This assumes a lot of things about alien physiology, structure, and tolerances are the same as humans. It's not hard to imagine the possibility of a species arising that either is less affected by a greenhouse effect or at maybe exists in an environment where it doesn't happen.
That's not even getting into the possibility of different paths to energy production.
This is always a problem with any Fermi paradox thought experiment. We're extrapolating so much from a sample of 1 and we understand so little about even that one case.
The details don't really matter. What matters is that 1) a new source of energy is discovered which 2) disrupts an existing equilibrium which in turn 3) brings about ecosystem collapse faster than even intelligence can adapt. The exact mechanism by which this series of events plays out is irrelevant.
I agree the details don't matter, which is precisely why there's no reason to believe (2) or (3) is universal other than that it's our own experience.
You are taking our details and extrapolating them to a universal filter.
Most people die of old age. A very small number of people die of being hit by rocks falling from the sky. Only one of these is a broad filter for who survives into the next century that everyone has to go through, but if you only knew the life of one person you could not say with certainty which one it was.
That's true, except that it is plausible that any major new source of energy is going to disrupt the previously prevailing equilibrium somehow, and it will do so very rapidly on evolutionary time scales. So yes, I'm extrapolating from one data point. But I think it's a plausible extrapolation based on a plausible model of evolution and ecosystems in general. Call it a hypothesis. Nothing would please me more than to have it disproved by evidence.
> it is plausible that any major new source of energy is going to disrupt the previously prevailing equilibrium somehow
Why?
Anyways even if I grant that, we then get to ask why a change in equilibrium universally results in catastrophe? Certainly the weeds in my unkempt garden would disagree that the lack of equilibrium there is a bad thing.
To be honest even the hypothesis that where we are now was inevitable for us seems sketchy and unsupportable. What if we'd had a nuclear race instead of a space race? We actually found alternatives to fossil fuel long before we reached a crisis point.
Because releasing energy is invariably accompanied by change of some sort. If that energy is released as part of an intentional effort by a technological civilization, then that change is also going to be intentional. The entities releasing the energy are doing it in order to produce change. That's the whole point.
Note that the situation we are facing here on earth is actually not what you would expect from that dynamic. Our current climate change is not directly related to the changes we've unleashed with the industrial revolution. It's an ancillary side-effect, and a particularly annoying one. But even if we didn't have CO2 to worry about, sooner or later we would cause some other change that would disrupt the previously prevailing equilibrium. In fact, we've already done that in numerous smaller ways. Lots of species and non-technological civilizations have already gone extinct here on earth.
The fundamental problem is that industrial revolutions produce exponential growth, which is not sustainable. Sooner or later that growth has to stop. (Even an arbitrarily advanced civilization is constrained by the speed of light to grow at a maximum rate of N^2 in the long run.) So either we have to decide to stop it or the laws of physics will do it for us, and the former seems unlikely.
> why a change in equilibrium universally results in catastrophe?
It doesn't necessarily, though it is very likely to be a catastrophe for someone. In any major upheaval there will be winners and losers.
The reason I think it's likely is that there will always be a period where new technologies cause living standards to improve dramatically, and that induces techno-optimism, a belief that technology will always be able to solve any problem that happens to come down the pike. Techno-optimism will cause civilizations to go closer and closer to the edge of the existential precipice because the Malthusians warning about existential threats will always be empirically wrong until it's too late.
> We actually found alternatives to fossil fuel long before we reached a crisis point.
Yes, that's true. And it's quite possible that on a different trajectory it would have taken 1000 years or 10,000 years to reach the crisis point instead of just a few hundred. But what is killing us now is not CO2 per se, but rather techno-optimism and the prisoner's dilemma. No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living for the greater good of future generations. And that seems to me to be a universal dynamic.
But now we're not only relying on physical phenomena but on psychological ones and there lies the typical mind fallacy writ large. The prisoner's dilemma, technological overreach, etc are things characteristic of human brains but there's no reason to believe they're universal.
It's not even clear that those psychological factors are universal across human history, since we only really know much about a few thousand years of it.
But also, those articles aren't about facts, they're about books. Books that make an argument, maybe even a compelling one, but still just an argument. There's plenty of stuff in both those wikipedia articles about the rough edges around the ideas they present. In so far as they "prove" anything they only prove that these things are descriptive of the reality we perceive -- it takes a lot more to prove universality than mere observations of the nearby world.
