They’re not making the point that “all civilizations will end because of this”. The more interesting and credible point they’re making is that 1,000 years of energy consumption growth rates at our speed must inevitably, even using 100% renewables, cook the planet. They’re not saying “we can’t beat climate change under any circumstances”, they’re saying (if I have understood them) that the way to do it is at least some amount of degrowth, which is quite reasonable.
You would think some alien species would figure out a way to make sure the worst individuals aren’t put in charge of production and energy generation, as opposed to how us humans apparently have evolved to do.
If you take a long term view of things you could just not do the thing that cooks the planet until you figure out a technological solution for it, instead of going head first for it because that’s the most profitable thing to do this quarter.
If you take a long term view of things
This is probably why they had to use aliens for the hypothetical scenario.
Maybe every time sapient life manages to evolve to dominate a planet, being selfish pricks like us is the only way their species was able to survive to get to that point, so they always end up destroying themselves. Would explain the Fermi paradox.
I feel this is a very anthropocentric view of things, projecting our own failings (some of which are coded in our genes) and assuming they’re some kind of universal law of nature.
It’s basically assuming that somehow every intelligent species would choose capitalism as their organising principle, something we’ve only ‘decided’ on 200 years ago.
There’s also the possibility that a species managed to live more in harmony with nature and just never made it off the planet. The point is that nobody seems to have been able to create an interplanetary civilization in the observable universe.
AI data centers go brrrrr
It also seems to me that the circumstances implied don’t seem the most likely? Like, we’re working on space exploration and development right now, it’s still early stages, but given another thousand years it would be strange for it to not go anywhere. It’s not even like we’d need to stop building new energy using things in a few hundred years (which, given the current trends in population growth, we might I suppose), we literally just have to spread the things out rather than just piling more and more onto a single planet.
The literal scenario should be less emphasized than the subtler point that degrowth is a far more direct way to address climate change than any specific green (or greenwashed) technological advance, since consumption itself (merely using that amount of energy, regardless of its sources) is enough to destroy our habitat.
The issue there is the cause and timescale. Waste heat from energy use isn’t what is causing our current climate change, it’s the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on the energy absorbed from sunlight. They’re related in that the greenhouse gas emissions are generally waste products too, but they’re different physical problems that seem equivalent because they have same ultimate consequence, so they shouldn’t be taken as having identical solutions. Not that degrowth wouldn’t be a way to solve our current issues too, but it’s not the only way to, and the point where it becomes such because we reach the physical limits of the planet is a long way off. In the meantime, it has a lot of downsides to consider vs the various other ways to deal with the current problem.
I wonder how much energy we can get in a space station by having water carry waste heat to the power plant? Or if that would just cook the station?
Not my forte
What??
Okay, first thing to realize. All large power is steam power. It’s just a matter of different ways to heat the water and propel the turbine inside the generator. Space is really bad at dispersing heat. To the point where the problem with space stations and ships hasn’t been how to keep them warm, it’s how to keep them cool. We also already know we can pump heat around with water. So I’m wondering if it’s possible to off world the hottest parts of human development and then use the heat generated as a recycled energy source for the space stations we would house that infrastructure in.
This is based on waste heat, for anyone that didn’t read the article. Our current problem is actually a different, more avoidable one.
The study also assumes they just keep growing and can’t decide to stop. You may or may not find that reasonable.
assumes they just keep growing and can’t decide to stop
That sounds like anti-spiral talk to me
And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH
Isn’t this a major plot point in Larry Niven’s Ringworld in 1970?
I don’t exactly remember now, but the ring-building aliens ran out of space on their local planets, one way or another.
It would make sense. In the 70’s in particular people though fusion reactors were right around the corner, and were worried about the waste heat from those.
it involves the Pierson’s Puppeteers
It is yes!
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Cute, but no. They used a theoretical model, not a large behavioural simulation. You could probably run their calculations on a TI-83.
The work addresses the thorny problem of waste heat. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, a small amount of heat will always be released into the planet’s atmosphere no matter what energy source we use — be it nuclear, solar, or wind — because no energy system is 100 percent efficient.
“You can think of it like a leaky bathtub,” study coauthor Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology, told LiveScience. A small leak in a bathtub that’s barely filled doesn’t let out a lot of water. But as the tub continues to get filled — and our energy demands grow — that tiny leak can flood the whole house, Lingam explained.
