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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: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 19 2015, @09:06AM
The Fermi paradox is always explained by the current problem affecting the society thinking about it. An the '60s, it was explained by nuclear war: most societies wipe themselves out by developing nuclear weapons before self-sustaining colonies off their own planet. Now it's explained by climate change. Give it another fifty years and it will be explained by something else. If people had been thinking about it a few hundred years ago, it would have been plagues. A thousand years ago, it would have been ice ages. A few million, meteor impacts.
The real solution to the Fermi paradox seems to be that any civilisation that manages to develop interstellar flight has a huge number of potential extinction events along the way. Some self-inflicted, some external. If you avoid them all, you win.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @10:26AM
Of course, another solution to the Fermi paradox would be that the probability of life is low enough that on average there's less than one life-bearing planet per galaxy. That would still mean lots of civilizations out there, but all of them too far away to ever see any sign of them.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday January 19 2015, @12:50PM
The real solution to the Fermi paradox seems to be...
...the same as the solution to any other thought-experiment 'paradox': one of the underlying assumptions must be false.
The Fermi estimate of the number of aliens that we should be observing assumes that (a) aliens exist, (b) interstellar travel is possible and (c) Intelligent, spacefaring aliens would embark on an exponential colonisation programme (or, to steal a line from a Greg Egan book, behave like "bacteria with spaceships".
We have no real data to prove/refute any of those assumptions, so why always assume it must be (a) that's false - which would go against the principle of mediocrity?
We actually know more about (b) and (c): our best current scientific theories till say that faster-than-light travel is impossible (apart from some speculative ideas that require large quantities of unobtanium, violate causality and still take decades or centuries to get anywhere interesting) and we have enough engineering nous to understand that relativistic travel would be very, very difficult). So the options seem to be suspended animation (which we can't do, and know to be difficult for complex organisms) or colony ships (which we also know to be difficult).
So one highly feasible solution to the Fermi paradox is simply that "interstellar travel is either impossible or too bloody difficult to be significant".
Certainly, if you take the realistic position that Star Trek-style FTL measured in lightyears per hour is vanishingly unlikely, any sort of interstellar travel is going to be *slow* and require a civilization that is far better at long-term thinking and planning than we are.
In particular, if you can build colony ships in quantity then you are really, really good at not only designing closed, sustainable systems, but in living within their constraints without resorting to savagery and worshipping the engines. Those abilities would be directly transferrable to living sustainably on a planet and building deep-space habitats - maybe eventually "Dyson clouds" - which would certainly limit your need and desire to engage in exponential colonialism.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 19 2015, @01:12PM
In particular, if you can build colony ships in quantity then you are really, really good at not only designing closed, sustainable systems, but in living within their constraints without resorting to savagery and worshipping the engines
That's assuming that the entities being sent have a lifecycle anything like ours. A machine-substrate intelligence that would slow its clock rate as energy diminished (or simply leave its consciousness in non-volatile storage in between stars) would not have these issues - indeed, it would only need to physically send a comparatively simple machine that could construct a receiver and substrate to host transmitted copies of the beings. Accelerating to 10% of the speed of light and then coasting in an inert state until approaching the target system would allow a species to colonise the galaxy in a few million years - a fraction of the time since the last big extinction.
The Fermi paradox doesn't require every species to do this, it only requires one, and the galaxy would be teaming with them.
Even the probability of a life-baring planet being such that there's an average of fewer than one per galaxy is not without problems. We aren't in the youngest galaxy in the group by any stretch, and yet we've seen nothing that looks like a galaxy-spanning civilisation elsewhere either.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday January 19 2015, @04:15PM
A machine-substrate intelligence that would slow its clock rate as energy diminished (or simply leave its consciousness in non-volatile storage in between stars) would not have these issues
True - but that scenario is the exact one that led to the Greg Egan quote I included - why would such an intelligence behave like bacteria with spaceships? In terms of maximising your power, there's no point wasting resources on colonisation until you've wrung every last drop out of your current solar system. Interstellar ping times are going to be terrible, so there's an advantage to having your computing power condensed in one place. If you're worried about backups (and can survive long trips) it makes more sense to set up a few very distant colonies and/or archives in interstellar space than colonise all the local systems so that they could be wiped out by the same supernova or gamma-ray burst.
Plus, if an alien species isn't so advanced that it has renounced war in favour of peace, love and proving Goedel's theorem by exhaustion, then odds are that generation N of that exponential colonisation is going to end up fighting generation N-1 over the next batch of attractive systems.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @12:02AM
Drop "interstellar travel". The real solution to the Fermi paradox is that any civilisation that evolves towards broadcasting its existence to the universe, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is exposed to a huge number of potential extinction events along the way. The increasing number of these as civilisation develops towards a potential for self-destruction through planetary-scale processes such as a nuclear armageddon or rampant global warming also imply that it may very well only be broadcasting its existence to the universe for a relatively short period of the order of hundreds of years. This then implies that there will be a thin shell of radio, diffuse at both ends and in principle of the order of hundreds of light years thick, emanating from their host planet, and growing ever sparser due to the infamous inverse square. Worse, any civilisation that gets up to and beyond our level will tend to encode their transmissions in something trickier to decode than AM modulation and frequently encrypted, making the inner end of the radio shell look nothing more like a radio-hot source. Given the sheer distances between stars that could host life, and the sheer timescales involved in the evolution of life, the idea that our civilisation has happened to be able to detect radio waves at the exact time that the radio shell from another civilisation is passing across us and is still detectable and decodable, is frankly laughable.
Interstellar travel itself is outright impossible. There is literally no way it can be done. The nearest realistic possibility are von Neumann machines, and good luck finding the civilisation that will bother sending enough of them out that there's more than an absurdly tiny chance of us ever happening across one (remembering again that we ourselves have a likely window of a few hundred years, and that these few hundred years have to overlap the period in which a civilisation near enough to us has sent out von Neumann machines). Then we have to actually see the damned things, and recognise them for what they are.
Face it - we are very, very far from the only civilisation in this universe, but we are nevertheless utterly and entirely alone. We will never see or hear of the other civilisations and they will never see or hear from us. The lengthscales and timescales involved are unimaginably vast in comparison with the length of time that our civilisation, and other civilisations, are around and detectable. Hell, it took around four and a half billion years before we came around on this Earth. A slightly different setup, a particular comet slamming into the proto-Earth three hundred years earlier, and we'd have been at our current level in 1715. By 2015 who's to say that Earth would still be emitting any kind of radiation an alien civilisation could pick up? Who's to say humans would still be here at anything like our level of civilisation, or that if they were, they'd be broadcasting unencrypted, easily decipherable broadcasts of shitty television out to the universe at large? We only need to miss an alien civilisation by this tiny margin, and neither we nor they will ever know that the other existed.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 21 2015, @07:58AM
Interstellar travel itself is outright impossible.
The obvious counterexample is Earth itself which has traveled several million light-years since its formation. It hasn't hopped between stars, the literal definition of interstellar, but it has easily traveled distances that would be considered far greater than interstellar.
The nearest realistic possibility are von Neumann machines
Humans are von Neumann machines as is every other bit of life capable of reproduction.
Face it - we are very, very far from the only civilisation in this universe, but we are nevertheless utterly and entirely alone.
Unless, of course, that isn't true. That's the problem with assertions. They aren't automatically correct.