00:00 Are aliens out there?
00:05 And if so, are they advanced enough to leave their planet and begin looking for other intelligent
00:09 life as we have?
00:11 Those are questions scientists have been looking to answer for decades.
00:14 But now a new paper looks at that possibility and what it would take for the hypothetical
00:18 extraterrestrials to make it out into the cosmos.
00:21 A big part of space exploration is, well, getting into space.
00:24 And that's a lot harder on larger planets like super-Earths.
00:27 The planet's escape velocity and other mathematical values would have to fit into what the new
00:31 paper outlines as an exoplanet escape factor, which the author has croned to the numbers
00:36 on some nearby exoplanets, as seen in this graph here, finding, quote, "values of fecks
00:41 greater than 2.2 would have space travel unlikely for the exoplanets' inhabitants.
00:46 They would not be able to leave the planet using any conceivable amount of fuel, nor
00:50 would a viable rocket structure withstand the pressure involved in the process, at least
00:55 with the materials we know."
00:56 This is an interesting find, because it's based not on the probability of there being
01:00 life on other planets, but rather our ability to ever encounter them based on physics.
01:04 The author also suggests that depending on how the civilization develops, they may never
01:08 need things like telecommunications, meaning they might never conceive of how to communicate
01:12 with those off-world, halting aspirations for traveling to space.
01:16 Or what if their planet has constant cloud cover, and they never even get curious about
01:20 what's beyond their atmosphere?
01:22 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:26 (upbeat music)
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