Wheis ET?

From: bill t [mailto:qwerty172@...]

You are of course correct, but I was playing devil's advocate. Try
this one. Imagine a civilization that evolved on a moon like IO. This
civilization achieved interplanetary and interstellar capabilities,
but they prefer to settle around stars that are substanially smaller
than our own? Perhaps even brown dwarfs.

If such a civilization is the dominant life form in the galaxy, we may
never know they exist because we are not a desirable settlement
location unless our telescopes stumbled on them by mistake.

It's true that we have nothing other than the principle of mediocrity to go
on to conclude that ETs may evolve under suns similar to our own. But I
think one of the points of the Space Settlement concept is that we break
beyond the planetary paradigm. For example, if we can assume that your
brown dwarf evolved aliens might develop space habitat technology, they
might then begin colonizing even yellow dwarf suns due to their superior
power output, even if they have to use filtration to reduce solar energy to
IR wavelengths inside their habitats (in much the same way we might use
color filtration to settle around a blue-white supergiant star).

Regards,

Mike Combs

From:
bill t [mailto:qwerty172@...]
You are of course correct, but I was playing devil's advocate. Try
this one. Imagine a civilization that evolved on a moon like IO. This
civilization achieved interplanetary and interstellar capabilities,
but they prefer to settle around stars that are substanially smaller
than our own? Perhaps even brown dwarfs.
If such a civilization is the dominant life form in the galaxy, we may
never know they exist because we are not a desirable settlement
location unless our telescopes stumbled on them by mistake.

It's true that we have nothing other than the principle of mediocrity to go on to conclude that ETs may evolve under suns similar to our own. But I think one of the points of the Space Settlement concept is that we break beyond the planetary paradigm. For example, if we can assume that your brown dwarf evolved aliens might develop space habitat technology, they might then begin colonizing even yellow dwarf suns due to their superior power output, even if they have to use filtration to reduce solar energy to IR wavelengths inside their habitats (in much the same way we might use color filtration to settle around a blue-white supergiant star).

Regards,
Mike Combs