From the Atlantic, by one of the authors of the study, Adam Frank:
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? Does anyone across the cosmos ever make it?
Remarkably, science has now advanced to point where we can take a first step at answering this question. I know this because my colleagues and I have just published a first study mapping out possible histories of alien planets, the civilizations they grow, and the climate change that follows. Our team was made up of astronomers, an earth scientist, and an urban ecologist.
It was only half-jokingly that we thought of our study as a “theoretical archaeology of exo-civilizations.” “Exo-civilizations” are what people really mean when they talk about aliens. Astronomers refer to the new worlds they’ve discovered as “exoplanets.” They’re now gearing up to use the James Webb Space Telescope and other instruments to search for life by looking for signs of “exo-biospheres” on those exoplanets. So if we have exoplanets and exo-biospheres, it’s time to switch out the snicker-inducing word “aliens” for the real focus of our concerns: exo-civilizations.
…
We’re interested in how exo-civilizations develop on their planets. Given that more than 10 billion trillion planets likely exist in the cosmos, unless nature is perversely biased against civilizations like ours, we’re not the first one to appear. That means each exo-civilization that evolved from its planet’s biosphere had a history: a story of emergence, rising capacities, and then maybe a slow fade or rapid collapse. And just as most species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct, so too most civilizations that emerged (if they emerged) may have long since ended. So we’re exploring what may have happened to others to gain insights into what might happen to us.
Of course, we have no direct evidence relating to any exo-civilizations or their histories. What we do have, however, are the laws of planets. Our robot emissaries have already visited most of the worlds in the solar system. We’ve set up weather stations on Mars, watched the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, and seen rain cascade across methane lakes on Titan. From these worlds we learned the generic physics and chemistry that make up what’s called climate. We can use these laws to predict the global response of any planet to something like an asteroid impact or perhaps the emergence of an energy-hungry industrial civilization.
Full essay here
The paper: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2017.1671
The Anthropocene Generalized: Evolution of Exo-Civilizations and Their Planetary Feedback
Abstract
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
A moment of pause so as to consider all the other things that might have destroyed an emerging exo- civilisation would have served better than the knee jerkbrain reach for pop climate change. So sad in one so clearly otherwise enthusiastic.
It interests me why this academic so readily assumes exo-life would be sufficiently like us to experience even remotely similar lines of development and civilisation building. There is much more interesting science fiction written than this must try harder effort.
One of many possible causes of climate change on Earth
is variations in the amount of extraterrestrial dust in our atmosphere.
( aka “space dust” or “cosmic dust” )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_dust
It’s not on the top of my list,
of possible causes of climate change,
but neither is CO2
My climate change blog:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
There’s a better explanation of why we’re alone: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
It is honestly perplexing that he assumes any Exo-Civilization would operate like an Ant Hill, booming and busting with one or two resources.
Humanity has already shown that when a resource becomes scarce in intelligent species will look for a replacement, or even create more of it if possible (as with food and farming).
If CO2 really were a threat to Civilization, then we COULD replace a large part of it… with Nuclear. If food production were truly in danger of being passed by Population, then we could grow more through greenhouses, irrigation, and others.
And if somehow we did get hit with a shortage (probably through bad government like Venezuela) even that is unlikely to cause outright distruction. As we’ve seen, people often find a way to survive.
“If CO2 really were a threat to Civilization, … then we could grow more [food] through greenhouses, irrigation, and others.”
Of course growing food requires CO2. Life consumes CO2. So, the ‘threat to Civilization’ is necessary for Civilization to exist.
Marsupial hominids. AFrank will not understand that at all.
Producing a paper using no actual data… wow. It’s just a thought exercise, aka mental masturbation.
“nor is it clear whether such civilizations inevitably drive their planets into climate change.”
That one sentence gives away the whole reason for the study. Everything has to be linked to climate change to get published and pal reviewed.
97% of climate science is a joke
This guy actually believes that his fantasizing about what alien cultures may or may not be able to do, is “scientific research”.
“watched the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, and seen rain cascade across methane lakes on Titan”
When exactly did we do either of these things?
“Does anyone across the cosmos ever make it?”
________________________________
Sure not. But “did anyone across the universe ever make it?”
Don’t think so.
That’s a good one:
“We’ve set up weather stations on Mars, watched the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, and seen rain cascade across methane lakes on Titan. From these worlds we learned the generic physics and chemistry that make up what’s called climate.”
