How would alien civilizations solve a problem like global warming? Sounds like a science fiction novel, but a group of researchers is actually taking the question seriously.
Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, was the lead author of a study trying to model the “possible histories of alien planets, the civilizations they grow, and the climate change that follows.”
Frank’s study was published in the journal Astrobiology in early May, but Frank wrote about his work for The Atlantic. “We’re interested in how exo-civilizations develop on their planets,” Frank wrote Wednesday.
“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,” he wrote. “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.”
Obviously, there’s no known ancient alien civilization for Frank to study, so he and his co-authors just made them up. Frank’s study analyzed how made up civilizations might contend with global warming and ecological 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,” Frank wrote.
This isn’t Frank’s first foray into questions about ancient extraterrestrial civilizations. Frank wrote another op-ed in The Atlantic in April on a paper he co-authored with Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
That’s right, NASA’s top climate scientist co-authored a paper on advanced civilizations that could have existed millions of years before humanity on Earth.
“Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted a 50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization,” Frank wrote in The Atlantic in April. “But by asking if we could ‘see’ truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced to ask about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might have on a planet. That’s exactly what the astrobiological perspective on climate change is all about.”
“By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking about the possibility for universal rules guiding the evolution of all biospheres in all their creative potential, including the emergence of civilizations,” he wrote. “Even without pickup-driving Paleocenians, we’re only now learning to see how rich that potential might be.”
Read more at Daily Caller
This sounds like another excuse to live off of grant money.
Oh yes a bunch of Eco-Minded Aliens their all going to come here meditate with Al Bore sit ina tree with crack-pot tree sitter Julia(Butterfly)Hill wipe out all mechization and return us all to a primative state this crackpot sounds are rediculous as Bill Nye I wonder maybe the aliens should take Nye,Gore,DiCaprio and David(Laurie)with them when they leave
Answer to the title question :
By laughing.
“To launch our science of exo-civilizations we started with those laws of planets”
“those laws of planets”?? We are casually familiar with 13 planets in out solar system out of billions in the universe so I guess “those laws of planets” is specific enough since the rest of the “science” that follows is just made up BS.
“To do our job we had to avoid the specifics of both their individual biology and their sociology because science provides us little to work with on those fronts.” so we just make (sh)it up.
“The model we created is “just a first stab at a science of exo-civilizations. We made the equations as simple as possible while still capturing the essence of planet-civilization “coevolution.”
Yes. The scent of the “essence” captured does smell familiar.
“The results were sobering.” Of course they were. Generous grants will be required to further research this research.
CAPTAIN THERE BE LUNATICS HERE
ROFL LMAO.. This is science anno 2018?
Good lord, we are doomed.
Since it has been brought up I’ll go off topic about the existence of extra terrestrial life. The augment that with all of the trillions of stars out there, extra terrestrial life has to exist is a valid one. It is time to move to the question of density of such life. I suspect that it is not common. Most solar systems are based on first generation stars. In order to the have heavier elements necessary for rocky planets, you need second or third generation stars. Planets have to be in the habitual zone and have a strong enough magnetic core to deflect the solar wind or they will lose their atmosphere like Mars did. Water is probably a matter of chance and it is possible it is the one thing missing for live. There could be so little it is locked up in the rocks or so much that the entire planet is an ocean. That would support live but not intelligent life. The planet has to be in a safe zone in a galaxy. Some areas are bombard with deadly gamma radiation often enough that life would be destroyed before it is very far along. If the density of life is the universe is low as I suspect, this explains why we haven’t been visited.
Someone posited that we haven’t been visited by aliens because anything smart enough to travel that far probably wouldn’t survive its own proclivity for self destruction. They would have to be peaceful in nature. Only territorial humans were willing to risk sailing off the edge of the world.
If the Aliens want to take someone home to stud for their pure stupidity they need to take either Bill Ne,Al Bore(Gore)of Leoanardo DiCaprio