Scientists Simulate Alien Civilizations, Find They Keep Dying From Climate Change
https://futurism.com/the-byte/simulate-alien-civilization-climate-change
Scientists Simulate Alien Civilizations, Find They Keep Dying From Climate Change
https://futurism.com/the-byte/simulate-alien-civilization-climate-change
26 Comments
> In a new study, scientists conducted simulations to see just how long extraterrestrial civilizations could survive if they kept up similar rates of growing energy consumption to our own.
> And it’s not looking good. They found that the aliens kept dying off within just 1,000 years because their planets would always get too hot to remain habitable. Not even totally switching to renewables changed their fates: their worlds would still slowly toast themselves to death, all the same.
> The work addresses the thorny problem of waste heat. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, a small amount of heat will always be released into the planet’s atmosphere no matter what energy source we use — be it nuclear, solar, or wind — because no energy system is 100 percent efficient.
> The researchers suggest that this could offer a partial solution to the Fermi paradox. “We have not encountered technological species because they are rare at any given moment in time,” the researchers write in the study. That’s because advanced lifeforms may simply keep succumbing to climate change within a thousand years, which is practically nothing.
> On the other hand, they note, this doesn’t necessarily explain why we haven’t seen any lingering technosignatures that potentially outlast the civilizations they originated from — a radio signal traveling for many light years, for example, or an interstellar spacecraft like our Voyager probes.
Surely it can’t be so basic such that The Great Filter is renewable energy and sustainable living…
I’ve been saying for years we just need to turn the AC on. It really is that simple
These simulation studies are never going to be able to map the complexities of how a real ecosystem self-stabilizes.
I’m not arguing that global warming isn’t a threat.
What I’m saying is even here on earth, we have had scientists repeatedly give us a “line of no return” for global warming and they were forced to endlessly revise those estimates because of larger complexities in the system than they could correctly measure.
We just had a large patch of water cool off along the Atlantic and we haven’t fully figured out why. While it doesn’t contradict the overall trend, it implies there are phenomenon we are not taking into account which can regulate planetary temperature.
The same is true of ice regrowth in places like Antarctica.
**The point I’m making is if we can’t even correctly map out our own ecosystem to get an appropriate measurement of the point of no return, how could we possibly simulate an alien ecosystem which likely evolved along an entirely different path and ecological relationship from our own?**
This study doesn’t offer us much.
I’ve always believed that our lack of accountability in the big picture would prove to be our doom. Given the number of nations and different approaches in each, I don’t think we’ll ever reach harmony and worldwide agreement to maintain equilibrium.
We are a reactive species, and our collective lack of proactivity will bring this human experiment to an end. Just look at the numbers: the planet has maintained equilibrium for 6.5 billion years, of which humans have been around for 400,000 or so. We’ve managed to break equilibrium in a little over 200 years since industrialization. This isn’t part of Earth’s natural cycle, so honestly 1000 years seems very optimistic in our case.
Even if we went 100% green energy and hit the energy demands to maintain energy equilibrium now, the Earth will still need thousands of years to get back to stability; in the meanwhile, we’re on course to make a large portion of it uninhabitable within the next 100. That’s my opinion based on observation.
Number of civilizations to base the training data upon: 1.
Surely an intelligent life would realize they’re killing themselves and adjust, right?….right?
Wouldn’t any model created by humans have inherent human biases?
This is just basic scifi, just made up stuff from no actual evidence or science.
So there’s this thing called the simulation theory that posits as these types of simulations become more and more detailed and closer to real life it becomes more and more likely that we live in a simulation.
If all these civilizations are as dumb as we are, then they deserve it. As we do.
“The work addresses the thorny problem of waste heat. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, a small amount of heat will always be released into the planet’s atmosphere no matter what energy source we use — be it nuclear, solar, or wind — because no energy system is 100 percent efficient.”
So harvest heat for energy and it will have a cooling effect to counter the waste heat. If the problem is that theres too much energy, use the energy.
The closer (timewise) a threat is to harming us personally, and the higher the level of harm that it will bring, the more real/believable we find it.