I thought the problem was that CO2 was acting like a blanket trapping in all the heat. Is this “heat leaking” really a problem? If so, what about solar cells then?
Nothing we do is 100% efficient, everything produces heat - CPUs pretty much make all their energy into heat
Heat can’t travel good in a vacuum. So it can only radiate of, which isn’t really effective
So just by using all our infrastructure, we would cook ourselves in there future.
The CO2 blanket only accelerates it much more
Thank you for explaining. That was the context I was missing.
Is this “heat leaking” really a problem?
Not yet. We’d need another century or two of energy consumption growth before it becomes really significant. The CO2 thing is actually very specific to our current way of generating power and avoidable - they conflated it a bit in the headline, probably for clicks.
Fundamentally, economic growth on Earth (probably, barring new physics) can’t continue forever. It’s a finite lump of matter, there’s finite ways of arranging it, and one or more arrangements will be the best while still respecting things like thermodynamics. Once we get there, there’s nothing to improve.
Heat exchangers have >100% efficiency.
We just need to use those to move the extra heat outside the environment.Someone gets it lol
The way they have >100% efficiency is if you are trying to increase the temperature, you can create new heat (which is extremely easy and can be done with essentially 100% efficiency) or you can move heat from elsewhere (creating new heat in the process as well, so it ends up being over 100% efficiency).
These incredibly high efficiency rates come from interpreting heat as success. It’s very easy to add heat to a system. It’s very hard to get rid of it.
Any system that moves heat from one area to another must necessarily produce more heat as well.
When your refrigerator cools your food, it vents hot air, adding more heat to the outside world than it removed from inside itself.
This shouldn’t be downvoted; it’s a good point. I actually do expect that in a distant future that’s positive, it would make sense to add artificial heat exchangers to the Earth.
The trick is that vacuum is a really good insulator, and theoretical maximum heat pump efficiency sinks down to “just” 100% gradually as the temperature gap gets larger. In order to move more heat, you have to make the heat exchangers pointed at the night sky hotter, so at some point you’re bound to get diminishing returns.
Nothing in the universe has an efficiency over 100%.
Depends how you define it. Heat exchangers do, because it’s defined for them in terms of heat moved per heat generated. All conservation laws are still respected.
Sabine explains it well
eh by their very nature they’re basing all these civilisations on our template
fucking amateur mistake.
The premise is that all energy use increases entropy over time, and eventually a planetary civilization will use so much energy that the planet itself will get cooked. As a thermodynamic inevitability.
But if it’s a super advanced civilization with advanced technology, Why can’t the civilization cool the planet by dumping waste heat into stuff that they then launch into space?
Unfortunately, the problem isn’t scientists believing in climate change. Its high school dropouts who think anything that doesn’t fit in a preschool popup book is fake.
Hmmm. Could they not in theory reduce their co2 levels so their planet can radiate the heat more and more into outer space?
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
Firstly, Reducing CO2 levels requires a small amount of sacrifice and minor inconveniences; both of which, while they can be overcome with relative ease are too much to ask.
Secondly, it would also reduce, and possibly redistribute, the net worth of people who have more than enough for multiple lifetimes, and that just wouldn’t be right.
So as you can see, there really isn’t anything that can be done.
Eat the rich.
I didn’t mean in our planet.
I meant, let’s say an alien civilization has great tech, but they use a lot of energy and thereby a lot of excess heat. Could they not lower their co2 levels and possibly even dim the sun a little to balance things out? As in using a Dyson swarm
They’d lose more in solar potential than heat they’d save by blocking the sun - sunlight is a very useful form of energy, and you don’t want the planet getting too cold either. Engineering the heat balance by changing the atmosphere, the ground or adding devoted heat exchangers like were discussed elsewhere would help a bit, but not infinitely.
If they want to keep building more, they need to go to space, and yeah, that leads to a Dyson swarm pretty fast. And then on to other stars. In the really long term there’s more than enough space and matter for one intelligent species; the main currency is time until the universe ends.
Alien civilisations will have shareholders too.
Covid taught me that humanity will never work together to solve the climate crisis. I’m 100% convinced we’re doomed.
if they kept up similar rates of growing energy consumption to our own.
…but what if aliens weren’t as stupid as humans and didn’t do this?
Sounds biased.
