Alien Civilizations Might Suffer Similar Fate as Easter Island
Climate change and unrestrained population growth may be two of humanity’s greatest threats. But according to a recent paper published by astrophysicist Adam Frank, it’s probably a pretty common problem experienced by other civilizations throughout the universe.
Depending on who you talk to, there may or may not be evidence for the existence of extraterrestials, but even if we haven’t directly located them, chances are pretty high they’re out there. And if they’re anything like us, they’ve probably faced negative environmental feedback from the intensive energy use burgeoning civilizations put on their planet.
Using a more terrestrial example, Frank and his colleagues looked at the ancient civilization that once inhabited Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island – a society often examined as a lesson in sustainability.
There’s evidence that the inhabitants of Easter Island, once a thriving civilization, eventually depleted their resources, having not planned for the strain of a growing population. Using their fate as example, Frank outlined four trajectories an alien civilization might face under similar circumstances, considering our fate has yet to be determined.
Frank calls the first scenario the “die-off” model, where the planet’s population shoots up to an unsustainable point, while temperature slowly increases. Over a short time period, the civilization experiences a massive die-off as the planet’s resources can’t sustain the population, while climate disasters increasingly occur from the byproducts of massive energy consumption.
In this scenario, a small percentage of the population survives, leveling off with temperature as energy use decreases, though this is only a fraction of the previous population – something like 30 percent.
The second scenario is the “sustainability” model, a.k.a. the “soft-landing model,” in which the population rises, but realizes it must do something to curtail rising temperatures. This civilization finds a viable solution to climate change, simultaneously leveling off population growth and rising temperatures – an ideal outcome.
The third and fourth scenarios, known as the “collapse” and “collapse with resource change” models, imagine a civilization that significantly over-leverages its resources, creating temperature rise that greatly outpaces population growth. This massive flux in temperature creates catastrophic climate disasters that kill off the entire population. In the collapse with resource change model, the civilization makes an attempt to stop the increase in temperature, but not soon enough, as the die-off occurs anyway – an equally depressing scenario.
via rochester.edu
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So, what’s the biggest takeaway from Frank’s paper? While it’s interesting to postulate about alien civilizations and their struggle to overcome the same issues with energy and sustainability, the paper may be considering the fact that this could be an answer to Fermi’s Paradox; if we haven’t found life out in the cosmos, maybe it’s because others fell victim to climate change or a similar sustainability issue we’re currently tasked with.
Will we have the foresight to achieve that soft-landing model, or will we collapse and die-off?
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Watch the trailer for No Impact Man, the story of a family that implemented a zero environmental impact lifestyle over the course of a year:
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Nemesis Star Theory; Does the Sun Have an Evil Twin?
Many people remain anxious about the threat posed from a hidden nemesis planet, known as Nibiru, that has been prophesied to collide with Earth. Though many of the proposed dates for this collision have come and gone, there is another celestial body that may be more likely to lead to an apocalyptic event: The Nemesis Star.
The Nemesis Star TheoryÂ
Binary star systems occur frequently and are actually more common than single stars. At least that’s what we thought, until a recent hypothesis proposed the possibility that every star starts out as a binary pair or multi-pair system. While the theory hasn’t been confirmed, there is significant evidence that our Sun likely has a twin, an evil twin.
The majority of stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, which are a fifth of the size of the sun and up to 50 times fainter. These types of stars are pretty commonly paired with another star in a binary system, leading astronomers to believe that Nemesis would be the Sun’s red dwarf star companion. But due to the small size and faintness of these stars, they can be hard to find, making Nemesis all the more elusive.
binary stars courtesy wired.com
This star is thought to be responsible for 12 cyclical extinction events on Earth, including the one that killed the dinosaurs. The Nemesis Star Theory’s roots can be traced to two paleontologists, David Raup and Jack Sepkoski, who noticed that there was a periodicity to major die-outs throughout Earth’s history, occurring in 26 million year intervals. This led to a number of astrophysicists and astronomers, postulating their own Nemesis Star hypotheses.
So how would the sun’s twin be responsible for mass extinctions? The Nemesis Star Theory proposed the idea that the Earth’s binary twin must be in a large 1.5 light-year orbit, retaining just enough gravitational pull between it and the Sun so as not to drift off. But the issue with the orbit of Nemesis is the possibility that it occasionally passes through a cloud of icy debris on the fringe of our solar system, known as the Oort Cloud.
Don’t Perturb the Oort
The Oort Cloud is a theoretical sphere that is believed to orbit our solar system, consisting of planetesimals, the small icy building blocks of planets, comets, and asteroids. These planetesimals are sticky and collide with each other until they become large enough to have a significant gravitational pull, eventually becoming as large as a moon or a planet. They also create asteroids and comets which can be knocked out of orbit and sent hurtling toward the center of the solar system, crashing into planets.
There is a binary star system that once passed close enough to nearly perturb the Oort, and it was likely visible from Earth. Scholz’s Star made a flyby some 70,000 years ago, at a distance of 50,000 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being the distance from Earth to the Sun. The Oort is thought to extend from anywhere between 5,000 and 100,000 AUs and is believed to contain up to two trillion celestial objects. Astronomers are 95% certain that Shulz’s star passed within half of a light-year of us, possibly perturbing the Oort, though apparently not enough to cause a mass extinction event.
Comets are believed to exist within the Oort and are the product of a thief model, a give-and-take of celestial bodies between stars when they’re formed. In this process, comets get pulled back and forth between the gravitational field of stars. It was for this reason that the Oort was theorized, due to the number of comets coming from it, there had to have been a sibling star that pulled them out to the Oort.
The Oort courtesy of space-facts.com
Astronomers also found a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, a region just before the Oort that also contains icy, celestial bodies. This planet, named Sedna, orbits the Sun in a long, drawn-out elliptical path and is one of potentially hundreds. Sedna may help to explain the Nemesis star theory, in that its far-flung orbit was likely caused by our Sun’s twin, pulling it out as it drifted off into the depths of space. Imagine if instead of 9 planets in our solar system, there were a few hundred?
So where is this Nemesis star? Several years ago, the E.U. launched the wonderfully named, Gaia satellite, to map out the stars in the Milky Way and look specifically at stars that have had a close encounter with our solar system or that might come close in the future. But whether or not Nemesis will be found is unknown; it’s possible that it could make a return for the next mass extinction, or it is possible that it drifted off, perturbing the Oort of another star.
