The Futility of the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Discussion in 'Science' started by ChemEngineer, Jun 25, 2017.

  1. Space_Time

    Space_Time Well-Known Member

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    I wonder if Proxima Centauri is a member of the Galactic Federation:
     
  2. JakeJ

    JakeJ Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    If aliens ever try to contact us, don't answer the phone.
     
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  3. Space_Time

    Space_Time Well-Known Member

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    The aliens probably are toying with us:
     
  4. zalekbloom

    zalekbloom Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The problem with the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is that for us the Extraterrestrial Intelligence is something similar to human, which cannot be true. The Extraterrestrial Intelligence can treat us as we treat ants, flies or monkeys. The best science fiction book I read which talks about this problem is "Solaris" by Stanislav Lem. Forget about the movie with the same name, read the book.
     
  5. Space_Time

    Space_Time Well-Known Member

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    I hope not:
     
  6. politicalcenter

    politicalcenter Well-Known Member

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    It could be a possibility that gravity could present an obstacle that a civilization couldn't or wouldn't overcome. A planet with a large mass would keep aliens grounded because it is difficult to get off due to heavy gravity. Or.... an underwater or under liquid that is just beginning to explore dry ground. But I stare at crayfish.
     
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  7. Space_Time

    Space_Time Well-Known Member

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    Will the unclassified report come out:
     
  8. zalekbloom

    zalekbloom Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Especially if the are illegal aliens.
     
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  9. Space_Time

    Space_Time Well-Known Member

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    Oumuamua again:
     
  10. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Definitely! A little more gravity would have been a serious impediment to our dreams of launches into space - even air travel. And, one might wonder if a thick atmosphere would slow interest in space travel, as astronomy would be impaired. Surely our centuries of astronomy have been a lure.
     
  11. Mircea

    Mircea Well-Known Member

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    Actually, no.

    It's a matter of simple physics: Gravity is a force and any force can be overcome with sufficient energy. The only possible exception to that might be a Black Hole.

    Having said that, I do like the fact that you are attempting to think outside the box.

    Discussions on extraterrestrial life fail because they are nonsensical and heavily ethnocentric.

    Do G/K-Class Stars support life?

    Yes, because our own Sun is a G-Class Star. The way in which G/K-Class Stars form lend themselves to the formation of terrestrial planets. The bigger stars absorb more of the material around them during their formation, which is why they are so large and why there are few, if any, terrestrial planets.

    Hold that thought.

    If you were barbecuing out in your backyard in Miami, Florida, and you lost your car keys, would you get on plane and fly to Seoul, Korea to search for your car keys?

    It's a simple "Yes" or "No" question.

    Yet, that is exactly what your government does.

    SETI, your government, other governments and universities are all looking at galaxies 50 Million, 100 Million or 500 Million or more light years away.

    Why are they so afraid?

    And, they are deathly afraid.

    Let us review: G/K-Class Stars result in the formation of terrestrial planets and they can support life.

    So, why isn't SETI and your government and all other (capable) governments and universities looking at the 1,000s of G/K-Class Stars that formed right here in our part of the spiral arm of our own Milky Way Galaxy and in the two adjacent spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy and which all formed roughly within the same time frame, which is 3 Billion to 6 Billion years ago?

    Because they are afraid.

    You start your search for extraterrestrial life in your own backyard, just like you would search for your car keys.

    SETI is looking at galaxies 100 Million light years away. You can't even prove that galaxy still exists. It could have collided with another galaxy 50 Million light years ago and it would be 50 Million more years before you knew that.

    So, claims that there is no extraterrestrial life because we can't find it in galaxies that are Millions of light years away are disingenuous at best.

    Do you not see the deception game they're playing?

    Let's think outside the box and reject wholesale the Art of Ethnocentricity.

    Yes, we have 7 continents and 3 major races with a 4th race consisting of sub-races and that has resulted in 1,000s of ethnicities, each with their own culture and with their own language.

    While that is true for Earth, it does not logically follow that it is true for other planets.

    Other planets may have only one continent, or several smaller continents and it could be that only one race evolved and while it might have had numerous ethnic groups, they were assimilated or merged into one ethnic group.

    If you were to travel to Earth of the Future, you would find no race, because all humans would be mixed race. There'd be only one ethnic group and they'd speak only one language. English appears to be the front-runner, but Chinese is superior.

    English, Chinese, Japanese and to some extent Korean, are the only living languages.

    All other languages, like Romance, Slavic, and tribal languages are dead.

    Agglutinative languages like German and Magyar, and some tribal languages, are not dead, but they aren't exactly living.

    What does that mean?

    It means the French (who still think they're god's gift to Earth) chafe under the indignation of having to use English loan-words because you cannot make new words in French or any other Romance Language.

    If you need a new word in English, what do you do? You make one up. Dweeb. Blog. Vlog, Computer. You can't do that in French. I speak Romanian, which is 50% Latin, 40% South-Slavic and 10% Dacian, and we have lots of English loan-words, because we cannot make up new words.

    German and Magar (Hungarian), other Ural-Alatic languages and some tribal languages that are agglutinative can make new words to express new thoughts, concepts or things by stringing them together.

    Leben is life. Mittel is things of an agricultural nature. Thus, Lebensmittlel is food. Gaschaeft is a shop, or perhaps shoppe, so Lebensmittlegeschaeft is a grocery store. Same in Hungarian. Take csillas, visz and galo and string them together for csillasviszgalo and that's an observatory.

    Dacian is another agglutinative language stemming from Sumerian. Take Sarmizegetusa. Applying Grimm's Law for fricative and vocalic shifts, the original Dacian pronunciation was Sarmezigezua.

    In Sumerian, that would be rendered sar.me.zi.ge.zu.a.

    Sar = Circle
    Me = Knowledge
    Zi = Heaven
    Ge = Earth
    Zu = Bond
    A = Genitive Case Indicator.

    Thus, Circle Knowledge Heaven Earth Bond Of.

    An accurate translation would be The Circle of Knowledge Bonding Heaven and Earth.

    Sarmizegetusa is an observatory. It is circular, like Stonehenge, only made of wood and used to track solar and lunar eclipses, Moon stations, the risings and settings of planets and stars, and the northing and southing points for the solstices.

    Chinese and other Asian languages are also agglutinative, stringing ideograms together to express anything you want.

    If you're wondering why Asians are smarter than Blacks and Whites, it's because ideograms require the use of both hemispheres of the brain, whereas alphabet languages only require the use of one hemisphere (the right hemisphere in particular).

    So, either English or Chinese or perhaps both will emerge as the single language of one race, one ethnicity, one culture, one currency, one government and people will have long abandoned superstitious beliefs, so no religion.

    With a single race, ethnicity, language, culture, etc you have the absence of conflict.

    The absence of conflict is what allows you to dump all your resources into technology, like interstellar space travel.

    There's something else we can infer from the absence of conflict: Benevolence.

    An extraterrestrial civilization capable of interstellar space travel would be so far removed from conflict that they are highly likely to be benevolent.

    Why is that important?

    Because a benevolent culture would never interfere with an inferior culture.

    As an American, you might think you're benevolent, but you're not. You go into inferior cultures who are less politically, economically and socially developed and force your culture and technology on them and then you get angry when they resist and fight you.

    There's a whole psychology to that. The vast majority of people are conservative (rather than Conservative) at heart and they flat out reject rapid wholesale change. Most people can tolerate slow change over a long period of time. Homosexuality would be an example of how over a long period of time there were changes in societal attitudes to the extent that a simple majority of people at least tolerate it.

    The reason I mention that is because a truly benevolent civilization would never insert themselves into the affairs of an inferior civilization, knowing the harm it would cause.

    And that is one reason extraterrestrials would never intentionally reveal themselves.

    You wouldn't need to observe for very long to learn that more than 5 Billion Earthlings are mired in superstitious religious beliefs for which the core tenet of those beliefs is that they are unique in this Universe.

    The revelation of extraterrestrial life would result in mass suicides. Even those not so wrapped up in such beliefs would be shaken to their very core. It would be harmful overall, especially since the great majority of people fear what they do not know or don't understand.

    But, if they did reveal themselves, what would they look like?

    Crick and Watson, the two Nobel Prize-winning scientists who discovered DNA never believed life formed on Earth. Both believed -- for different lines of reasoning -- that life developed elsewhere and came to Earth, then developed further relative to the conditions on Earth.

    Thus, DNA is everywhere and the pinnacle of Evolution regardless where it occurs is a bipedal humanoid.

    Back to gravity.

    Heavier gravity would result in humanoids being shorter, squatter, and with shorter appendages.

    Lighter gravity would result in humanoids being taller, slender, and with longer appendages.

    Their skin pigmentation would be affected by their sun, ie K-Class or G-Class and then G1, G2, etc.

