Let Many Flowers Bloom in Space
Space exploration by many miniaturized, low-cost probes would allow us to explore diverse landscapes and find life forms that were never imagined.
RELIGIOUS SCRIPTS ASSERT that humans were created in the image of God. But if our life originated in the laboratory of an advanced scientific civilization, then this would be the image of its scientists.
But even in the more likely situation that our life originated spontaneously from a soup of chemicals on Earth, we could still learn from a wiser species in our cosmic block that formed around another star. Given the star formation history of the Milky Way galaxy, this species could have predated us by billions of years and gained a deeper understanding of nature by now. Rather than search for replicas of ourselves, we should imagine a diverse range of possibilities and send numerous probes into deep space to explore whatever is out there.
So far, our strategy for space exploration was focused on a small number of expensive missions with narrowly defined objectives. The shortcoming of this approach is that our notions of what lies beyond the reach of our telescopes might not reflect the real discovery potential out there.
A better strategy is to send many low-cost micro-probes to seed numerous explorations and let these many flowers of investigation bloom in space. This approach would follow Darwinian selection of variations as a strategy for adapting to unforeseen circumstances. Multiple probes improve the chance of survival in the hazardous condition of space. Just like a flower distributing numerous seeds, a single parent spacecraft could spread many low-cost micro-probes at any destination. This will enhance the discovery potential for rare hotbeds of extraterrestrial life.
Many micro-probes could explore a larger landscape of environments. In analogy to Charles Darwin’s discovery of unfamiliar species in the isolated Galápagos Islands during his second voyage of HMS Beagle, the exploration of many isolated celestial bodies could find unexpected life forms on them.
The miniaturization of electronics enables a reduction in cost and energy for launching these micro-probes. Their small cross-sectional area also reduces the risk of damage from impact by dust particles, cosmic rays or hot gas.
If other civilizations came to the same realization long ago, then they would have distributed by now numerous probes throughout interstellar space.
The best survey telescopes used by astronomers thus far, such as Pan STARRS, can only detect reflected sunlight from objects larger than a football field within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Smaller probes would have passed unnoticed within the inner solar system.
The recently announced Galileo Project aims to cast a fishing net that will identify probes of interest. Here’s hoping that we will not miss too many micro-probes passing through the holes of its fishing net.
Trail of the Saucers is edited by writer/producer
and published by Stellar Productions. Zabel co-hosts the popular new podcast Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel that can be found on all major platforms.
