2024-01-04 23:15:38
Oxygen is vital for an important part of life as we know it, but its abundance or scarcity in a planet’s atmosphere can also determine whether or not the existence of intelligent and technologically advanced life on it is viable. This is the conclusion reached in a new study, where each of the plausible circumstances of this hypothetical civilization is also examined in detail based on the oxygen level.
The study was carried out by Amedeo Balbi, from the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy, and Adam Frank, from the University of Rochester in the United States.
“In our study, we have explored what atmospheric compositions would be compatible with the presence of advanced technology,” says Balbi. “We’ve found that the requirements around that can be quite strict.”
Frank and Balbi propose that, beyond being needed for respiration and metabolism in multicellular organisms, oxygen is crucial for the availability of fire, and that using fire is a hallmark of a sufficiently technological civilization.
On Earth, the development of technology beyond the basic level required a good ability to make fire at will and also control it at will. For this open-air combustion, you need to combine a fuel (wood, charcoal or anything that burns) and an oxidizer (usually oxygen). Combustion has been the driving force of industrial societies, whether for cooking, forging metals for structures, manufacturing materials for housing, or allocating the energy released by the burning of fuels to other uses.
Tracing Earth’s history, researchers discovered that the controlled use of fire and subsequent metallurgical advances were only possible when oxygen levels in the atmosphere reached or exceeded 18%. This means that only on planets with significant concentrations of oxygen will it be feasible for advanced technospheres to develop (environments with artificial structures or modifications that emit signals revealing their artificial nature (technosignatures). Therefore, an oxygen level of at least 18 % on a planet with sufficient habitable conditions, places it as a clear candidate to host a fairly high-tech civilization.
Artistic recreation of a planet outside our solar system inhabited by an intelligent civilization. (Illustration: Jorge Munnshe for NCYT from Amazings)
The oxygen levels needed to biologically support complex life and intelligence are not as high as those needed for advanced technology, so although a species can emerge in a world with little or no oxygen, and even evolve to some level of intelligence, it will not be able to become a technical species, according to the authors of the study.
This is the “oxygen bottleneck,” a term coined by researchers to describe the critical threshold that separates worlds capable of hosting technological civilizations from worlds incapable of doing so. That is, the level of oxygen marks a bottleneck that prevents the appearance of advanced technology in worlds where this chemical element is not abundant enough.
The research, which addresses a hitherto little-explored facet of the search for intelligent life in the cosmos, underlines the need to prioritize planets with high levels of oxygen when searching for extraterrestrial technosignatures.
The study is titled “The oxygen bottleneck for technospheres.” And it has been published in the academic journal Nature Astronomy. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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