Our species are facing an important moment in human history. Either, we are developing technologies to safely use the energy needed to flee our planet, or to kill ourselves in a catastrophic, claims new research.However, the new paper is contradictory, if we can achieve the former and avoid the latter, we could be truly a species of planets in just 200 years.”Earth is a tiny dot surrounded by darkness,” lead author Jonathan Jiang, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Live Science. “Our current understanding of physics tells us that we are trapped in this small rock with limited resources.”
In order to permanently leave our planet, humans need to significantly increase the use of nuclear energy and renewable energy, and at the same time protect those energy sources from being used for malicious purposes and the next few decades will appear to be critical: If humanity could safely move away from mineral resources, it could still have guns, research suggests.
Kardashev scale
In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed a measurement scheme, later developed by Carl Sagan, to measure the technological power of intelligent species. It all comes down to power, and how much (from any source) genre can be used for its purposes, whether those that explore the universe or play video games.Kardashev civilization, for example, could utilize all the energy found on the animal’s home planet, including all the earth’s energy sources (such as fossil fuels and potentially nuclear weapons) and all its energy. falls to that planet from its parent star. Globally, this is about 10 ^ 16 watts.
A civilization of the type II consumes 10 times the amount of energy, and is able to exploit all the power to produce a single star. Type III species can go even further and use a lot of energy throughout the galaxy.Needless to say, the human population is below the Type I limit, but our energy use is growing every year. Many people use more energy per person, but that energy comes at a cost: that is, the threat to our biosphere from carbon emissions and pollution, as well as the risks posed by the ability to use energy-efficient methods and destructive delivery. targets, such as nuclear bombs.
Advanced civilization
The danger posed by increasing power consumption may explain why scientists have not found evidence of advanced civilization. If the Earth is not very special and the development of life and intelligence is not unique (and there is no reason to think so), then the galaxy should be full of intelligent analysts. Sure, we have not been around for a long time, we are talking about the stars, but the Milky Way has billions of years in existence. Certainly now someone, somewhere must have reached phase III and began exploring the galaxy with a serious eye.
This means that when people were smart, there had to be someone who would meet us, or at least leave an acceptable gift but as far as we know, we are alone. Life, and especially the wise life, seems very rare. So perhaps a set of processes removes intelligent life from the scene before civilization reaches higher stages of development. Most of these so-called “large filters” are different types of animal self-destruction.
Indeed, we have already been able to destroy ourselves as animals, and we have never broken the first episode of Kardashev. Few countries now have the nuclear power to wipe out every single person on the planet.”We are our Great Filter,” Jiang said.
The strategy is to avoid self-harm as we increase our energy use to the point where we can be honest in many countries at the same time, even if you are on a solar system, says Jiang. Man’s presence on more than one planet serves as a powerful defense against self-destruction. But to achieve the status of many planets requires a tremendous amount of energy, not only to establish temporary colonies, but also to maintain full, self-sustaining cities.
The edge of the knife
Jiang and his team explored the best way to achieve type I status in a paper uploaded in April to the journal preprint server arXiv. Researchers followed the recommendations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which set out the clear implications for sustainable use of fossil fuels. In short, unless humanity rapidly changes nuclear power supply and renewable options, we will do more damage to our biosphere to continue to scale up the Kardashev scale.
The study also took an annual increase of 2.5% in renewable and nuclear energy use, and found that in the next 20 to 30 years, those forms of energy will gradually replace fossil fuels. Nuclear power sources and renewable energy have the potential to continue to grow in production without putting further pressure on the biosphere, and if we continue with our current level of use we will reach state I by 2371, the team found.
Jiang admits that statistics included a lot of speculation, and that the uncertainty in the scale was about 100 years old. Statistics had to assume that we would identify safer ways to manage nuclear waste, and that an increase in energy efficiency would not lead to disaster. However, if we can keep this trend, we can set the stage for the protection of our species for future generations.
For more read: https://www.livescience.com/humans-interplanetary-200-years
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