New simulations suggest that an advanced alien civilization could take less than 1,000 years to destroy its own planet due to climate change, even if it relies solely on renewable energy.
When astrophysicists simulated the rise and fall of alien civilizations, they found that if a civilization experienced exponential technological growth and energy consumption, it would have less than 1,000 years before the alien planet became too hot to survive. still be habitable.
This would be true even for renewable energy sources, due to the inevitable leakages in the form of heat, as predicted by the laws of thermodynamics.
While astrophysicists wanted to understand the implications for life beyond our planet, their study was initially inspired by humans’ use of energy, which has grown exponentially since the 1800s.
In 2023, humans used about 180,000 terawatt-hours (TWh), which is about the same amount of energy hitting Earth from the Sun at any given time.
Finding life in other parts of the Cosmos, much more difficult
Much of this energy is produced by gas and coal, which are heating the planet at an unsustainable rate. But even if all this energy were created from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, humanity would continue to grow and therefore continue to need more energy, he writes.
“But is it sustainable over a long period of time?” asked Manasvi Lingam, an astrophysicist at Florida Tech and co-author of the study.
Lingam and his co-author Amedeo Balbi, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Tor Vergata University in Rome, were interested in applying the second law of thermodynamics to this problem.
This law says that there is no such thing as a perfect energy system, where all the energy created is used efficiently; some energy must always escape from the system. This escaped energy will do that over time.
An exponential power consumption
A build-up of energy leakage, even from green energy, will eventually overheat any planet to the point where it will no longer be habitable.
If energy levels are not reduced, it could take less than 1,000 years for energy production to begin, the team found.
For astrobiologists, this 1,000-year limit also makes it much more difficult to find life elsewhere in the cosmos. After all, 1,000 years is a blink of an eye in cosmic terms, with planets like Earth taking hundreds of millions of years to become habitable in the first place.
