No Aliens

Last Updated on Thursday, 6 August 2009 01:30 Written by Brian! Thursday, 6 August 2009 01:26

Last time, I talked about why we don’t have giant robots in our ridiculous sci-fi comic. Today I’m going to talk about why we don’t have aliens.

Very basic life may be relatively abundant in the universe. Current methods of detecting planets are crude, but we’ve already found them around a great number of stars. And it appears that water is among the most common substances in the universe along with oxygen and carbon. You put these three things together with some energy and you get organic compounds. Give them enough time and energy, you get complex proteins and then microbes. The hard part is keeping your water, oxygen, and carbon warm enough for long enough for them to get started. Too hot, and no water. Too cold, like, say, a few degrees above absolute zero which appears to be the default temperate of the universe, and you’ve got ice. You’ve only got liquid water within an incredibly narrow orbital range of any given star. Of course, there’s loopholes. Europa’s probably got a liquid ocean under its frozen surface thanks to friction generated in its core by Jupiter’s orbit.

So, okay, simple microbes are by no means out of the question.

Complex life though, that’s a toughie. The big problem is the Moon. Its size and orbit relative to the Earth have had two significant effects on the history of our world. First, it stabilizes the Earth’s axial tilt and rotation which has granted us with seasons that are varied enough to encourage diverse evolutionary branches but stable enough to keep life chugging along. Second, it sweeps the vast majority of meteors away from us. Basically, without the Moon’s stabilization and orbital housecleaning, we would experience environmental extremes on the order of Ice Ages every few hundred years while getting hit with extinction-level objects every few hundred thousand years. There’s just no way to develop complex life under those conditions.

This is a big problem because other planets don’t have moons like ours. The Moon is massive by moon standards. The Moon has 1/80th of the Earth’s mass, which doesn’t sound like much, but the largest moon, Ganymede, has about 1/12,000th the mass of its planet. What I’m saying is that out of the ~170 moons we know about, only one of them is sufficiently massive to exert the beneficial influences the Moon has for life on Earth.

The really hard part, though, is intelligent life. Evolution has no specific goal. So, even if complex life develops, there’s no guarantee that human-like intelligence would ever develop no matter how many billions and billions of years are allowed.

But, hey, the universe is a big place. Let’s say all the right things came together and you get human-like intelligence on another planet. Now you’ve only got to worry about three more things.

1. That these intelligent beings do not self-destruct.

2. That these intelligent beings live close enough to us in space that they can reach us, even if only through remote contact (i.e. radio) within the lifespan of their civilization.

3. That these intelligent beings live close enough to us in time that we can pick up their signal at all because it does us no good if the advanced alien civilization stopped broadcasting six million years ago.

But all of this is just a really long way of saying that we can’t introduce aliens into the Roboverse because it represents such a stark disconnect with the modern world that we know. There’s simply too many religious, political, and financial whirlwinds that sci-fi style Little Green Men unleash on a setting. And while a story exploring those facets of human-alien contact would be fascinating, Atomic Robo ain’t that story.