________________________________
Tell me “the generic physics and chemistry that make up what’s called climate.”
prey.
Mars has dust, Venus has clouds and Titan has rain. There, any clearer?
The “rain” on Titan is methane, as are the snow and the ice.
Titan also has seasonal changes, and occasionally, shows Saturn-induced warm spells.
it’d be nice if AFrank paid attention to these realities.
A truly ground breaking piece of research. They had a grant to study exo-civilizations, but there was a huge impediment to their work – there was no data. Old-style scientists (like some of us dinosaurs here) would have just given up and wandered off looking for other areas to study. But not these guys – they operate at the leading edge of science!! They laboured long into the night, shunned by colleagues who had data to play with, jeered at by students, put on notice by administrators that they had to publish or lose their tenure, warned by the funding foundation that they’d have to repay the grant (long since squandered on going to climate conferences in exotic locations) if they didn’t get their fingers out.
Finally, they came up with a solution. And what a solution – it’s a whole new paradigm, a whole new way of collecting data, a whole new way of doing science!! They just made it up.
Think of the benefits that this new protocol would give to climate science and climate scientists. No more tediously going through old weather-station records, adjusting, re-adjusting, homogenizing, re-homogenizing until they show the warming trend you want. No more days and weeks wasted tinkering with sea level data, adding a millimetre here, subtracting a millimetre there, till you get the right acceleration. No more days wasted wondering whether kriging is better than polynomial fitting to fill Africa and the Arctic with the right kind of temperature data. No more having to debunk the criticisms of those darned d3niers with their endless carping about how you mutilated the data, and it doesn’t show what you said it shows anyway. No more having to pester the zoology department profs for the names of cute and cuddly species that you can claim will go extinct if it warms by half a degree.
No, with this new approach, your data will be clean and totally unambiguous. The trends it shows will be obvious, the blades of your hockey sticks will be at just the right angles, and they will start at just the right dates. Fortune and fame will be yours for the asking. Software billionaires will invite you to their beachfront estates for cocktails.
And think of the cost savings. No more field work, drilling holes in trees in the Urals. No more getting stuck in the ice while you document how the ice is disappearing. You can use the savings to go to even more climate conferences
Welcome to post-data data!!
/sarc (because you never know)
But, butt, what about the huge Tic Tac seen over the pacific in 2004? 😉
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-31/leaked-military-report-ufo-rendezvoused-something-big-under-ocean
I read the phrase “building a sustainable civilization on Earth” and I immediatly think of the double standards of the First World. As an example, here in the UK, although we have fawning green politicians, yet we are importing skilled folk from 2nd world countries to enable our health service, while leaving their countries of origin short of skilled resources.
I am convinced that nations should become sustainable but that is the opposite of what our hypocritical politicians and masters, keen to keep their servants, are actually doing.
THe EU has punishing tariff barriers that prevent much trade with 2nd and 3rd world countries. We are encouraging solar panels on roofs in Scotland whereas it ought to be encouraged in Africa and Asia where the sun shines to help those countries to develop a post industrial sustainable infrastructure. etc etc etc
The author wrote; “Does anyone across the cosmos ever make it?
Remarkably, science has now advanced to point where we can take a first step at answering this question. ”
Has the definition of science really fallen so low? It is speculation on the order of the notion floated in the 40’s that Venus was a tropical swamp world. Literally speculation based on observing a white featureless disk [as Sagan put it].
“Your tax dollars at work”
That isn’t clear. No grants are listed. Most people involved seem to be from University of Rochester, which is a private outfit. Oddly, Adam Frank (also UR) is not listed as an author.
Second grade writting style.
You only have to look at this planet’s civilisations to see a better model: very few have declined due to negative resource effects, decline, or misuse, it’s almost always politics. A few from natural catastrophes, a few from invasions, a few from climate change, but by far the most from human politics; internal corruption, overly rigid class structures stifling adaptation to change, useless conquests, and rigid ideologies which are out of touch with reality.
How can one do any kind of analysis such as this and not include extra-planetary resources? Asteroid mining has been a staple of SF for decades, and several entrepreneurs are doing serious work in that direction now that SpaceX has managed to start a major cost-to-orbit price drop. Likewise orbital solar power satellites, leading to orbital habitats.
Perhaps we are “the old ones”.