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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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 19 2015, @01:12PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday January 19 2015, @01:12PM (#136026) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday January 19 2015, @04:15PM

    by theluggage (1797) on Monday January 19 2015, @04:15PM (#136065)

    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.