Smoking is a good example of something that we know will most likely harm us later in life, but “later in life” it is so far away that we discount the danger.
Climate change is the same thing, but it’s on a longer scale of time and is caused by a large number of people. We rationalize because of the time scale a bit, and even more so because we think that what harm (or good) can we, personally, do. The thinking goes something along the lines of: the world is a big place, and me, an individual person, unnecessarily driving my poor-mileage car hither-and-yon isn’t going to have much of an impact, so why does it matter?
Of course, there are millions (billions?) of people thinking that they’re just one individual person, so what does it matter what they, individually, do.
Behold the power of numbers. Or, the power of one.
Thought this was r/collapse lmfao it belongs there for sure
We have survived comet impacts, ice ages, massive floods and many other calamities which produced dire warming and cooling. The fact we are still here is evidence that like cockroaches we will be around.
Things we won’t survive: being sucked into a blackhole, our sun’s death, planetary collisions.
Main error in the thesis: that a planet holds a single “civilization.” Even inside a supposedly patriotic country, one side will happily watch the world burn if it “owns the libs”.
The concept of pan-civilizational planetary cooperation is a myth. That’s the Great Filter.
How are these parameters configured?
I assume tech development would have to be similar to us, sure, but we have no idea what their culture/s are, their governments, their biological composition, so, are these parameters based on the only intelligent life we know of, *ours?* What informs them of other intelligence?
We must live under the water it is the only option!
We must become water people.
The good news is your governments have already figured out the solution. The bad news is it will require about 6 billion people to die so they stop using up all the resources required to build sustainable all-climate habitats for the survivors. —Bob the Simulator Probably
“These simulations are predicated on the assumption that our energy needs keep growing exponentially at an average rate of around one percent per year.”
Well of course that won’t work. That assumption is what determines the outcome. Pretty useless study unless you’re just trying to prove how exponential growth works.
After 1000 years, that’s about 21,000 times the power requirements of year 1.
After 2000 years that would be this many times the power requirements of year 1. : 4,392,862,050,500,961,316,221,330,825,658,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Unrealistic assumptions lead to really dumb results? Who knew?
Remember SETI? It was based on 1950s tech. Radio was high tech at the time and radio stations built ever more powerful transmitters. That trend was assumed to continue and had it done so we would radio stations broadcasting with petawatt power…
Same flaw with the Kardashev scale, some energy good so infinite energy even more good!
Same with Malthus, people will over reproduce like lemmings and run out of food and other resources.
Reality doesn’t work like that! Our technology gets more efficient over time. Our population is expected to start shrinking. So we are near peak energy consumption and switching to renewables from fossil fuels means a 60% cut in total energy use at minimum since ICE vehicles are only about 20% efficient. And we get that cut in the next decade or two.
I didn’t know bullshit became a science but at least these artistes note that equilibrium is a possibility leading to billion year old civilizations
This is stupid:
>*The work addresses the thorny problem of waste heat. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, a small amount of heat will always be released into the planet’s atmosphere no matter what energy source we use — be it nuclear, solar, or wind — because no energy system is 100 percent efficient.*
Yes of course, ultimately all the energy we use end up as waste heat. That by itself is harmless though, and doesn’t even necessarily lead to any INCREASE in heating since there’s exactly the same amount of waste heat if you just for example allow sunshine to hit the ground instead of having PV-cells.
In other words, yes there’s always waste heat — but there’s not **MORE** waste heat if the chain goes sunlight – PV – electricity – some kinda industrial process – waste heat instead of taking some natural path to the same destination.
Either way, almost all of the sunlight hitting earth end up as waste heat.
Climate on planet X has been changing since forever. Some alien civilization dies. Must be climate change!
You can’t “simulate alien civilizations” when you only have one species and one civilization as an example. It would be like trying to simulate every species on Earth based only on your knowledge of goldfish. Every animal would look a lot like a goldfish. All they can do is come up with variations of what we already know.
lol. This is what I have thought for a while. Intelligence combined with the aggressiveness and competitiveness of evolutionary pressure may just be a dead end.
more garbage propaganda about the dangers of the supposed climate crisis.