Following close on the heels of this morning's entry about how there are many sun-like stars in our galaxy, most of them quite a bit older than our own sun, here's a report about some very old galaxies that we didn't expect to find.
The universe is laden with massive galaxies that formed while the universe was just one billion years old, an era when such mature galaxies were not expected to exist.
Astronomers with the Gemini Deep Deep Survey have found an abundance of galaxies in the "redshift desert," a region of space thought to be sparse because of the time needed for massive galaxies to form. But a wealth of patience, combined with long telescope exposure times, has shed some new light on the matter.
What are we using as our estimate for the age of the universe these days...15 billion years? 20? Put a few sunlike stars in those ancient galaxies and you have the potential for intelligent life developing 10 billion years ago. So multiply everything I said about a head start by 10.
Contrary to what I said earlier about whether these ancient intelligences and we would have anything interesting to say to each other, I'm reminded that John Smart (in our recent interview) suggested that we will likely never find any of these intelligent forerunners:
As I've mentioned earlier, I think all universal intelligence follows a path of transcension, not expansion. This has to do with such issues as the nature of communication in complexity construction (two-way, with feedback, is relentlessly preferred), the large scale structure of the universe (which puts huge space buffers between intelligences) and the small scale structure of the universe (which rewards rapid compression of the matter, energy, space, and time necessary to do any computation).
Once our antennas are powerful enough to detect unintentional EM emissions from the closest few million stars, something that Frank Drake tells me is almost possible now with the closest of our neighboring stars, we'll begin to discover these unmistakable signatures of nonrandom intelligence. We will also notice that every year, a small fraction (roughly 1/200th) of these radio fossils suddenly stop sending signals. Like us, these will be civilizations whose science invariably discovers that the developmental future of universal intelligence is not outer space, but inner space.
By the way — if John is right — we've got about 100 years more of broadcasting before we've finished leaving our mark in outer space. Who knows? Maybe in a billion or three years, some upstart ET-come-latelies in a distant galaxy, surprised to discover that potentially life-sustaining stars existed long before their species came about, will point their radio telescopes at the sky and catch the last few minutes of the Humanity Show.
Posted by Phil at January 5, 2004 04:19 PM | TrackBack