this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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My thinking is that a technological species either goes into ecological overshoot so badly that it kills itself (or at least its capacity to conquer space) ((this is what we're doing currently)), or then it learns to live harmoniously as a functioning part of the wider planetary system, and thus has no need to spread into space.
3rd option: they want to explore
3rd Plus: Facehuggers in the cargo bay.
Space exploration necessitates a technological industrial civilization. So they/we would somehow have to figure out how to first do #2 (so as to not die), while still maintaining the industrial capacity to spread out into space. That sounds like an even more improbable subset of the already improbable scenario #2.
It's obvious that stars provide obscene, unimaginable amounts of energy. It's also clear that this energy can be captured and stored.
We, currently, can't exit our orbit without using oil, but that does not mean it's theoretically impossible.
Climate change is just one of six planetary boundaries that we've crossed, out of a total of nine. The choice of rocket fuel is largely inconsequential compared to the effects of maintaining the industrial capacity necessary for such endeavours.
Don't most rockets use hydrogen oxygen reaction? Separating hydrogen from oxygen requires only electricity, which we can produce renewably.
I think this misses 2 possibilities. The first one being the unlikely scenario where a species' space travel program outpaces the ecological collapse of their planet, necessitating a jump into an interplanetary civilization, and the second being the rarity of certain materials required for a technological civilization to continue to exist. The Rare Earth metals are so named because of their rarity on the planet, with most deposits being the result of meteorite impacts, and even things like iron only exist in finite quanities. There's been talk for years now of capturing asteroids in orbit around the planet for mining purposes and atmospheric "scooping" to harvest gases from the gravity wells of other planets for gases such as hydrogen.
Unless a civilization achieves 100% efficiency in a closed cycle of material use, they will need to look to the stars by necessity eventually.
#1: I doubt there would ever be a situation where those same resources wouldn't be better used to make things slightly less unbearable on the home world. In our case, even if we covered the world in poison and had an endless nuclear winter, Mars would still look like the worse planet to live on. It's doubtful whether or not a better one exists within any "practical" distance. If the aliens happened to have a lucky spawn in a star system with multiple habitable planets, good for them. They have another chance to figure things out. But interstellar flight (not to mention colonization) is still vastly more difficult.
#2: Exploiting the resources of the solar system is orders and orders of magnitude simpler than establishing self-sufficient colonies in uninhabitable space or planets. The show For All Mankind threw out most of any believability it had a while ago, but even there the entire fourth season revolved around the subject of how even a single asteroid full of rare earth metals would sate our hunger for such a long time as to effectively kill any initiatives to expand in space.
I think it’s a variant of #2: the ozone layer is much more susceptible to damage from space flight than we yet realize, and it’s a trade-off between keeping a hospitable home world and interstellar travel. By the time a species is scientifically advanced enough to be technologically capable of it, they learn the risks and decide it’s not worth it.