The measurements that are telling us of extra-solar planets cannot tell us anything about extra-solar civilizations, another typical theme of science fiction. We are discovering hundreds of planets orbiting around stars and the latest news are that one sun-class star out of three may have an earth-like planet in the habitable zone. But it turns out that science fiction was absolutely right, at least on this point. The idea that planetary systems were common in the galaxy was much more fascinating than the "official" one but, at that time, it seemed to be pure fantasy. Of course, that contrasted with the main theme of the science fiction of the time, of which I was also an avid reader. When I started reading astronomy books, in the 1960s, nobody knew if there existed planets around other stars and the common view was that they were very rare. It is possible that any industrial civilization based on non renewable resources would face the same problem, we are facing: collapse generated by depletion. Could extraterrestrial civilizations do better than us? Perhaps not. On the contrary, we may well be already sliding down the other side of the Hubbert curve and we may have to give up all dreams of space exploration. Such ships are theoretically possible but, with the amount of energy that we can manage today, is hard to think that we can assemble enough resources for building a fleet of interstellar spaceships. It was a concept proposed in the 1950s as a way to reach the planets of the solar system in a few days and other stars in a few years. The " Orion" spaceship is pushed onwards by the detonation of nuclear bombs.
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