Does anyone across the cosmos ever make it?

October 19, 2020 12:00 PM

The universe does many things. It makes galaxies, comets, black holes, neutron stars, and a whole mess more. We’ve lately discovered that it makes a great deal of planets, but it’s not clear whether it regularly makes energy-hungry civilizations, nor is it clear whether such civilizations inevitably drive their planets into climate change. There’s lots of hope riding on our talk about building a sustainable civilization on Earth. But how do we know that’s even possible? How Do Aliens Solve Climate Change? A piece by astrophysics professor Adam Frank on modeling hypothetical past exo-civilizations (aliens) and how they might have handled situations like our own current predicament. Link to study. Frank also has a book, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth, on the same subject.
posted by Lonnrot (10 comments total)

You might think switching from the high-impact energy source to the low-impact source would make things better. But for some trajectories, it didn’t matter. If the civilization used only the high-impact resource, the population reached a peak and then quickly dropped to zero. But if we allowed the civilization to switch to the low-impact energy resource, the collapse still happened in certain cases, even if it was delayed. The population would start to fall, then happily stabilize. But then, finally and suddenly, it rushed downward to extinction.

The collapses that occurred even when the civilization did the smart thing demonstrated an essential point about the modeling process. Because the equations capture some of the real world’s complexity, they can surprise you. In some of the “delayed collapse” histories, the planet’s own internal machinery was the culprit. Push a planet too hard, and it won’t return to where it began.

So, according to these models, even if we do everything right, there's still a risk that humanity will go extinct as a result of the climate crisis.

Is it time to start figuring out how to build our own biospheres yet? Because the one we have isn't particularly reliable anymore, and we're pretty dependent on it.
posted by MrVisible at 12:40 PM on October 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Honestly the current arc of humanity is doing a good job of explaining the Fermi Paradox.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:45 PM on October 19, 2020 [7 favorites]

Reminds me of the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, and the work of William Vogt.
posted by doctornemo at 1:29 PM on October 19, 2020

This dovetails with my gut feeling: if a civilization is to survive, it must repudiate exponential growth. (*this can be rough if you share your planet with another society that will not do so) If there are long-lived societies out there, they are NOT building galaxy-spanning civilizations with generation ships. They're discovering inner truth while making sure their star system's asteroid resources will last for the next hundred million years.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 2:22 PM on October 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

Related: Exponential Economist meets Finite Physicist.
posted by wildblueyonder at 3:17 PM on October 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

I liked the article but its crystal ball seems well-smudged. I mean it's the kind of modeling that would anticipate the The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. But nevertheless I like it because the true value of this kind of analysis is to calibrate the imagination to accept certain kinds of catastrophes and not other, more terrible ones. Wouldn't it be nice to have our chief concern be horse manure, instead of accelerating ecological collapse and/or the unspeakable destruction of nuclear war? We should have listened.
posted by dmh at 3:29 PM on October 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Honestly the current arc of humanity is doing a good job of explaining the Fermi Paradox.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia

Self-destruction from the inability to limit environmental damage seems the leading contender of all the possible Great Filters.
posted by Pouteria at 7:50 PM on October 19, 2020

Self-destruction from the inability to limit environmental damage seems the leading contender of all the possible Great Filters.

Sociopathy. Ecological catastrophe is just one of the possible manifestations.

1. Any extraterrestrial life form that could build a civilization that we'd recognize as such would be a social species with hierarchical status and prestige determining who's in control.

2. Such a species will have diversity of social behavior and motivations similar to ours. They will have sociopathic individuals. Smart sociopaths are noteworthy for their ability to wind up in charge of things for reasons that will be universal among intelligent (whatever that means) social species.

3. No mechanisms for denying power to sociopaths can be perfect, and once a species' technology reaches a certain point, a sociopath only has to win once to destroy everything.

In conclusion, nobody ever makes it.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:48 AM on October 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

James Speth:

"I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems.

I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation."
posted by Tom-B at 12:27 PM on October 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

My greatest fear is that a runaway greenhouse effect is inevitable on any planet that contains life, whether or not that planet evolves intelligent life that utilizes power. The history of the evolution of life on this planet is fundamentally a story of the evolution of new molecules, molecules that require energy to produce and thus act as ever-proliferating vessels that trap the energy of the sun on the surface of the earth. The coronavirus spike protein is an excellent example. Just last year, it didn't even exist, and now there's (probably literally) tons of it everywhere. Those proteins were formed using the energy of the bodies it fed on, and that energy came from food that was ultimately fueled by sunlight, and this is true of almost all biological molecules in existence. I fear that life burns worlds, and that is why the stars are silent. I think geoengineering might be our only way out of this mess, and I'm beginning to think 'sustainable' energy (which is also a form of trapping the sun's energy on the surface) may be anything but. (Which isn't to say I don't think we should use it, as opposed to carbon fuels, I just think it's kicking the can further down the road.)
posted by sexyrobot at 7:31 PM on October 20, 2020 [1 favorite]