Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Discovery has a theory as to why we haven’t discovered evidence of intelligent alien civilisations; According to Discovery, the handful of planets which have just the right characteristics for life to thrive, are eventually destroyed by a technological environmental cataclysm.
Why Can’t We Find Aliens? Climate Change Killed Them
As we look deeper into our galaxy for signs of extraterrestrial life, we keep drawing a blank. Does this mean life on Earth is unique and we’re the only ones out here? Or could it just mean that all the aliens are dead?
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“The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra, lead author of the paper. “Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive.”
“Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable,” he said.
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But now we have an intelligent lifeform that emerged as a dominant force, interrupting and exploiting our planet’s natural cycles. Humanity has inadvertently created a new bottleneck — let’s call it the “Industrial Bottleneck” — by causing irreversible changes to our delicate biosphere. Now, we’re seeing rapid impacts on our civilization as the balance in our climate is knocked off-kilter by the inexorable rise of greenhouse gases from industrial processes and energy needs.
Are these bottlenecks common throughout the cosmos? If an extraterrestrial lifeform “makes the grade” and survives the Gaian Bottleneck, does it then face another existential threat from their evolution into a industrial civilisation?
For now, this is all speculation, but what’s clear from observations of our own planet, is that the mother of all existential self-inflicted bottlenecks is on the horizon and, unless we find a way of reversing the damage we’ve caused to our environment, it seems we’ll quickly become just another lifeform that didn’t make the grade.
Read more: http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/why-cant-we-find-aliens-climate-change-killed-them-160121.htm
There’s evidence that intelligence is rare, either that or they are doing a very good job of hiding themselves. If even one other intelligence arose in our Galaxy at least half a million years ago, then where are they?.
However, a hypothesis of fiery death through technological climate apocalypse simply doesn’t make sense. In a few decades, a century at most, mankind will have the engineering capability to adjust the global thermostat to whatever we want, by pumping aerosols into the upper atmosphere, installing orbital mirrors, nuclear fusion powered heaters, or through advanced technologies we simply haven’t considered yet. I’m sure we can think of circumstances which would prevent aliens following the same technological path to greater control of their environment, but surely such circumstances would be special cases, not generally applicable?
My theory is that intelligent aliens, if they exist, are difficult to find, because they mostly end up abandoning the real world. Their computer games become so compelling, so immersive, the intelligences which created them simply don’t bother with physical reality anymore.
Our society has already seen the emergency of video game addiction. How bad will such addiction problems be, when the VR is piped directly into your brain, through a neural interface, and computer generated game reality is utterly indistinguishable from physical reality? Except of course, in the computer generated universe you are a superhero or a god, or whatever other character takes your fancy?
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There’s also the fact that we live in the galactic equivalent of the middle of f-ing nowhere. If you invented the car you wouldn’t pick Podunk, North Dakota to be the first place you drove to.
I saw this article on a plane yesterday. I have to confess that I was the one who posted the comment that they’d jumped the shark. Very off the cuff and sarcastic, but I was totally flabbergasted that Discover would publish this piece.
The existence of extra-terrestrial origin intelligent life forms has not yet been observed in a verifiable way. The only data we have on intelligent life forms is Earth’s intelligent life form. So, we know that intelligent life formation of the carbon based humanoid type is 100% possible.
We know nothing else, though we can envision and dream about the stuff of Star Wars and Star Trek. The stories are stimulating, but they are just stories.
John
Perhaps as intelligent life strives to find out the origins of the Universe they build fantastic machines underground. Machines capable of accelerating atomic particles to light speeds then crash them into each other and accidentally creates a blac…………
Back when Global Thermonuclear destruction was the “Crisis Du Jour” Carl Sagan had postulated that all other intelligent life might ultimately destroy itself with Nuclear Bombs.
Same story line, different crisis
now, here I always thought that life on this planet evolved from a pile of garbage left behind by a group of inter-galactic picnickers. Sure that they left other planets in the same shape.
“the handful of planets which have just the right characteristics for life to thrive, are eventually destroyed by a technological environmental cataclysm” Why not? There’s as much data to support this as there is to support catastrophic global warming.
Actually I seen one of them little boogers. Landed down there by the barn one day. Wife come a hollerin’ in the house. I grabbed my shotgun and run out there. Door opened and this wobbly thing come out and started towards me wavin’ with one hand and stickin’ the othern out. They was a bunch more staring out a window. I shouted: “you get on out of here you trashy ole’ thing.” He just kept on comin’ ‘n that’s when I blasted him. Ship took off. We got us a couple of big scoops ‘n carried it out to the field and buried it. Damnedest thing you ever saw.
You have to be a superior grade of moron to believe that warming the planet by a degree or two will cause the extinction of man.
MarkW on January 22, 2016 at 10:20 am
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MarkW,
Richard Lindzen has articulated some thoughts about how strange it is that some people think small changes in climate are so fearsome.
I would alternately say, you have to possess an irrational set of fundamental concepts to conclude that warming the planet by a degree or two will cause extinction of (or even a major impact on) any significant numbers of even the least most dynamically adaptable life forms on Earth.
John
SETI is another of today’s secular religions. Not to begrudge the search, but the same wild-eyed certainty amongst its adherents as with AGW. It comes down to “spontaneous generation” which was refuted 150 years ago (ignore that fruit fly hovering around your desert), er, except for the first one 4 billion years ago which stays. If spontaneous generation is wrong, then that occurence 4 billion years ago was a freak event. Now of course, we know ET must be true because other, older, civilizations conquered the Galaxy and colonized the Earth before we evolved — er, not. Eschew swapping old religions for new — there are no ETs out there.
