it could be heard over immense distances. There are reasons that draw us to hundreds and thousands of AU. Other civilizations will have their own regions of gravitational focusing, depending on the mass and radius of their star, some a little closer, some a little farther away than ours. Gravitational lensing may serve as a common inducement for civilizations to explore the regions just beyond the planetary parts of their solar systems.
Second: Spend a moment thinking about brown dwarfs, hypothetical very low temperature stars, considerably more massive than Jupiter, but considerably less massive than the Sun. Nobody knows if brown dwarfs exist. Some experts, using nearer stars as gravitational lenses to detect the presence of more distant ones, claim to have found evidence of brown dwarfs. From the tiny fraction of the whole sky that has so far been observed by this technique, an enormous number of brown dwarfs is inferred. Others disagree. In the 1950s, it was suggested by the astronomer Harlow Shapley of Harvard that brown dwarfs—he called them “Lilliputian stars”—were inhabited. He
