How will humankind end?
If you think that humanity will go on forever, that's a depressing question. It probably wouldn't be our struggling primate species if something could last forever.
We will likely be around for a while yet, pondering things. Why don't we hear from any other alien civilizations?
Any species that advances far enough to gain control of a planet and expand into space faces a similar set of questions in their continued survival. The Great Filter concept catches on. The Great Filter is related to the Fermi Paradox. The two are trying to give context to the situation.
If there are so many planets and possibilities for life to emerge, then where are all the aliens? As civilizations become more and more advanced, they face evolutionary hurdles. They collapse and are hard to detect.
Two researchers tackled these ideas in a new article. The authors are Michael Wong and Stuart Bartlett, and it was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Wong is a post-doctoral fellow at the Earth and Planets Laboratory at the Carnegie Institute for Science, and Bartlett is a Geological and Planetary Scientist at the California Institute of Technology.
The idea is that intelligent civilizations can realize their continued expansion is unsustainable and will lead to collapse, so they aim for a kind of homeostasis instead.
The authors want us to think of life as systems where mass and energy are used to produce functional information that life uses and transmits. The living system can survive if functional is present. Lifeforms evolve to use functional information better over time. Evolution is not steady. The authors write that life has become more complex due to transitions in the way it manages functional information. Being better at it is an advantage.
The idea expands to include cities, which are alive in a manner of speaking. In some ways, a city is a superagent composed of individual human agents similar to a multi-cellular organisms that is a superagent composed of individual cellular agents.
Consider a civilization that is one big city. We are not at that point on Earth, but we can see that possibility. Global civilizations are in the same position as lifeforms that go through evolutionary transitions that allow them to continue to use energy and information effectively and overcome barriers to survival.
The inventions of the printing press, telecommunication, computers and the internet have shaped and reshaped human society. Microbes use other energy sources, plants use sunlight, and predator eat flesh, just as lifeforms have evolved to use other energy sources. We've learned to use fossil fuels, we've developed nuclear energy, and we're expanding our use of renewable energy.
So far it's been good for humanity.
As a globe-bestriding civilization continues to grow, what happens? Cities may behave like lifeforms in some ways, but they are not. Their superlinearity is one of the ways they are different.
A linear trend is slower than a super linear trend. The easiest way to understand superlinearity is to look at a graph of three lines, one linear, and one sub linear.
There are many aspects of a city that are super linear. GDP, wages, crime, and disease are all super linear because they generate increasing returns with increasing size. There are different biological entities. According to the authors, there are many aspects of biological life scale. The total road surface, number of gas stations, and length of electrical lines are some of the aspects of cities that are sub linear.
Some aspects of a city are sub linear. Economies of scale work in our favor. The crux of the problem facing technological civilizations is that some things in our envisioned global city are super linear. The authors call it singularities.
The authors write about crises where population and energy demand tend to be constant in a finite amount of time. The energy needed to sustain growth is clashing with the energy needed to sustain expansion.
The solution to singularities is technological innovation. Singularities arise more often as a planetary civilization continues to grow, and must be avoided by ever more frequent innovations that delay the system's collapse.
As civilization becomes global, there is tension at the heart of it. Singularities can be overcome by resets or innovations. But what if the time between these singularities continues to shrink? At that point, the planetary civilization will face a crisis where the time scale becomes smaller than the innovation.
The planetary civilization is in trouble. The authors say that is why we don't hear from other civilizations. There are only two ways to get there.
There is one path that is collapsing. The Great Filter is kind of like the asymptotic burnout that the authors talk about. Every civilization that controls a planet eventually faces it. If there are other civilizations out there in space, many of them might collapse.
Others may not have. How did they avoid it? Homeostatic awakening.
A global civilization becomes aware of its situation in a homeostatic awakening. The civilization has a window of time to change a fundamental change to prioritize long-term well-being over growth.
It tells us why we don't hear from more advanced civilizations. The lack of signal doesn't mean they're not there, it means they've gone silent. They make themselves hard to detect.
The idea of the dataome is used by the authors in tracing a civilizations path. The dataome includes the external recording and processing of information, as well as the coevolution of those organisms atop of a collection of biological organisms. We are taking part in the continued development of the dataome.
The dataome emerged as societies transitioned away from hunter-gatherer status and as more energy became available. The emergence of a dataome leads to growth. We have seen that in our own history, and we are watching as our society continues to accelerate. We produce and consume more goods, and we want more energy. The climate can't handle continued growth, so we're headed for a singularity.
Will we reset? It is within our power to do so. The authors look at a society that has resisted expansion and prioritized other things.
Bhutan is a small kingdom between India and China. Bhutan's government doesn't bother with GDP, a measure that most nations use to gauge their progress and well-being. Bhutan maximizes theirGross National Happiness.
Bhutan resisted the quest for growth and economic supremacy. The authors don't claim that Bhutan's case is relevant to avoiding burnout. It seems that Bhutan is unlikely to reach any kind of technological singularity in the near-future.
There are examples of mini-awakenings where humans have realized they are heading for big trouble and have changed their trajectory. Ozone-depleting chemicals, WMDs, and the moratorium on whaling are examples. If we can live up to our climate change agreements, they will be in the same category.
This leads us back to the Fermi Paradox. Why haven't we seen definitive evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations in a universe that seems to be compatible with abiogenesis and the evolution of life leading to technological civilizations? There is an implicit assumption that the trajectory of progress can be traced back to the past.
Civilizations will continue to harness more energy and expand. The Kardashev Scale measures a civilization's technological advancement based on its energy consumption. In the Kardashev Scale, civilizations grow until they harness all the power of their star with massive engineering megastructures called Dyson Spheres. Once they harvest the energy of their solar system, they spread throughout the universe as a type III civilization.
The scale is simplistic and fun. It ignores the fact that evolution isn't linear and ignores the crises that singularities create.
The authors think thatType III may be hard to achieve. Alternatively, civilizations can either burn out or collapse.
There are other solutions to the Fermi Paradox that talk about technological advancement up the Kardashev Scale. Thinkers attach probabilities to the Drake Equation. This idea is different. It is inevitable that a civilization will come up against singularities, according to the authors.
Homeostatic civilizations will last longer than burnout civilizations if the authors are correct. The barrier will collapse if the civilizations slam into it.
The authors are presenting their ideas. There is no evidence yet that this idea is true.
This idea is sort of like a life-preserver for those of us who are interested in all things space related. Many of us grew up watching a version of Star Trek where humanity is more or less unified and we have gone out into space to meet our neighbours. It is a great and inspiring vision until it runs into things like the Great Filter and the Fermi Paradox.
Maybe there is hope. Our civilization might be able to see singularities coming and reorient itself towards homeostatic equilibrium.
It can seem unlikely to look at the world today. Humans are good at generating solutions. We might be able to overcome some of the singularities that are coming our way. Maybe we will figure it out one day. People say that growth is not possible. The comeback from space-knowledgeable people is that we can expand into space and save the health of the planet. We can have bases on the moon, Mars, and asteroids.
The paper's authors leave it to the rest of us to ponder about the future. They leave it to other researchers to explore and test their ideas.
It is important to know whether humanity is a universal trait in the universe.
The future of humanity is up in the air. Will our distant descendants be able to see the future? Can we create a global political system to deal with singularities? Who knows?
There is a melancholy aspect to both asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening. We will never meet the neighbours.
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