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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @12:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @12:02AM (#136176)

    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.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 21 2015, @07:58AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 21 2015, @07:58AM (#136627) Journal

    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.