SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Astrophysicist Adam Frank has an interesting article in The New York Times postulating one answer to the Fermi paradox — that human evolution into a globe-spanning industrial culture is forcing us through the narrow bottleneck of a sustainability crisis and that climate change is fate and nothing we do today matters because civilization inevitably leads to catastrophic planetary changes. According to Frank, our current sustainability crisis may be neither politically contingent nor unique, but a natural consequence of laws governing how planets and life of any kind, anywhere, must interact. Some excerpts:
The defining feature of a technological civilization is the capacity to intensively “harvest” energy. But the basic physics of energy, heat and work known as thermodynamics tell us that waste, or what we physicists call entropy, must be generated and dumped back into the environment in the process. Human civilization currently harvests around 100 billion megawatt hours of energy each year and dumps 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary system, which is why the atmosphere is holding more heat and the oceans are acidifying.
All forms of intensive energy-harvesting will have feedbacks, even if some are more powerful than others. A study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, found that extracting energy from wind power on a huge scale can cause its own global climate consequences. When it comes to building world-girdling civilizations, there are no planetary free lunches.
By studying these nearby planets, we’ve discovered general rules for both climate and climate change (PDF). These rules, based in physics and chemistry, must apply to any species, anywhere, taking up energy-harvesting and civilization-building in a big way. For example, any species climbing up the technological ladder by harvesting energy through combustion must alter the chemical makeup of its atmosphere to some degree. Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear.
As we describe in a recent paper, using what’s already known about planets and life, it is now possible to create a broad program for modeling co-evolving “trajectories” for technological species and their planets. Depending on initial conditions and choices made by the species (such as the mode of energy harvesting), some trajectories will lead to an unrecoverable sustainability crisis and eventual population collapse. Others, however, may lead to long-lived, sustainable civilizations.
(Score: 1) by quixote on Monday January 19 2015, @12:55AM
Nice of the physicists to prove it, but it's also obvious if you think about it for five minutes. Solution also isn't too difficult: figure out the carrying capacity of the planet based on what you know, divide by ten because you don't know much, limit your population to that tenth, and do your damndest to have the smallest possible footprint even at that level. (Getting from the hole we've dug to something sustainable... well, that's not so easy.)
If humans had stopped overpopulating at about 1.5 billion, we'd be having way fewer problems even without any other improvements. Of course, all the world's fundies would have had to put up and shut up. (Also not so easy.)
So, yeah, we're headed for the cliff. But who knows. People stepped back from nuclear war. Maybe enough people will also figure out that just because all kinds of things are (now) doable, doesn't mean they should be done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @01:07AM
sorry, but I think this is nonsense.
in the worst case of climate change, we may lose a whole bunch of people, but there will certainly be enough left so that the species will not die off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @12:39PM
I think the worst case of climate change is actually Venus.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 19 2015, @07:44PM
I think the worst case of climate change is actually Venus.
Not on Earth, since Venus has a factor of two greater solar influx.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MrGuy on Monday January 19 2015, @01:51AM
Yes. It's completely obvious.
The problem is that it's been equally obvious to "anyone who thinks about it" since Thomas Malthus [wikipedia.org] predicted imminent global collapse. In 1798. With a world population ~5 times smaller than the current one. The arguments here are as reasonable as Malthus' were.
Here's the issue, and why more than 200 years later Malthus' catastrophe hasn't come to pass. It ignores human ingenuity at solving problems we don't know how to solve yet. Malthus' predictions were based on assumptions about how much agriculture the human race could possibly produce. But that prediction was based on us using 1700's technologies for agriculture. We have considerably more efficient methods in the modern world.
Is climate change an issue? Of course. But assuming it's not a problem that can't be solved, simply because we don't currently have the technology to solve it, is equally as uncompelling as Malthus is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @10:05AM
Well, the "solution" to Fermi's paradox is always: Look at troubles we currently have, claim every civilization will eventually run into them and be destroyed before they gain the ability to interstellar travel, therefore we don't see extraterrestrials.
