00:03Are aliens out there?
00:05And if so, are they advanced enough to leave their planet and begin looking for other intelligent life as we
00:10have?
00:10Those are questions scientists have been looking to answer for decades.
00:14But now a new paper looks at that possibility and what it would take for the hypothetical extraterrestrials to make
00:19it out into the cosmos.
00:21A big part of space exploration is, well, getting into space.
00:24And that's a lot harder on larger planets like super-Earths.
00:27The planet's escape velocity and other mathematical values would have to fit into what the new paper outlines as an
00:33exoplanet escape factor,
00:35which the author has crunched the numbers on some nearby exoplanets, as seen in this graph here.
00:40Finding, quote,
00:41Values of Fex greater than 2.2 would have space travel unlikely for the exoplanet's inhabitants.
00:46They would not be able to leave the planet using any conceivable amount of fuel,
00:50nor would a viable rocket structure withstand the pressure involved in the process, at least with the materials we know.
00:56This is an interesting find, because it's based not on the probability of there being life on other planets,
01:01but rather our ability to ever encounter them based on physics.
01:04The author also suggests that depending on how the civilization develops,
01:07they may never need things like telecommunications,
01:10meaning they might never conceive of how to communicate with those off-world,
01:14halting aspirations for traveling to space.
01:16Or what if their planet has constant cloud cover,
01:18and they never even get curious about what's beyond their atmosphere.
