An analysis from researchers has argued that nothing and no one — will have been able to prevent the world from eventually overheating by as much as 16 degrees Celsius (29° Fahrenheit) within some thousand years here, simply due to the exponential growth of human energy use and the waste heat into which it is transformed. That last one has far-reaching implications for not only the hunt for ET but also for techno-civilization life spans in general.
Rising Upward Waste Heat
The research reports that as civilizations become more technologically advanced, their energy needs increase at an ever-accelerating rate, generating proportionally greater amounts of waste heat. This waste heat, produced by all energy creation and use, may eventually exceed the ability of our atmosphere to return itself to normal conditions — heading toward global warming so extensive as to make human life uninhabitable on earth.
They used Earth as a model, observing that “same of the life energy global consumption,” it is installed on an exponential growth curve from 5,653 (TWh) in 1800 to 183,230 TWh in2023 following analogous, effort living population boom. If the price of this meta-energy (to use Terence McKenna’s term) goes down by only 1% each year, then according to the Kardashev scale, it would take around 300 years for that civilization to completely weaponize every usable Joule in their galaxy!
What It Means for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
The results of the study have important consequences for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and our understanding of how extraterrestrial civilizations develop.
As the researchers put it, waste heat just might prove to be a big deal in Earth’s future and when we consider any technological species elsewhere in the cosmos on planets around other stars. This limitation may then affect our strategies for the exploration of more advanced lives elsewhere in the universe, and how we value the results of such searches.
The researchers also argue that any means around this, such as moving tech infrastructure to another planet or lowering energy use would be the checks from these other advanced civilizations. This in turn, might partially explain the Fermi paradox — with so many potentially habitable planets out there, how come we are not already swimming under a bustling sea of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations?
Conclusion
The work makes for sobering news for the long-term sustainability of technology-based civilizations in general, both here on Earth and potentially elsewhere in the cosmos. While mankind continues to explore the limits of energy consumption and technological growth, a new challenge now looms of an unprecedented scale; waste heat, which threatens to make Earth unlivable. This work has implications not only for our own destiny, but also on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence urging us to reconsider what it is we should be looking for when we think about where we sit in the grand scheme of things.
