Minimal conditions for survival of technological civilizations in the face of stellar evolution

Abstract

The ease of interstellar rocket travel is an issue with implications for the long-term fate of our own and other civilizations and for the much-debated number of technological civilizations in the Galaxy. We show that the physical barrier to interstellar travel can be greatly reduced if voyagers are patient, and wait for the close passage of another star. For a representative time of ∼1 Gyr, characteristic of the remaining time that Earth will remain habitable, one anticipates a passage of another star within ∼1500 au. This lowers the travel time for interstellar migration by ∼two orders of magnitude compared with calculated travel times based on distances comparable to average interstellar separations (i.e., ∼1 pc) in the solar vicinity. We consider the implications for how long-lived civilizations may respond to stellar evolution, including the case of stars in wide binaries, and the difficulties of identifying systems currently undergoing a relevant close encounter. Assuming that life originates only around G-type stars, but migrates primarily to lower mass hosts when the original system becomes uninhabitable, the fraction of extant technological civilizations that exist as diaspora can be comparable to the fraction that still orbit their original host stars.