From the you’ve got to be effing kidding me department come this dead serious essay from “The Conversation”, that hotbed of climate alarmism in Australia which somehow got past bullshit detectors at phys.org.
The money quote sort of tries to talk down the headline, but they leave it wide open as a possibility.
David Waltham writes:
So why don’t we see advanced civilisations swarming across the universe? One problem may be climate change. It is not that advanced civilisations always destroy themselves by over-heating their biospheres (although that is a possibility). Instead, because stars become brighter as they age, most planets with an initially life-friendly climate will become uninhabitably hot long before intelligent life emerges.
The Earth has had 4 billion years of good weather despite our sun burning a lot more fuel than when Earth was formed. We can estimate the amount of warming this should have produced thanks to the scientific effort to predict the consequences of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.
These models predict that our planet should warm by a few degrees centigrade for each percentage increase in heating at Earth’s surface. This is roughly the increased heating produced by carbon dioxide at the levels expected for the end of the 21st century. (Incidentally, that is where the IPCC prediction of global warming of around 3°C centigrade comes from.)
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-climate-contact-alien-civilisations.html#jCp
Is there anything climate change can’t do? I predict effects on black holes next.
On the plus side, Michael Mann must be relieved that the Green Lizards aren’t coming after him.
h/t to Marc Morano and Leif Svalgaard
“So why don’t we see advanced civilisations swarming across the universe?”
—
If these idiots would only study the “historical documents,” they would realize that aliens either use cloaking devices to avoid detection, or they hide themselves to honor the prime directive. Of course you don’t see them swarming across the universe!
Whatever the reason why aliens are avoiding us, it’s a good thing for me. I’ve misplaced my copy of Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call.” I realize it’s only been tested successfully against Martians, but that’s a pretty good start.
Any sign of life on Uranus?
Earth-like is not Earth. How many planets have a 22-1/2 degree tilted axis, were struck by a rogue planet creating a large single satellite orbiting at just the right distance and have a start like the Sun? And even with all that, the biosphere appears to have been a bit of a fluke. We may be alone or nearly so.
start -> star (danged fat fingers … )
‘Michael Mann must be relieved that the Green Lizards aren’t coming after him.’
Too many cock tales?
Aliens are watching us right now, tuning in to all the BBC, ABC broadcasts. This CO2 malarkey is the funniest show in the galaxy!
/sarc (just in case)
“It is not that advanced civilisations always destroy themselves by over-heating their biospheres (although that is a possibility).
It is also possible that they always destroy themselves because they cant tell when they are exaggerating.
“So why don’t we see advanced civilisations swarming across the universe?”
Because we are not looking hard enough. NASA is not searching. SETI is privately underfunded. They rely on dole outs from individuals. They don’t even have their own dedicated radio telescopes. They share telescopes with other institutions. Given this pathetic situation, I estimate the odds of finding ET is one in three million. In other words, at the rate we’re searching we expect to find ET after 3 million years. Assuming there are at least 10,000 alien civilizations in our galaxy. It’s also possible there is none or they are not interested in communicating with us (not sending signals)
Climate, huh. That’s what they want us to believe.
Roswell Station Data
If it gets warmer, the earth will become the holiday resort of choice for Proxima Centaurians ;>)
Intelligent life has not emerged in Australia yet.
Fire up… “They” are not friendly!
Were we not told, just a few years back, that climate change would bring alien intervention?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations
I don’t tink we need to be worried about aliens.
If intelligent life is common on planets that can have life and such planets are common then there would be millions or billions of planets with intelligent life forms.
If it is possible to colonize other planets it would not take a long time for an advanced civilization to colonize the entire galaxy.
It may actually be too hard or too dangerous to do so and thas why it hasn’t happened. There is a limit how far technology can take us and we do not know the limit yet.
Assume the following:
– Start with 1 planet with intelligent life.
– It takes 10 000 years for an advenced civilization to get enough people to create 2 new colonization ships.
– Each colonized planet will only send 2 new colonization ships and do so 10 000 years after it is colonized.
So if we assume a civilization at our level and it takes 10 000 years for it to send the first 2 ships we get the following numbers:
It will take 360 000 years to colonize 137 Billion planets. 360 000 years may seem a long time but it is a very short time for a solar system or our galaxy.
