The Drake Equation: The Definitive Review
Yeah, yes, uh-huh, more on Starfield.
With two weeks of Starfield under my belt, let’s have a little recap of where I am. From last week’s entry, I can now report that I’ve completed two faction questlines and have reaped significant rewards as a result. Now hovering around level 24, my immediate objectives have shifted toward a longer arc. Moving away from raw consumerist acquisition, I have now mapped out a path of skills I need to unlock for a move into hardcore crafting and equipment modding. This is driven solely by the absence of a modern suppressed sniper rifle1 in my armoury2. I don’t think I’ve even seen one in the shops3, so my only options are to wait for a fortuitous loot drop or simply make one. Now, this means accessing the tier two technology skills, which meant maxing out something in tier one. I went for the scanner, as its zoom is very useful and it was pretty easy to grind out the upgrade requirements just by running around the countryside of a couple of hub planets. The faction quest-lines helped too, being fun old jaunts to various systems (although the Ryujin one was mostly indoors). The other faction I ran through was the Freestar Rangers, so I now have access to even more assassination contracts and my grubby obsession with stealth clearances has plenty more pasture to graze. I also acquired three ships along the way; one from the Ryujin quests that was pretty sweet, and another as a completion prize from the Rangers that feels ludicrously large and unwieldy for a solo thief-cum-assassin. The third I liberated from space pirates4, which rapidly became my favourite. It’s pretty tiny but I’d amassed so much cash that I was able to pimp this ride with all sorts of nifty upgrades, including altering the internal cabins into crafting workshops. It’s got banger weapons, upgraded drives and shields, plus loads more cargo space. I even managed to find out where to get shielded cargo, so I can now smuggle contraband. I did one run at the behest of a shadowy figure who carried more than a slight hint of the Dark Brotherhood about him. I’m not one for overly deep research for games I’m currently playing, so am still living with the hope that some hypershady assassin cult lives in Starfield’s underbelly. At this point I have not completed a single main story mission.
So where next? I decided to take a bit of a breather after doing those two quest-lines, so am undertaking a grand mop-up of ‘activity’ side-missions. It’s a punctuated rhythm that I’ve instinctively followed since Oblivion and for me, underlines just how lovely the Bethesda model is. It lets the player settle into variable paces of accomplishment. I will often bang though sequential missions at a rapid pace, so taking time off to rest and indulge in less pressing tasks shows how advanced this template is in the context of simulating a digital universe5. I'm already thinking about building a dream home on some dream planet. Not sure which, but my forward planning involves some kind of repository for raw materials, so there’s plenty of hours to spend on shopping and mining jaunts. I did build a rudimentary hut somewhere (that I’ve already forgotten), and found out that like the equipment modding, I have some skills to earn before I can make something juicy. Oh no! Not more XP farming via the stealth-slaughter of space criminals. How awful.
One thing that has stood out is Starfield’s sober take on interplanetary adventuring. There’s a real absence of the Roddenberry-esque ‘family of humanoid6 civilisations’ cliche that runs so commonly through contemporary sci-fi media. Despite the obvious ease of transposing Elves, Orcs, Argonians, Khajiits et al as alien races, Bethesda has chosen not to. This bravery is to be hugely commended, as what we really didn’t need was another fucking Mass Effect and more photocopy-of-a-photocopy ramrodding of archetypal races as a stand-in for subcultural and societal traits. Starfield is so much more The Expanse than Star Trek and I’m gladdened that it shares more in common with Blake’s 77 than it does Dr Who, even though I would absolutely fucking kill for a Dr Who BGSOWR. Despite a host of crimes against science, Starfield takes on a realist calculation of the Drake equation, rather than the derangedly optimistic ones that spew out figures like 20,000 technological civilisations per galaxy. A recent take, using contemporary inputs, gives just three8. This is down to the surveys of actual planets exposing the rarity of habitable-zone rocky planets and lesser-known topics like the phosphorus problem9, which really crush your Mass Effect dreams of unfulfilling, degrading sex cutscenes with aliens10. Likewise, it’s nice that Starfield uses its own magical space drive derived from particle theories11 rather than referencing space warping or the Alcubierre drive, which itself has seen more than enough overly-optimistic proselytization by zealots who happily ignore how tricky a problem it is to squish enough mass into a density high enough to bend space without that mass getting very angry about it and exploding12.
