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?
One possible answer might be that, once all intelligent civilisations reach a certain point of advancement, they stumble across the so-called ‘Great Filter’, a developmental obstacle which 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 nuclear war – now, it is increasingly deemed to be climate change, a phenomenon no cutting-edge industrial civilisation 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 his technology, namely nuclear bombs and fossil fuels.
The Misanthropocene Era
As the distinctly Malthusian Frank said in a promotional 2018 interview with Scientific American: “My argument is that Anthropocenes may be generic from an astrobiological perspective: what we’re experiencing now may be the sort of transition that everybody goes through, throughout the Universe.”
If Anthropocenes (or Alienthropocenes) are indeed “generic”, then doesn’t that mean they can potentially be modelled? Possibly so. According to Professor Frank (not to be confused with The Simpsons’ Professor Frink), “a civilisation, to some degree, is just a mechanism for transforming energy on a planetary surface”, a statement so utterly reductive in its nature it really ought to be the governing motto of the UN or EU these days.
Being something of a UFO buff myself, I have long been of the personal opinion that any actual aliens mankind should ever encounter will most likely turn out to be totally, well, alien in their nature, so much so we might not even be able to recognise them as being actual animate life-forms at all, a bit like most normal people feel when looking at Rachel Reeves. Professor Frank, though, disagrees, being apparently so in thrall to the currently dominant technocratic myth of Homo Statisticus (have you ever met anyone with 2.4 actual children?) that he feels it plausible to extend its basic pattern out across the entire Universe:
Well, just as we understand planetary climates pretty well, we can use the basic, fundamental tenets of life to guide us, too. Organisms are born, some of them reproduce, and they die. Living things consume energy and they excrete waste. That should be true even if they’re made of silicon or whatever. The next step is to incorporate principles of population biology, in which the idea of ‘carrying capacity’ — the number of organisms that can be sustainably supported by the local environment — is very important. This approach can also be mathematically applied to the state of a planet. So in our modelling work we’ve got an equation for how the planet is changing and an equation for how the population is changing. What ties them together is the predictable result that as environmental conditions on a planet get worse, the total carrying capacity goes down. A civilisation with a population of n will use the resources of its planet to increase n, but at the same time, by using those resources, it tends to degrade the planet’s environment.
But what if some aliens are incorporeal in nature, being made of gases, for instance? What if they therefore don’t actually need to eat or excrete at all? What if some of them are made from – or perhaps breathe – CO2? Or what if they are extremophiles (i.e., lovers of extreme climates) and therefore very high temperatures are actually good for some ETs’ health, not bad for it? Wouldn’t climate change akin to the kind Frank currently warns is taking place here on Earth make them thrive? Plus, what atmospheric gases will there even be to be boosted or dissipated by hypothetical industrial activity on other planets in the first place? Global warming may not even be chemically possible on Planet Fictional at all. These objections are all pretty obvious, and I do hope Professor Frank addresses them in his actual book (which I haven’t read), because if he hasn’t, it may be in danger of being interpreted by the ungenerous-minded as a work of mere sci-fi with numbers in it.
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 which do not even actually 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 modelling graphs for the four presumed most likely scenarios for any planet’s long-term sustainability or civilisational 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, labelled ‘Die-Off’, is the one which 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.
Chatting SHIT?
Elsewhere, I have developed an innovative but speculative data-based concept of my own that I sincerely hope one day takes off. It is known by the acronym SHIT – or Statistics Having Imaginary Truth, and I coined it to denote the way most economists appear to just make up their forecasts and predictions out of thin air, producing ‘authoritative’ figures from nowhere like fiscal rabbits from a monetary hat. I write this present piece in the days immediately following Jeremy Hunt’s latest budget, by the way.
Although I tend to accept Earth is getting somewhat warmer these days (albeit nowhere near enough to destroy all human life upon it, or whatever Al Gore is currently standing naked in the street and yelling out loud to gullible passersby), I am nonetheless becoming increasingly inclined to consider long-term climate forecasts for our planet as increasingly becoming a complete and utter shower of SHIT likewise. If so, then how much more SHITtier must data-based climate models for other planets – planets which, I here repeat once again, and in italics for extra emphasis this time, do not even exist – be?
