Our Earth is threatened by unprecedented global warming. Not really our Earth, actually. Rather, our civilization. Since the pre-industrial era, the global temperature has already risen by 1.1°C. In question, our addictionaddiction to fuels fossilsfossils. We consume more and more of it. With the consequence, the emission of greenhouse gases in theatmosphereatmosphere. And the threat of seeing our Planet become less and less hospitable. Until, if we do not act to prevent it, our Earth even becomes uninhabitable.
In a study currently being peer-reviewed by the journal Astrobiologytwo researchers — one from the University of Rome (Italy) and the other from Florida Institute of Technology (United States) — wonder if the climate crisis we are currently experiencing could not have affected other civilizations. Elsewhere, in our Universe, without even having been grappling with the demonsdemons fossil fuels.
Beware of residual heat from our energy consumption
Think about our good old light bulbs which overheated. The image reminds us that all energy consumption is accompanied by the production of a certain amount of heat. On Earth, for the moment, this residual heat does not contribute much to the rise in global temperature. But researchers argue that if our energy consumption – even renewable energy – continues to explode, the curve of waste heat production will increase exponentially. And the contribution of this heat to anthropogenic warming could reach one degree over the next century.
Humanity could soon detect planets transformed by aliens!
The question then is: how long would it take for an advanced civilization to reach the point at which it would render its home planet uninhabitable? Researchers have developed models based on the second law of thermodynamicsthermodynamics. More simply, they incorporated, in the calculation of the habitable zone of a starstaran additional source of heat. That resulting from a potential technological activity.
And then, they considered that an extraterrestrial civilization would evolve at a pace similar to ours, in its energy consumption — ours went from barely more than 5,500 terawatt hours (TWh) in 1800 to nearly 185,000 TWh in 2023 — and in its demographics, with growth in both accelerating over time.
Conclusion: the durationduration maximum life of one technospheretechnosphere — with an annual growth rate of about 1% over the entire period of interest — would be about 1,000 years. Unless said advanced civilization succeeds in implementing solutions that prevent it from making its planet uninhabitable: stellar shielding or the relocation of technological infrastructures into space. Aliens may have gotten to this point. In this case, we could detect their technosignatures. But on our Earth, we are not there. So perhaps it would be desirable to slow down our energy consumption a little?