    It would also affect their visual acuity, meaning they might not see the same colors we do, or see different wave lengths within the "visible" spectrum, perhaps up to the low end of ultra-violent, or the high end of infrared.

    The atmosphere would also affect their visual acuity (and both the atmosphere and light waves may affect the shape of the eyes).

    A planet with heavier gravity would have Oxygen, Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide concentrated in the lower atmosphere, with Hydrogen, Helium, other Noble gases and other gases in the upper atmosphere.

    Our upper atmosphere has Hydrogen, Helium, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and others. The Xenon came almost exclusively from the decay of Plutonium-239, which did exist briefly in Earth's crust. Whether natural or coerced decay (like nuclear fission), Pu-239 decays better than 93% of the time into Zirconium, which is used for fake diamonds, and Xenon.

    Our atmosphere allows us to use electromagnetic waves as communication, even though the ionosphere wrecks havoc with certain frequencies, especially those in the AM band.

    On a planet with heavier gravity, it's possible that EM waves are so scattered in the upper atmosphere there's no coherent signal to detect.

    You should be able to easily detect waves from a planet with lighter gravity or the same as our own, but that falsely assumes they're using EM waves to communicate.

    If you're familiar with TDMA, FDMA, FTDMA and CDMA then you know that CDMA is an inherently secure form of communication. That would be the "Code" part of CDMA. The digital signal has a code prefix for each data packet and if you don't know the code prefix there's no way to decipher the message, which I would point out is in the form of digital data packets, so it wouldn't necessary be detectable.

    It could be, too, they are using VLF or ULF and that would show up as background noise. They could also be using light as a form of communication, which would be background noise.

    While they would be humanoid, there's no way they'd ever look remotely similar to us. We are the product of everything that came before us, and unless another planet developed exactly in every way as ours, that ain't gonna happen.

    Their skin tones are like Earth neutral tones. Think "gray-scale" and then thrown in some beiges, tans and browns, but no green, red or blue.

    They may or may not have hair or fingernails. It's safe to assume they'd have eye-lids of some sort.

    As far as interstellar space travel, I think the key is E = mc^2.

    We haven't really begun to manipulate that yet. Once you learn how to readily convert matter into energy and energy into matter, then space travel is a piece of cake.
     
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  12. politicalcenter

    politicalcenter Well-Known Member

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    I think they just pick an area of space to listen to. And I am wondering if evolution follows some unknown rules or patterns. We have Crayfish everywhere except Antarctica.
     
  13. politicalcenter

    politicalcenter Well-Known Member

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    Why would a heavier gravity make organisms short and squat? We have giant trees and short, squat weeds.
     
  14. politicalcenter

    politicalcenter Well-Known Member

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    Why would less gravity make tall and slender "people"? Are we making assumptions with no evidence whatsoever?
     
  15. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Interesting. I'm not going to address all of that in one post, obviously.

    The thing is, achieving orbit is a serious technological challenge even on Earth. The energy required for achieving orbit has to come within a fuel weight that can be lifted. That energy density is a serious requirement.

    It wouldn't take that much more gravity on Earth for our approach to be simply defeated - that is, for the fuel weight to be greater than what can be lifted by that fuel.

    Even today, our search for fuel density improvement is taken very seriously, as it is a gating factor on what we can do from this planet.

    As for your last sentence, there is no doubt that some sort of direct conversion of matter would be huge. And, if we could achieve something closer to light speed that would allow us to visit more places that are near us inside this galaxy. But, let's remember that this galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. And, scientists just don't live very long. And, one still has to consider accelleration time, decelleration time, mission time, etc. Nobody is really excited about missions where the total round trip is several times a human lifetime. We're slow to send missions to Neptune because it takes 7 years to get there. So, even at light speed our missions wouldn't get very far outside our solar system.

    Perhaps your last sentence recognizes that the problem within our solar system really has to do with how to speed up and slow down. Pluto is less than 5 hours away by light - far nearer than actually requires speed of light travel, but many years away by all fuel types we are using today. One of the problems of missions to Saturn is that they need to travel fast in order to shorten the travel time, but then the satellite arrives going really fast and has to spend time doing orbital maneuvers using the gavity of Saturn and it's moons to slow down enough to carry out the mission. Then, there isn't any fuel to allow for a return trip.
     
  16. Gelecski7238

    Gelecski7238 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Overall, you've uncovered many interesting and thoughtful angles to the issues involved. Yet I doubt that revealing the actual existence of ETs would send hordes of people into a death-spiral. Even if that happened, I think we would be better off without the people who can't handle the truth because of their low-quality mindset.

    I have a hard time buying into the idea of "because they are afraid." What evidence is there for your claim that SETI et al are in a near-sighted rut? It's hard to believe that the wealth of announcements about evidence for the existence of probable goldilocks-zone planets have been largely confined to absurd outreaches.
     
  17. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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    It's interesting to closely watch the recent launches by SpaceX on NASA TV, which have given us close and detailed TV access to the complexity of a launch, and it's quite amazing how much energy is required to place a tiny capsule into space. All a direct response to Earth's gravity...
     
  18. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Amen. It really is impressive how much energy is required. It's amazing that that much energy can even just be controled - and spectacular when it isn't.
     
  19. Mircea

    Mircea Well-Known Member

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    Yes, it would.

    Until a few decades ago, the prevailing paradigm was that we are unique in this Universe and because we are unique we are special and we are special because a god thing put us here.

    The existence of other life will destroy that.

    I don't mean mass suicide a la Heaven's Gate or Jim Jones, although you would see a lot of Heaven's Gate type suicides.

    I'm talking about the nutters who will kill their families then turn the gun on themselves, or the woman who will drown her children or suffocate them and then take poison.

    Lather, Rinse, Repeat 10s of 1,000s of times and you end up with Millions dead globally.

    No doubt. Some people are wrapped just a little too tightly for this world.

    There's no other logical explanation. The US government is not very forthcoming, but the Russian government has been.

    Visit their websites.

    What stars in the Milky Way has Hubble examined?

    That's a trick question, because Hubble hasn't looked at any.

    You say Hubble was designed for other purposes. Okay, I get that, and I'm fine with that. I look forward to the launch of the Jim Webb telescope this year, because the Webb will do one of 2 things:

    1) confirm Hubble's finding that the Universe is 14.6 Billion years old; or
    2) see much farther making the age of the Universe older.

    Personally, I think the age of the Universe will increase a couple of Billion years or so.

    But, why not design a Hubble to look at the stars near us?

    That's a lot of money you say. Yes, and a lot of jobs, too, not to mention the knowledge acquired.

    For our species to survive, we are going to have to leave this Earth at some point in the Future and we need to find a place to go.

    Why? Doesn't matter why.

    Sooner than later we're going back into an Ice Age.

    For the last 23 Million years or so, we have a glacial onslaught for 80,000 to 120,000 years and then a period of no glaciers for 8,000 to 30,000 years.

    Actually, it's 12,000 to 18,000 years, because the 8,000 year and the 30,000 are anomalies.

    So, we're ready to go at any time, but long before glaciers are chasing you down what's left of the streets, 5+ Billion will die.

    If you don't believe that, then look at the Mini-Ice Age that was 300+ years ago. 20 Million people died. In the civilized world. It's estimated more than 100 Million died, because the North American tribal groups, and the South American and African and Asian did not keep written records. China had writing, but they didn't record the number of deaths, only that there was massive starvation and dying.

    There were 100+ New England colonies that all merged under one flag called the Dominion in the 1680s or so before breaking up into the colonies that later became the States. They lived in near-famine conditions and were saved only by the southern colonies.

    North of I-80 in the US (upstate New York and New England and all of Canada) the growing season was 6 weeks. You cleared your fields the last week of June, planted the first week of July and harvested by the 2nd week of August before the first frost came and killed everything.

    The swath between I-70 and I-80 had a 10-week growing season.

    B-b-b-b-b-b-b-but Technology!

    Not gonna happen. I grew up around farms. I used to walk beans and de-tassle corn. I can tell you exactly what farmers do. They get on their John Deere tractors and ride out to a field, take a 4 foot piece of 1/2 inch rebar and a 2 pound sledgehammer, put one end of the rebar on the ground and hit the other end with the hammer.

    If the rebar goes into the soil 2 inches, you can plant. If not, you ride your John Deere tractor back, park it in the barn and wait a week or two or three until the ground thaws.

    You can't plant crops if the top 2 inches of soil are frozen. Period, End of story. No ifs, ands or buts about it. If you try to plow, they only thing you'll do is tear up your blades.

    A Mini-Ice Age could happen next year, or 10 years from now, or as the prelude to re-entering the Glacial Period, in which case things will just get progressively worse long before you're fleeing glaciers.