A further question must also be asked: where precisely did Frank get the data for the models and graphs reproduced in his 2018 book and articles from, exactly? According to what he said in his interviews, it was from prior studies made of Easter Island/Rapa Nui, the now-lifeless barren ocean island where, once upon a time, or so the standard promulgated narrative goes, foolish humans lived sustainably and well until, in a short-sighted fit of greed, they stupidly chopped down all the place’s trees, causing a drought and then being left with neither wood for fuel nor tasty arboreal produce to eat any more, thus dying off en masse. But was this really true?
Easter Egg-stinction Event
According to Professor Frank and his colleagues:
Easter Island presents a particularly useful example for our own purposes since it is often taken as a lesson for global sustainability. Many studies indicate that Easter Island’s inhabitants depleted their resources, leading to starvation and termination of the island’s civilisation.
Except that, “many studies” of another kind say this isn’t what actually happened there at all; in the opinion of some revisionist modern scholars, the standard story of Easter Island’s downfall and depopulation is actually a modern-day green myth designed to promulgate a cautionary warning about what will happen to modern-day industrialised Western civilisations if, like the imprudent old Easter Islanders, we too are rash enough to use up all our resources, destroy our local environment or help bring about acts of needless climate change.
The key 2021 paper purporting to demonstrate that this now famous old popular narrative is indeed just a myth contains much data and many graphs of a technical nature which, as far as this mere layman knows, may one day turn out to be just so much SHIT too. However, if the Easter Island Extinction narrative really was just an overblown environmentalist fable created to groom Greta Thunberg into existence, it would appear that the primary data Professor Frank says he and his colleagues based his models of shared off-Earth exoplanetary collapse on in his 2018 book were pure SHIT themselves, were they not?
There Is No Planet B
If Frank’s book was just marketed as a fun hypothetical thought-exercise, then I would find it wholly unobjectionable – it’s good for scientists to be free-thinkers. But he appears to have been promoting it as a spur to persuading politicians to implement actual real-world ‘climate-friendly’ policy objectives, and then being treated seriously in this aim by the mainstream scientific press. Therefore, you do have to ask: are such pop-science studies as Frank’s 2018 book, being aimed primarily at a lay-audience who probably know no better, really intended to function more as green-friendly political agitprop than as genuine science as such?
To end his LiveScience interview, Professor Frank asks his readers a question, the answer to which is clearly supposed to be obvious:
Across cosmic space and time, you’re going to have winners — who managed to see what was going on [i.e., a self-inflicted climate crisis] and figure out a path through it — and losers, who just couldn’t get their act together and their civilisation fell by the wayside. The question is, which category do we want to be in?
The winners! The winners! I want to be on the side of the winners! Except that, if the West does indeed compliantly tear up its whole current dirty – yet conveniently cheap, reliable and efficient – energy infrastructure to save going the way of the supposed Easter Island idiots, who will the actual winners on our planet be? The Chinese, Russians and others, who will quite happily go on burning coal and oil while we shiver in abject poverty and they quite happily extend their autocratic tentacles across the globe, enabled to dominate us militarily, economically and industrially by piles and piles of dubious pseudo-scientific SHIT being promulgated by a caste of weird, West-ruling cultists who honestly expect to be taken seriously when they go around shouting mad things like “Climate change killed off all the imaginary aliens, so junk your gas-fires now or DIE IMMEDIATELY!!” to ostensibly reliable, august and disinfo-slaying outlets like Scientific American and LiveScience.
Perhaps a sinister race of non-human alien beings do indeed walk among us after all – they’re called the governing class.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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In summary, the Drake equation variables are such that it produces whatever outcome you wish it to. On the one hand there are/have been an infinite number of civilisations in the Universe (let alone our Galaxy with a ‘mere’ 100bn stars), on the other, we are alone. To think this all came about because in 1950, Fermi asked Teller and others the innocent question: “Where is everybody?”
Why would we expect to be able to detect life on other planets? Spectra of CO2 and other gasses in atmospheres as the planets pass in front of their suns (relative to us)? Do we see any pattern in the detected composition of exo-planet atmospheres? Say, the older it is the more (or less) CO2? Are there other passive signals we should be looking for? Can we monitor exo-planets’ atmospheres and watch them change as their inhabitants trash their planets (or clean up afterwards)?