It would have been so easy for Bethesda to lean on its fantastical roots for Starfield, so I have to wonder what this more realist perspective indicates for future projects. As I joked in my previous review, I think Bethesda’s template should be shotgunned across a million disparate settings, but there is a grain of truth in the sense that Starfield’s groundedness indicates a possible shift in mood. We can only hope other companies follow suit. I was talking favourite sci-fi movies with a relative’s boyfriend on holiday, and we agreed that the 21st Century has thrown up just as much quality space realism as it has MCU cartoonery. From Interstellar’s representation of space hardware via Gravity’s obsessional detail with the construction, population and destruction of orbital structures, to Moon and that awesome buggy-chase in Ad Astra, a strong trend of documentary-style representations seems to have put Starfield in good stead. We can absolutely thank Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for that. I like to think this is also thanks to the increased amounts of video we’ve seen from real space probes. Live from the surface of Mars, comets and asteroids. Whizzy flybys of Pluto, the immense catalogue of the Saturnian system from Cassini, and a grudging mention to videos and streams from within the ISS. We can derive convincing aesthetic styles from the abundance of imagery from real space exploration and I wholly welcome it. But I also don’t want to see the demise of Raygun Gothic and all those wonderfully vibrant styles of decades past. Here’s hoping for a more overt connection between The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Starfield where we get a hundred Forbidden Planet worlds and all that recapitulation of the gaudiest pop-cultural sci-fi tropes, fisted through a 60s gauze, rendered in a original series Star Trek palette. Or rather, I’d love to see other studios take on that challenge. Any chance of ditching all the fantasy and ham-mediaeval settings for a late-70s sci-fi renaissance, CD Projekt Red? Fancy a crack at a grown-up open world space adventure, Ubisoft? LIKE A DRAGON: IN ORBIT, SEGA?
[21]
Aye, there's the old-world antique sniper rifle, but i want the power and reliability of .50cal overkill with my suppressed weaponry.
I now have a suite of suppressed beauties, the main prize being an epic-grade old-world shotgun I got well early on, which was obscene in its power. It had a rapid reload too, so I was running about like a hyperspeed Anton Chigurh. Shouty space pirates full of bravado? Fucking mincemeat.
Maddeningly, I resent buying weapons as it feels cheap, despite the expense. To easy perhaps? Finding, looting or making is way more personal.
As with the weapons, ships feel more personally yours when you've ruthlessly murdered the crew. In fact, I'm kinda sad that I can't space them in true Expanse style, as dragging unconscious pirates into an airlock and pushing a button would seem to be fairly easy to accomplish. You should have seen the looks on their faces. I just laughed and laughed and laughed. (Yes, that is a Day Today quote.)
I have a bonkers pet theory about videogames that defines them all as virtual universes, even pong, and that the open-world game is the highest form so far. I may write 20,000 words about this as an excuse to slag off GTA again.
With the recent hoo-hah over the laughably bad alien corpses from Mexico, Brian Cox claimed on Twitter that humanoid aliens aren't realistic as aliens would be something other than humanoid. But as others have noted, the humanoid configuration is excellently mobile and great for navigating a rocky planet. Noted, we only have Kangaroos in common for tetrapods that became bipeds, but there's a real path-of-least-resistance trend in the simplest symmetry (bilateral) and using limbs for locomotion. Given that the locomotive solutions on ground are either legs, peristaltic pulses (snakes, worms) or a conveyor belt with constant slime (gastropods), it seems like legs are pretty safe bet for any mobile alien coming from a rocky planet. This immediately lends itself to the lowest-energy, highest-stability solution of the tetrapod, so we really aren't that far off having a bipedal humanoid template as a preferable solution for tetrapods that evolve hands to use complex tools and hence have some chance of becoming a technological, spacefaring species.
AKA the greatest fucking science fiction TV series ever made. Avon is the greatest reinterpretation and upgrade of Spock ever seen, ORAC the best fucking AI possible. And Servalan? Superior in every respect.
