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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One and a half million clay tablets found buried in Sumer, from the Sumerian civilisation tell our history, I will not write it here, but the tablets have been translated. Nothing is as it seems.
?the 1.5 million clay tablets found in Sumer were ancient forms of credit cards?
John
Everyone ignores the obvious scientific reality, because it is uncomfortable to what we like to believe. According to Einstein and every test, we can devise, the Speed of Light is an absolute barrier for physical travel. This means that given our short lifespans and the immense distances between the stars, there has never been, is not now, and never will be any form of realistic contact between different planetary systems.
Never.
We don’t like to believe that this world, with the inclusion of the uninhabitable planets in our solar system, is it for our race. But the reality is that we’re never leaving, and no one is ever coming. The human race will live here,and one day the human race will die here, and no one will remember us. We can’t stand to think that.
But that’s what the science says.
So, is there intelligent life out there? What does it matter? They have to follow the same physical laws we do, and that means they’re never coming here, and we’re never going there. We live on an island surrounded by a barrier that can never be crossed.
Some interesting speculation on the importance of a large moon to the emergence of intelligent life:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLMnChNhsd8?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360%5D
Didn’t we hear this rubbish from AUS Greens leader Bob Brown in his notorious “Fellow Earthians” speech 3 years ago? Even the world’s looniest Greens (see “Sarah Sea Patrol”) found this too out there and prevailed on the laughing stock to retire.
Yes, when he left politics. He’s just been arrested at a protest aganist logging in Tasmania. The guy should be thrown in jail!
Alien life will be both discovered and proven by mathematical analysis of dna, rna, and the like. Perhaps hidden in a code within a code within a code, will be information available only to life forms with sufficient math ability. We may know a lot less math than we think.
The issue with all the comments below about how animals do all these things to their own kind, blah, blah, blah, is: humans are the only species that studies its own brain. We act completely different than any other species in very human ways. You don’t see any other species using science; birds don’t do maths.
We can’t sit here and justify our animalistic, illogical natures using other species as evidence, simply because we’re not typical animals; we’re something different, theological opinions aside, even.
To sum it up, this crap is even dumber than the Y2K scare. We haven’t even scratched the surface of our own galactic neighborhood, let alone the visible Universe in the search for habitable planets. Anyone that would write such crap doesn’t know very much about Astronomy and it’s history. Less than a century ago it was accepted science that the Universe consisted of our own Galaxy. We don’t even know for sure how many Ringlets make up Saturn’s rings or how far the Oort cloud really extends and why long term comets that come from it get perturbed out of their orbit to come flying into the inner solar system and this guy is writing excuses for why intelligent alien life has not been found or heard from?