Back then, we were in the cold war, so the solution was that any civilization would kill itself with nukes. Now we've got environmental problems, so every civilization will eventually run into them and get destroyed (let's completely ignore the fact that we've already made great progress in solving environmental problems, and that we might solve the energy production problem completely and virtually forever if we ever get fusion power plants to work — and that other civilizations might have solved that problem earlier).
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Monday January 19 2015, @03:57PM
Malthus would have been right, save for:
- the escape valve afforded by the "New World" (and European diseases and warfare wiping out the vast majority of native populations)
- the development of atmospheric fixing of nitrogen and other new sources of fertilizers.
We are currently burning / converting to fertilizer 10 calories of petro chemical energy to yield 1 calorie of food energy --- what happens when we run out of oil?
Even worse, the limiting element in the earth's crust for biological processes is phosphorous --- look up phosphorous futures and yields and consider where the reserves are and what's happening to them --- there's a reason why China is importing all it can get, and has banned exports.
Even if we had a meaningful space program, earth's gravity and the limitations of chemical rockets mean that most of us are stuck here.
Commercial hunting was banned in my grandfather's lifetime --- will commercial fishing be banned in our children's or grandchildren's lifetime?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:57AM
We are currently [using] 10 calories of petro chemical energy to yield 1 calorie of food energy
Some people aren't.
Even some city dwellers have rediscovered what our ancestors knew (recycling).
.
There's another fellow in nearby Altadena who's a bit of a SoCal legend for his giant pile of compost.
Going back decades, you could go pick up some, gratis.
Now, if you needed a truckload, that's how he made a few bucks and kept the operation going.
Tim Dundon [google.com]
.
I'll also note that the Los Angeles Zoo sells elephant poop or other exotic fertilizers, if that's what you want.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday January 19 2015, @02:16AM
I think the hard part is that if you limit your production, your neighbor is likely to out-produce you and dominate.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @03:25AM
I recently saw a story on this topic.
Globally, there is no shortage of food.
That "shortage" is a myth that the giant food combines want you to swallow.
The problem is that we haven't put solar collectors on our roofs, haven't built digesters to recycle our own poop, and don't recycle our vegetable peelings then compost that to e.g. grow our own herbs|veggies on a window sill/in a flowerbox|backyard.
We buy hydrocarbons that the megacorporations have produced using food as the raw materials and we buy additive-filled processed foods from those same megacorporations.
Food scarcity is a lie; big agribusiness simply wants control of the entire market [commondreams.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 19 2015, @02:36AM
The technical solutions are easy: population caps, emissions caps, etc. It's the politics that we haven't mastered yet.
http://5050by2150.wordpress.com [wordpress.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday January 20 2015, @09:04PM
Population cap is going to be a HARD SELL..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @05:15AM
Overpopulation is a good thing. It means a greater volume of scientists and engineers to tackle problems. By the time the planet starts to experience really catastrophic climate change or hunger, there will be a lot of intellect and energy directed to solving the problems. If hundreds of millions of people begin to die off due to these issues, that just stabilizes the population and reduces the amount of food needed. The people who survive will likely be the smarter people, who will be richer and more mobile on average.
It's not clear that a nuclear war or superbug could wipe out humanity. As long as a few hundred million people can survive a major event, they could repopulate the planet. With the knowledge spread around it won't take as long to reach the same level of technological progress.
If people learn how to build gigaton antimatter bombs in their garages, maybe the Fermi paradox is telling us something about our chances of survival. But it is also possible that weak EM broadcasts don't travel very well across distances of light years, and that either there is no possibility of faster-than-light travel or there is and aliens use an exotic form of communication (like the ansible). Hence, no aliens found (that NASA is allowed to tell you about).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 19 2015, @06:11AM
and do your damndest to have the smallest possible footprint even at that level
This is no different than optimizing for paper clip production. It's just not that important. If you aren't solving the real problems like overpopulation or poverty, then ultimately, it won't matter if you're trying really hard to have a small "footprint" or not. You will see population die-offs repeatedly with the usual ecological problems just before and during the die-offs. Personally, I think the whole process of "footprint" reduction is actually counterproductive by making human society less efficient, less wealthy (with wealth negatively correlating with population growth and pollution), and less adaptable.