Perhaps we are the first and most advanced society in the Galaxy.
This is like saying that there are no intelligent and conscious plants today because, while they did exist in the past, they all killed themselves when they became depressed as they realized they couldn’t move.
The real reason that all the stars are so very far apart? They’re just as dumb “there” as we are here.
So, I wonder, what’s to stop the folks who (to my mind) tried to use the CAGW crisis to set up a global Government under their control, from faking “contact” with ET’s and using that crisis to get what they want . . It appears not much . .
They would have to produce evidence, if they had claimed to have contacted ET.
Sure . . but I have no way of effectively disputing faked evidence of contact . . and I doubt anyone else does either.
OK, it is Friday. Time for some funnies, so I offer . . . . .
‘The Happy Alien Arrival Story’
Year 2016 a planetoid like object about the size of the planet Mercury is detected at distance of 0.5 au from Earth and it is determined that it is slowing down. It is detected to probably be intercepting near Earth.
Later in 2016 analysis shows the Mercury sized planetoid-like object is 80% densely compressed coal which is cleverly reinforced structurally with steel. About 18 percent of its mass seems to be a force field held atmosphere of compressed oxygen. There appears to be a propulsion system which somehow uses coal.
Early in 2017 the aliens make first contact. They are permanent travelers surveying the universe. They say they come in peace to trade their extensive survey knowledge of the universe for some water (to make oxygen) and for all the coal we are willing to sell them.
Everyone lived happily ever after.
John
So “(Extraterrestrial) Climate Change” has negated the need for “The Men in Black”?
But I liked that movie!
So… I always figured we couldn’t find intelligent life because the odds of there being intelligent life at our level right now – out there in the big are pretty small to begin with when you consider the bajillions of stars and bajillions and bajillions of planets orbiting them. But more importantly, we broadcast far and wide into space for what… 100 years? Just over 100 years? And now nearly everything is moving through cables and being beamed directly etc. If I wasn intelligent race out there in some distant place and was just starting to get the signals we are now sending, I’d be (1) thinking that we were clearly killing ourselves (unless they can tell movies from reality) and (2) we were slowly dieing off because the signals they were receiving were dietapering off.
And then lets not forget the faster than light barrier and the fact we broadcast for 100 years or so… if every other race did that, we could still be 1000s, 100s of 1000s or millions of years off receiving their signal. From a geologic perspective, our galaxy has only just started to get the right ingredients for life as we know it anyway! Could be another planet on the opposite side of the galaxy got intelligent life at the same time as us and we still wouldn’t know about it and won’t for another 100,000+ years!
The signals would be extremely weak at interstellar distances.
And that points up the other part of this that never seems to get mentioned: Space is very big. The distance to the nearest star is 4.5 years, at the speed of light.
Now, it may be that there is no such dang thing as warp drives, worm hole transport, suspended animation for hundreds of years followed by machines waking you up when you eventually arrive at another star…in short, they may be out there, but are very far away and are as stuck in their solar system as we are in ours.
Having said that, it will turn out to have been a bad idea if the wrong sort hear our signals and come investigating, and enslave us all for all of eternity.
*shiver*
This is as possible as that they would travel all this way and hide from us, or just keep going because our personal habits offend their delicate sensibilities.
This ‘no aliens because of environmental disaster’ parallels the ‘no aliens because of nuclear winter’ line used during the cold war. It is a great argument because it sounds science-y,it is impossible to prove wrong and it’s scary.
Not bothering with physical reality? That’s a classic. The AGW crowd gave up on physical reality years ago and lives inside a model world where virtual disasters lurk behind every subroutine.
If I were an alien, with any intelligence at all, and I noticed a planet full of savages, treehuggers and, most of all, socialists, the last thing I would do is announce my presence.
You would realise that all that would happen would be constant demands to build some idealist’s utopia with your technology and a hand held out for more cash.
Until such time as we discover life on another planet, planetoid, asteroid or whatever, the only scientific conclusion to be drawn is that life is unique. Anything else is pure speculation.
Let me see if I have this straight: The premise of this article is that every intelligent civilization eventually gives rise to a cult of climate lying warmistas?
and just imagine how huge all their bureaucracies grew … and the tax revenues from whatever atmospheric elements they had !!
has anyone offered extraterrestrial real estate to AlGore yet ??
The alien life forms were waived off by the extremist headline writers and pseudoscience living here. There is a warning buoy floating out near the edge of this solar system to give notice to all who come near or those who are thinking about opening a comm channel. Silence………
The conclusion from the article should be that we have nothing to worry about. The article itself is proof that there is no intelligence here!
There are no alien communities with the ability to travel or contact us because their societal evolution branched towards the sustainability/diversity/socialist ideals & goals long ago. They practice a form of culling their young, based on genetic/behavioral testing; those with individuality and self sufficiency traits are removed.
Their evolution continued down that branch until they achieved complete stagnation and they have stayed there for the last 12,000,000 years … stable, sustainable and content to know that they simply exist. They are oh so slowly evolving into the conscious faith/divination that their mere existence as a life form (they pretty much think of themselves as a single slumbering entity) is something on the negative side of the karma scale. They are becoming the complete opposite of the BORG … their motto is “Join Us, Existence Is Futile”.
Nirvana
There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the earth. If one or more hadn’t happened, what direction would life have taken? Would humanity have arisen at all? I think we’re extremely lucky that the dinosaurs were wiped out, because reptiles ruled the world for 200 million years! They were doing fine until the asteroid came. The evolution of intelligent life seems to involve an enormous amount of luck.