New ‘burnout’ theory explains why aliens are avoiding Earth
source link: https://thenextweb.com/news/why-have-aliens-never-visited-earth-scientists-suspect-asympotic-burnout
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
New ‘burnout’ theory explains why aliens are avoiding Earth
Blame the singularities
In 1950, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi asked a question that torments astronomers to this day:
“Where is everybody?”
His query has been immortalized in the Fermi paradox.
The theory contends that there’s a conflict between the apparent absence of aliens and the probability that they exist.
Proponents note that the universe is about three times older than our solar system, and contains more than a billion trillion stars. If stoopid humans can travel to the moon, why haven’t intelligent extraterrestrials paid us a visit?
A pair of astrobiologists this week proposed an answer: alien civilizations get so advanced and large that they can’t handle interstellar travel.
Dr Michael Wong, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Dr Stuart Bartlett, of the California Institute of Technology, describe this crisis as “asymptotic burnout.”
Societies reach this point when their energy demands become unsustainable. They then face a stark choice:
“Civilizations either collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritizing homeostasis, a state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal, making them difficult to detect remotely,” the scientists hypothesize in Royal Society Open Science.
Planetary civilizations can divert these catastrophes through technological resets — but this merely delays the inevitable.
The growth leads to singularities (dashed vertical lines) that must be averted by continuous innovation. Credit: Wong and Bartlett
Aliens civilizations that are near to burnout could be the easiest to detect.
“They would be altering their environments and dissipating free energy in a wildly unsustainable manner, [producing] fluctuations on the planetary scale that exhibit the largest signal-to-noise,” say the study authors.
“This presents the possibility that a good many of humanity’s initial detections of extraterrestrial life may be of the intelligent, though not yet wise, kind. “
Wong and Bartlett admit that their hypothesis has a significant shortcoming: there isn’t any real evidence for the idea.
Their theory merely draws on laws of life on Earth, which may not apply to other planets.
Perhaps the first victim of asymptotic burnout will be humanity.
Recommend
-
61
Flat Earth Theory Generator
-
7
A year into the pandemic, game developers reflect on burnout, mental health and avoiding crunch(The Washington Post illustration; iStock)By
-
6
New AI-based theory explains your weird dreams Dreams are weird. According to a new theory, that's what makes them useful. 21 May, 2021 Loading your audio a...
-
4
Sponsored by Cockroach Labs What you build and where it takes you shouldn't be limited by your database. CockroachDB helps developers build and scale apps with fewer obstacles, more freedom, and greater efficiency. So you can...
-
4
Sponsored by Cockroach Labs What you build and where it takes you shouldn't be limited by your database. CockroachDB helps developers build and scale apps with fewer obstacles, more freedom, and greater efficiency. So you can...
-
1
Avoiding analyst burnout: how to streamline ad hoc requests Feb 1, 2022 by The Metabase Team The goal of business intelligence is to give stakeholders and strategists the information...
-
0
These astronomers want to tell aliens where Earth is — and not everyone is happy about it...
-
4
Earth’s Core Is Leaking, And Scientists Finally Have a Theory WhyThe core is leaking helium-3, a rare element that is a possible fuel for nuclear fusion and may be a key to the origin of life. ...
-
6
Earth Could Soon Be More Detectable by Aliens, Study SaysResearchers say advancements like 5G could soon raise Earth's radio profile to eavesdropping aliens. May 9, 2023, 1:00pm
-
2
Transcript Shane Hastie: Good day folks, this is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast. Today I'm sitting down with Dr. Laura Maguire. Laura is a specialist in cognitive systems engineering. Laura, welcome. Thanks...
About Joyk
Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK