A Bayesian Analysis of Technological Intelligence in Land and Oceans

Abstract

Current research indicates that (sub)surface ocean worlds essentially devoid of subaerial landmasses (e.g., continents) are common in the Milky Way and that these worlds could host habitable conditions, thence raising the possibility that life and technological intelligence (TI) may arise in such aquatic settings. It is known, however, that TI on Earth (i.e., humans) arose on land. Motivated by these considerations, we present a Bayesian framework to assess the prospects for the emergence of TIs in land- and ocean-based habitats (LBHs and OBHs). If all factors are equally conducive for TIs to arise in LBHs and OBHs, we demonstrate that the evolution of TIs in LBHs (which includes humans) might have very low odds of roughly 1 in 103 to 1 in 104, thus outwardly contradicting the Copernican principle. Hence, we elucidate three avenues whereby the Copernican principle can be preserved: (i) the emergence rate of TIs is much lower in OBHs, (ii) the habitability interval for TIs is much shorter in OBHs, and (iii) only a small fraction of worlds with OBHs comprise appropriate conditions for effectuating TIs. We also briefly discuss methods for empirically falsifying our predictions and comment on the feasibility of supporting TIs in aerial environments.

Chasing nomadic worlds: A new class of deep space missions

“…The habitability of nomadic worlds remains indeterminate, although a plethora of publications have identified possible avenues whereby these objects could be rendered suitable for hosting life [67,42,32,68,69,39,33,70,40,46,71,35,41,72,37,73,36,74,38]. Hence, detecting and characterizing a nomadic world in the above size range would accord us a unique opportunity to gauge whether such abodes constitute viable habitats for life, evaluate our understanding of habitability, and determine whether prebiotic molecules and/or organisms may be transported across interstellar distances [75,76,77,58,71,73].…”