Imagine how many planets a civilization on a solar system like ours that was formed just 1 million years before us could have visited.
There would be traces of aliens everywhere on planets all over the universe, but there aren’t, at least not in our solar system. Our Planet would most likeley have been colonized millions of years before humans appeared if it would be possible, but it hasn’t.
So in my opionion there are just a few reason for this.
– We are one of the first intelligent lifeforms. It may be very rare that an intelligent liform appears on a planet.
– It is techinacally too hard/impossible and dangerous to send colonization ships to other planets many lightyears away.
Aliens are not staying away from earth due to climate change. Even with the moste scary CAGW scenarios earth would still look like a great planet to live on for aliens.
From the amazon page about his book Lucky Planet, which is based on the “4 billion years of good weather” lunacy –
“About the Author
David Waltham is an astrobiologist, geophysicist and head of the department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway College, the University of London.”
“This solution to the Fermi Paradox might be considered depressing, but it should increase our caution – “We may just find out the hard way that planets with nasty climates are quite easy to produce.””
“good weather” vs. “nasty climate”. A typical British scare salesman like Maltus, Lovelock, Ravetz on a book promotion tour.
Climate change will end the Universe. Following the Big Bang, gravitational attraction should’ve been sufficient to slow down and reverse the expanding Universe, once again leading to a singularity and another Big Bang, thus repeating the cycle for infinity. But just like it causes the expansion of the seas, and Mann’s ego (I had to throw in a little comic relief for this sober assessment), Climate Change will cause the Universe to expand.
Forever.
I can just imagine a retired couple of aliens planning their vacation:
“You don’t want to visit Earth. The A/C doesn’t work.”
Unless they are from Hoth. They would love the warm weather.
@Kenny – Or the Husnock – they were Eradicated by Kevin Uxbridge. 😉
“Instead, because stars become brighter as they age, most planets with an initially life-friendly climate will become uninhabitably hot long before intelligent life emerges.”
The single measurement that refutes this hypothesis is “Earth”.
“We can estimate the amount of warming this should have produced thanks to the scientific effort to predict the consequences of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.”
Original estimates based on a large body of engineering data on aerodynamics ‘predicted’ that bumblebees cannot fly. Other estimates based on early computer models of the electronic structures of simple molecules ‘predicted’ that lithium hydride was too unstable to exist. Estimates in nascent scientific investigations are primarily useful for grantsmanship.
It is probably impossible for spacecraft to travel faster than 10% of the speed of light. That means we are all stuck in our own little solar systems and EM spectrum communication at the speed of light is all that is possible.
The period of time that advanced civilizations are broadcasting EM to reach into deep space might only last a few hundred years. Earth will go dark in this type of communication in the next 50 years in terms of everyday communication that will be strong enough to reach beyond the nearest stars. Deliberate attempts at communication across the stars might be all that we can hear. Maybe this is eventually deemed to be dangerous to do and alien civilizations only do it for a few decades before someone says stop doing that. I think, we have already reached this conclusion.
So, they are not here and we cannot hear them either. In 50 years, no one will hear us either.
Dammit, now the aliens won’t come to visit us because too many idiots are flapping their meat at each other. This classic humor story by Terry Bisson will explain all:
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
This whole thing is based on the idea that the earth’s climate is a delicately balanced system that, purely by luck, has remained relatively stable for the last billion years. They believe that the increase in solar energy over that time should have coused up to 100C in warming but it’s been almost precisely countered by the cooling forcings produced by the biosphere (like decreasing CO2). They can’t even conceive that the climate might be able to regulate itself.
I swear I’ve seen studies referenced on this site that claim the opposite — unnatural climate change will alert aliens to our presence and prompt an alien invasion because
1) The aliens want to harvest the natural resources contained in our precious bodily fluids.
-OR-
2) The aliens want to destroy us before we destroy the environment.
Or possibly I saw this on The Simpson’s.
Final word on global warming and its power over the natural world.
CO2 with the help of GLOBAL WARMING caused the Big Bang and subsequent super-luminal expansion of the early Universe.
So there! (sticks out toungue)
“tongue” . Sorry!