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Climate Change, the Fermi Paradox, and the Fate of our Planet

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

Hugh Pickens writes:

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.

• Re:So sustainability has to equal restraint Re:So sustainability has to equal restraint (Score: 1) by WillAdams on Monday January 19 2015, @03:57PM

  by WillAdams (1424) on Monday January 19 2015, @03:57PM (#136062)

  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?

  Parent

• Alternatives to petrochemical fertilizers exist (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:57AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:57AM (#136221)

  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).

  Dervaes has a one-fifth acre lot in Pasadena, California, on which he and his family raise three tons of food per year. This provides 75 percent of their annual food needs, 99 percent of their produce and helps them sustain an organic produce business. They also raise ducks, chickens, goats, bees, compost worms, and are running an aquaponics fish experiment.
  Jules Dervaes, Urban Homesteader [wikipedia.org]

  .
  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_

  Parent