by Stephen Tucker, Daily Sceptic:
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.
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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:
