Advanced civilizations can be destined for extinction or stagnation.
Why, to our knowledge, have aliens never visited Earth? Scientists have
been baffled by this mystery for many years, but two researchers have
proposed an unsettling theory: It's possible that advanced civilizations are
destined to either stagnate or perish before they get a chance.
According to the new theory, space-faring civilizations ultimately reach a
crisis point when scientific advancement can no longer keep up with the need
for energy as they expand in size and technical sophistication. The next
step is collapse. The only other option, according to the researchers, is to
reject a concept of "unyielding expansion" in favor of preserving
equilibrium, but this comes at the expense of a civilization's capacity to
spread across the stars.
The argument, which was written on May 4 and published in the journal
Royal Society Open Science, seeks to resolve the Fermi paradox. The paradox highlights the
discrepancy between the vast scope and age of the universe, two factors that
suggest the universe should be teeming with advanced alien life, and the
lack of evidence that extraterrestrials exist anywhere in sight. It takes
its name from the casual lunchtime musings of Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Enrico Fermi. "Well, where are you all?" It is believed that Fermi
said.
The authors of the current study claim to have the solution.
Astrobiologists Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution for Science and
Stuart Bartlett of the California Institute of Technology wrote in the study
that civilizations are difficult to detect remotely because they "either
collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritizing homeostasis, a
state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal." The apparent lack of
[galactic-wide] civilizations would be compatible with either conclusion,
homeostatic awakening or civilization collapse.
The two looked into studies of cities' "superlinear" expansion to arrive at
their theory. According to these research, cities grow exponentially in size
and energy demand as their people rise, ultimately reaching crisis points
known as singularities that induce sharp drops in growth before an even more
abrupt, perhaps civilization-ending collapse.
"We believe that a planetary society would encounter a 'asymptotic
burnout,' an ultimate crisis where the singularity-interval time scale
becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation,' once it evolves into a
state that can be defined as one virtually connected global city," they
said.
According to the researchers, it would be simple for mankind to identify
these near-collapse civilizations since they would be wasting a lot of
energy in "wildly unsustainable" ways. This raises the prospect that many of
humanity's early finds of alien life may be of the clever but unwise
variety, according to the researchers.
According to the researchers, civilizations might experience a "homeostatic
awakening" that would refocus their production away from unrestricted
progress across the stars and toward development that emphasizes social
well-being, equitable, sustainable growth, and harmony with the environment.
While such civilizations would not entirely give up on space travel, they
wouldn't grow to a point where contact with Earth would be likely.
The researchers mention a few of humanity's "mini-awakenings" that
addressed world crises on Earth, including the 1982 international whaling
moratorium, the reduction of the world's nuclear arsenal from 70,000 to
under 14,000 warheads, and the halting of the once-growing ozone hole by
prohibiting emissions of chlorofluorocarbons.
The researchers emphasize that their proposal is only a hypothesis and that
it is meant to "provoke discussion, reflection, and future investigation."
It is based on the observation of principles that appear to regulate life on
Earth.
Their hypothesis joins a plethora of other scientific and popular
hypotheses on why we haven't established direct contact with
extraterrestrial visitors. They include the enormous practical difficulties
posed by interstellar travel, the possibility that extraterrestrials are in
fact paying a covert visit, or the possibility that extraterrestrials
arrived on Earth too early (or humans too early) in the history of the
cosmos for direct contact.
Another theory, presented on April 4 in
The Astrophysics Journal, contends that due to the vastness of the universe, it may take up to
400,000 years for a signal from one advanced species to reach another. This
timeframe is much longer than the relatively short time humans have had to
observe the sky.
