Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday January 19 2015, @12:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-a-matter-of-degree dept.

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.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @04:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @04:14AM (#135949)

    "Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear."
    OMG! i got to stop plating tree because they are slowing down the winds and channeling the "kinetic wind power" through the stem and roots into the planet ...
    holy crap! forrests might even contribute to the slowing of planetary rotation!?
    but how should i capture the "excess" CO2?

    then again, maybe turning uranium into lead over thousands of years is the way to go.
    i'm sure in another thousand radiation induced evolution/mutation years we'll have lead trees that transform lead back into urn-ium (-aka- "gone-for-good"-ium).

    *sigh* i think staying in bed and doing nothing i the best way to go.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @12:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @12:51PM (#136020)

    Well, certainly in your case, I think staying in bed and not *posting* anything is the best way to go.