And why other civilizations might already have suffered the same fate.
Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science newsHumanity’s impact on the climate is clear and devastating. Over the last two hundred years or so, we have pumped enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to significantly increase its temperature and raise the frightening prospect of much of the Earth becoming uninhabitable.
For the moment, the amount of heat humans generate in this way is tiny compared to the energy from the Sun. But if our energy consumption continues to grow at exponential rates, an important question is when this will eventually rival solar heating and how it will impact the habitability of the Earth.
“We demonstrate that the loss of habitable conditions on such terrestrial planets may be expected to occur on timescales of ≲ 1000 years,” they say. Humanity is already two hundred years into this process following the Industrial Revolution. However, Balbi and Lingam point out that solar panels absorb light that would otherwise be reflected back into space. And so this process inevitably injects extra heat into the environment.Balbi and Lingam consider three ways this might play out. In the first, waste energy leads to runaway heating that effectively cooks the planet and drives humanity to extinction. The result is self-destruction through unchecked growth.
Other civilizations will face the same scenario and that will have important implications for our ability to find and contact them — the famous Fermi paradox. Balbi and Lingam suggest that if most technological species grow until they cook their own planets, they may never reach a stage where they’re around long enough for us to detect them.
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