This is because the Drake equation has a first half where we can get data and second half where we have no fucking hope of knowing what the correct variables are. There wasn't even much awareness that the galaxy itself has a habitable zone when Drake formulated the equation. A deeply atomised approach can be seen as part of Isaac Arthur’s peerless series on the Fermi Paradox, which bears even more sobering results. Single technological civilisations may be megaparsecs apart rather than tens or hundreds of light-years. Yah, that’s an intergalactic scale. But hey, get used to it. A good start can be found here:
I am happy to be proven wrong about the above, BTW. But really this is because I want comments and arguments.
12th most abundant element on Earth, 15th in the Universe. But the difference is stark: 15th most abundant means 7,000 parts per billion when carbon at 4th most abundant is 5,000,000 per billion. Phosphorus is absolutely vital to the nucleic acids DNA and RNA, and the ADP>ATP cycle, which is the chemical energy source for all organic life on Earth. We breathe oxygen purely to run a more efficient ATP cycle, being FIFTEEN TIMES more efficient than anaerobic. ATP is such a vital molecule for life that the average human turns over its own bodyweight in ATP every day. And yah, the 'P' stands for 'phosphate'. Of course you can make the argument that alien life may use a different metabolism, but you can stack some evidence we have against that. Literally everything alive (or semi alive, like viruses) on uses organic chemistry, and organic chemistry seems to have chosen ATP as the best fit for life, not to mention the use of nucleic acids for information storage, which are also complicated bits of organic chemistry. There is a Darwinian logic at work here, which helps us to a fairly anthropic conclusion but perhaps a valid one. When astronomers analyse large clouds in interstellar space for complex molecules, they are commonly organic compounds involving carbon and hydrogen. It seems that organic chemistry is the Universe's preferred route for complex molecules, so we can lean a bit more on it being a possibly universal chemistry for life, which in turn leans on it needing abundant, available phosphorus. As far as I know, there is no other reasonable subsitute to get the same versatility that we see from the universal respiration cycles for life on Earth. And don't fucking start on that silicon bullshit. There's not enough of it and it forms two-dimensional sheets much more readily than the three-dimensional structures needed for life. If you got this far, here's Isaac Arthur's excellent video on the phosphorus problem:
Not wanting to offend, but secretly craving a rant, the Fermi paradox's most probable solution is that it was never a paradox at all, because there was a basic error in its axiom that there should be fuckloads of alien races within close reach. If you take the sober and well-supported view that the Earth is likely to be extraordinarily rare in terms of its composition, location and the stability of its parent star, then the Fermi problem evaporates with minimal fuss. Leaving aside the rarity of the crucible, consider the steps in combining the raw materials and some of the outrageously wild steps that life took to get to Humans. From the development of chemical replicators, nucleic acids and transcriptor organelles like Ribosomes, to the absorption of Mitochondria, just the development of the Last Common Universal Ancestor cell seems like a billion lottery wins of good fortune. I mean, we’d all be fucked if it wasn’t for nitrogen fixing, for which bacteria developed an enzyme that’s so ridiculously good that it trivially performs a chemical reaction that would take the lifetime of the Universe to happen if the substrates were just left together in a water-filled test-tube. For more info on academia's research into the origins of life on Earth, Professor Nick Lane is a superb communicator on abiogenesis. See:
A 'graviton loop drive', no less. At least gravitons have some theoretical standing, being the presumed particle of the gravitational field under a standard model Quantum Field Theory. This takes each distinct class of particle to have its own universal field, with stable oscillations of those fields being the real particles that form the interactions that allow physical reality. Gravitons can be formulated to have an antiparticle partner, but as with the Higgs, reality may not agree. Anti-Higgs partners were postulated, and even proposed as a way to negate mass, but it turned out nature favoured a single-Higgs mechanism so no superluminal travel there. As if it was ever fucking possible to conjure up such particles en-masse to give controllable macroscopic effects anyway. I mean, who are you fucking kidding? We found the weak force bosons on the early 1980s and funnily enough, haven't been able to make them to order either. Shame, as we'd have total control over nuclear fusion and energy generation if we could.
We ignore exotic matter with negative mass because its only reason to exist is so that Alcubierre drives can work and wormholes can be expanded from their entirely theoretical sub-planck scales. IE, the ‘a wizard did it’ of speculative physics. But hey - I’m not a physicist, nor an astronomer, biologist or astrobiologist. If you are and want to prove me wrong, please do. As quickly and forcibly as you can, with as much swearing as you can bear.