Oxygen could be the key to unlocking advanced technologies on other planets. With the space telescope it should soon be possible to discover alien civilizations.
Oxygen was recently detected in the atmosphere of Venus, an essentially uninhabitable fire planet. A species could develop in a world without oxygen, but would then not be able to build a technological society. According to the researchers, the search for planets with high oxygen content should therefore be a priority. The researchers assume that oxygen is necessary not only for respiration and metabolism in multicellular organisms, but also for the development of fire. And thus a hallmark of technological civilizations. On Earth, the controlled use of fire and subsequent advances were only possible because oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere were 18 percent or more. The oxygen content required for the biological maintenance of complex life and intelligence is therefore lower than the content needed for technological developments. “The presence of high oxygen levels is like a bottleneck that you have to overcome in order to develop a technological species,” says Adam Frank.