For detecting intelligent life, I understand we’re scanning for directed or stray radio signals. Directed radio would include the publicity stunt mentioned in yesterday’s DS. Stray radio signals are another matter. We (mankind) have distinctly reduced the raw power we pump into broadcast TV signals (for example much TV is now delivered over fibre optic or copper cable) and increased the use of low-power local radio signals (cellular phones and WiFi) – so our stray radio emissions (which are wasted energy) have increased and then reduced over just about 100 years. This means there’s a ‘shell’ of radio ‘noise’ expanding away from the Earth at the speed of radio (light) – as this shell passes through an alien solar system it might just be detectable for that brief 100 years or so before fading into the background noise again. If there’s a civilisation based in that solar system it needs to be at a stage when it thinks radio is important and not, say, at a Medieval or smart-phone equivalent or post industrial eco-freak wholemeal sandal wearing stage. Oh, and it needs to be curious enough to wonder ‘Where is everybody?’. Unfortunately, the only aliens we’re likely to be detected by and communicate with are those who still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Good article from nine days ago in Britannica regarding the Fermi paradox and the work of SETI (search for extra terrestrial intelligence) and its exceedingly low volume of work. I was particularly struck by a quote from an American astronomer who said, “considering the vast number of stars, radio frequencies and other signal parameters, deducing if extraterrestrial intelligence exists from the results of small scale SETI projects is like deducing whether fish exist by dipping a glass into the ocean.” A good analogy, I thought.
Scientists are very good at telling us what doesn’t exist and cannot happen only to be disproved at a later point.
Some people would claim the Earth is the only place where evil exists resulting from an ill-advised experiment with creation. It is isolated by an electrical envelope so that it cannot contaminate the other spheres but is maintained to allow higher beings to experience life in the grossest material realm.
Sounds quite far-out but explains why we’re not encountering other life in a way that cannot be used for political leverage.
2.4 children? That’s mean.
It is impossible to accurately model climate into the future. Many of the parameters are not well understood or are unknown altogether. There are so many variables like atmosphere, clouds, oceans, water vapour, etc etc and they are all non-linear. Climate is chaotic as Mckitrick, an expert in statistical analysis states in “Climate Dynamics”. The climate system exists to distribute heat about the globe and is the earths thermostat. IPCC make the mistake of assuming CO2 will add to that because they assume the system is linear. —-A very interesting book on this is “The Essence of Chaos” Edward Lorenz. ——However I don’t want to make the mistake of getting into Punch and Judy scientific arguments, because while we are all arguing about science, the western governments are all getting on with the politics based on their “official science” which is mostly modelling. But as Lorenz and Mckitrick and many others point out, models are not science and are not evidence of anything, no matter what the BBC might tell you on the 6 O’clock News.
Much as I enjoy Steven Tucker’s writing on this occasion I’ll pass. I enjoy a bit of comedy but given the state of the world today this piece is not worth the effort.
I am glad to see someone is discussing the topic with the seriousness it deserves.
Professor Frank seems incapable of seeing anything broader than anthropogenic induced climate change supposedly caused by small changes in Carbon Dioxide . In other words another grubby scientific prostitute or grifter following the current collectivist thing.
What does ‘worse’ mean and how much ? why is everthing seen as temperature rise ? In the 70s when I was at Uni, the bogeyman was the impending ice age. Why are there not a set of graphs with Falling Planetary temperatures . And why might temperature increase be bad ? Why might any life wish to or be forced to live in cities as a civilisation ? Only humans do on this planet and more than 99% of othere life does not. Yet everything uses the resources of the planet including other lifeforms. It has an effect on the planet but does it enhance or degrade it ? The environment is the environment – can it be said to be good or bad and therefore degraded ?
One thing is for sure – Nothing is perfectly stable without continuous change of any kind. Life forms must evolve to deal with change and if the like of Frank could be time travelled into the last glacial era or the cretaceous era he might find it less comfortable that the prent time for which he is suited.
I was watching a video on YouTube about looking at ice core samples to see what the climate was about 1000 years ago. Very briefly they showed a chart of the CO2 levels in the atmosphere about 1000AD and it was about 300ppm. I thought we had had 200ppm in the pre-industrial era (whatever that means) and it is only about 380ppm now!