    So, we need to find a place. Who cares if it's 50 light years away? That's half the battle. Now that we know it's 50 light year away, we can develop a propulsion system to get us there in a reasonable amount of time.

    But, they have. Read more carefully. "We found a planet, but sorry, it's orbiting a Blue Giant."

    We need a G/K-Class Star, not an A-, B- or O-Class.

    Note the nonsense. The standard answer is that they look at the big stars to see if they are perturbed, and then go through mathematical acrobatics to determine if the perturbation is caused by a celestial body orbiting the star.

    I got a better idea. Build a ****** Hubble-for-Planets and then stare at G-Class Star right next to us so they can see the planet and then they won't have to play mathematical games.
     
  20. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    (Apologies for addressing only part of your post, as you have several ideas here and the post is pretty big.)

    I think the Abrahamic faiths are pretty solidly based on what happened on Earth. I don't see anything that suggests God couldn't have created life in some other remote section of this universe.

    As for human response, we've had a few times when it was strongly suspected that alien life had been found. In fact, we have people today who are convinced that we've been visited.

    So far, human response to that has been pretty brief and not at all suicidal. And, I'm not aware of any strong statements from any of the major religions.

    I'd be interested to hear if you have cites on religious response to the possibility of aliens.
     
  21. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Our telescopes are designed for specific purposes and are limited by current telescope, sensory instruments and rocket technology.

    Saying "build a Hubble for planets" is easy. But, remember that the reason we don't have James Webb up and running is that it had to be folded into the nosecone of existing rocket technology, and that has been a ridiculously difficult task.

    Creating a larger space based telescope for examining the planets we are starting to find is a serious technological challenge. Remember that these planets are within a TINY distance from their stars. The challenge has been described as examining the features of a firefly in California from a telescope in New York - with the firefly sitting on top of a klieg light.

    Also, James Webb was not designed to be a Hubble replacement. Hubble works in the visual light spectrum our eyes see. James Web is looking at light that has been red shifted due to the huge distance of the objects that Webb is designed to examine. There are reasons for having telescopes tuned to a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum and designed to look for specific phenomena. And, that includes the important work that is in the radio spectrum. It's not like you just make a telescope bigger.

    Also, the first planets being found are those that are easy to find, obviously. NASA creates bleeding edge technology, and that technology can't just find everything that anyone might want to find. What can be found started out being giant planets. That is NOT because giant planets are the most interesting. So FAR more large planets have been found for the obvious reasons.

    Both the EU and NASA have some pretty exciting telescopes in the works to look at the candidate planets that are being found.

    Of the telescopes NASA is working on, the real Hubble follow-on is probably Louvoir, especially when considering exoplanets - not James Webb.

    https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/luvoir/design/

    I just hope that the congressional demand for spacemen, grossly underfunded as it is, doesn't gut the NASA science budget.
     
  22. Aleksander Ulyanov

    Aleksander Ulyanov Well-Known Member

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    There is no Planet B.

    We might be able to reach other stars someday we might not, unless we can build and launch spaceships fast enough to send 40 millions off-planet annually we won't be doing even half of what's actually necessary. That's about 109,000 a day, every day, no holidays.

    And that's half.

    We either treat the world more efficiently or stop increasing so quickly, probably both.
     
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  23. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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    Even considering yet to be known alternative energy sources and/or propulsion systems, powerful enough to escape a planet with 2-3 times the gravity of Earth, whether it might be cost issues, or design issues, or biological unit impact issues, etc., all of it would probably impede their space program. What is maximum G's humans can tolerate? I'm guessing the idea of 25% to near SOL travel, the acceleration required would doom a human...and the deceleration would be interesting as well...
     
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  24. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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    Yes...any idea of mass-migration from Earth is not practical...at best a 'few' people can move on...
     
  25. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Our major challenge in space travel has been to package and control enough energy to overcome the force of gravity on the fuel + payload. Even today, that's a significant engineering challenge.

    My comment was just that if gravity were significantly larger than it is today, the challenge of civililzation on Earth to launch into orbit would not have allowed the progress we've made to date.

    And, the same would be true for life forms on other planets that are significantly more massive than Earth.

    Gravity on Gliese 876 is estimated to be 3X that of Earth, for example. Besides the additional lift required, orbit would require higher altitude and greater speed.

    Anything short of black holes can be overcome, but I think the difficulty of significantly greater gravity would slow advances toward space travel.
     

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