The famous ‘Fermi Paradox’ asks why, if life really is every bit as prevalent in the cosmos as some astrobiologists claim, with their equally famous ‘Drake Equation’ (which purports to show extraterrestrial life should be teeming just about everywhere in the universe), then where is it all? [emphasis, links added]
One possible answer might be that, once all intelligent civilizations reach a certain point of advancement, they stumble across the so-called ‘Great Filter’, a developmental obstacle that simply can never be overcome, no matter what planet you are living on, which ultimately destroys the whole species in an irreversible Mass Extinction Event.
This Great Filter was once often imagined to be a nuclear war – now, it is increasingly deemed to be climate change, a phenomenon no cutting-edge industrial civilization can supposedly ever escape from unscathed, on Earth or off it.
One leading advocate of this kind of doomsday thinking today is Adam Frank, a U.S. astrophysicist whose 2018 book Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth and many co-authored academic papers have attempted to delineate a so-called “Astrobiology of the Anthropocene”.
The ‘Anthropocene’ is the proposed (and recently rejected) term many scientists want to give to the current geological era on Earth, which they say has been irrevocably impacted and influenced by mankind and its technology, namely nuclear bombs and fossil fuels. …snip…
From Drake Equation to Fake Equation?
Speaking of numbers, as Frank and his co-researchers claim to have produced climate models for generic other planets that do not even exist, where have they got the necessary data to fill them up with?
It must be pretty detailed data because, look, Frank has somehow managed to create modeling graphs for the four most likely presumed scenarios for any planet’s long-term sustainability or civilizational collapse path, once intelligent life eventually appears on it:
Red line: co-evolving made-up trajectory of made-up planet’s made-up environmental state (a proxy for its made-up temperature, says Professor Frank)
The first model graph, labeled ‘Die-Off’, is the one that currently appears to apply to doomed old Planet Earth, at least in the view of Frank.
According to Commander Data, talking in another 2018 promotional interview with LiveScience:
In this scenario, the civilisation’s population skyrockets over a short period of time, and as the aliens guzzle energy and belch out greenhouse gases, the planet’s temperature spikes, too. (In this study, temperature was used to represent human-made impacts on the planet’s habitability via greenhouse gas pollution.)
The population peaks, then suddenly plummets as rising temperatures make survival harder and harder. The population eventually levels off, but with a fraction of the people who were around before. Imagine if seven out of 10 people you knew died quickly. It’s not clear a complex technological civilisation could survive that kind of change.
It probably could if they were all just civil servants.
Top image: AI-generated alien world via DreamStudio.ai
Read full post at Daily Sceptic
To parse Michaels Chrighton’s comments …
The famous Drake equation:
N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL
This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry.
The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we’re clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.”
As with the above folderol, if only one of the guesses happens to be zero then you have nothing – an answer that can be anywhere between nothing and infinity is not science or remotely scientifically useful.
Tauri excretum cerebrum vincit!
Who pays for this “science”?
Government grants, left-wing eco-groups, and left wing foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Getty Foundation (both funded by the wealth created from fossil fuels and run by descendants of the founders).