Yep. I've been in a serious existential crisis over this for the last few years.
It's not like disaster is inevitable. We could cut carbon emissions before they destroy technological civilization, or maybe come up with a practical way to (re-)sequester the carbon we've emitted. But right now it is not looking particularly promising to me, and time is running out fast.
I think if you're that concerned about it, you should be working to solve it, this would surely be the antidote to your worries. Just writing a letter to your representatives would be a simple way to help.
Only if I thought that there was something my representative could do that would solve the problem. The reason I'm in existential despair is that the distance between what I think would need to be done to solve the problem and what can plausibly be done given the realities of our world is vast. Even if we cut emissions to zero tomorrow (which is obviously not going to happen) that would not solve the current problem. I think that if you look at things realistically, we have already passed the point of no return.
So what I am doing is searching for someone who can persuade me that I'm wrong and that there is a plausible path forward that does not involve societal collapse in the near future (by which I mean the next 100 years or so). When I find that person I'm going to put a lot of effort into trying to help them succeed. But so far I have not found them.
I'm also putting some effort into building a legacy (by which I mean a societal legacy, not a personal one) that our descendants could use to rebuild civilization once the planet settles into a new equilibrium. That will probably be at least a few thousand years from now, so this too is a real challenge.
I'm sorry that you are going through existential despair over the climate/energy problem. Existential despair sucks, regardless of cause.
I'm not sure that I'm the best person to persuade you that you are wrong, but I can at least share my perspective. I also don't see writing your representative as being all that helpful. On the other hand, as a physicist who's been working on and thinking about energy issues my entire life, I think that the sheer amount of available negentropy that we are ignoring makes it inevitable that someone will find a solution. There are other renewable energy sources out there other than wind, solar, geothermal, etc which are not even being talked about. One of these is evaporative convection energy (basically what powers hurricanes). It's literally an engine that runs on global warming; the more you use it the more it cools the Earth. There are other ideas as well out there, that one's just the one I'm working on. Someone's going to get it.
Some people get depressed because 'we as a society can't work together to solve this problem'. I don't look at things that way. I see it more like when a customer or standard specifies that you have to use a particular library in your code that is maybe not your favorite. You can gripe and moan and try to get them to change it, but in the end that's the spec. And society's spec for a solution is an energy technology that 1) doesn't make CO2/global warming 2) is cheaper enough than existing fossil tech that it will displace it and 3) actually works. Most existing solutions don't meet 2 and most drawing board solutions don't meet 3. But its far from an impossible spec.
Trying to change someone's weltanshauung is too big for a single post, but if you are interested in a different viewpoint, my email's in profile. Either way, I hope that hope finds you again.
> I think that the sheer amount of available negentropy that we are ignoring makes it inevitable that someone will find a solution
The problem is that negentropy is not the limiting factor. Obviously solutions exist for long-term sustainable energy sources. We even know what they are: Solar. Wind. Batteries. The limiting factor is not knowledge nor negentropy, it's socio-political. We (i.e. pretty much the whole planet) have to implement a solution before the climate changes to the point where there are large-scale planet-wide crop failures. That is the part I am not optimistic about. I don't think our current socio-political structure can handle a global famine, and it also doesn't seem to be capable of allocating the economic sacrifice needed to avoid one.
The thing that scares me most is that the rate of change in the climate is much much faster than I ever expected it to be. Twelve years ago my wife and I moved from LA to SF thinking that would be enough to escape the worst effects. But just in those twelve years I've seen dramatic changes in the climate here. We've gone from reliably wet winters to unprecedented drought and heat in just over a decade. That scares the holy bejesus out of me because if you extrapolate that rate of change into the future we're looking at a very real possibility of global famine before I die, and I'm not that young.
The other thing that scares me is the melting permafrost and concomitant release of methane. That is a genie that will not go easily back into its bottle. (That is the reason I say that even cutting emissions to zero tomorrow will not solve the problem. The permafrost melting seems irreversible to me at this point.)
That's not even getting into the possibility of different paths to energy production.
This is always a problem with any Fermi paradox thought experiment. We're extrapolating so much from a sample of 1 and we understand so little about even that one case.