'Asymptotic burnout' of planet-scale civilizations may explain Fermi Paradox

I find the idea that unless our civilisation changes its priorities from "unbounded growth" to "homeostasis" then we necessarily will suffer the "asymptotic burnout" comparable to papers written in 19th century predicting New York will drown in horse manure in next 75 years unless the growth is artificially stunted. Although the authors mention the role of periodic innovation as a factor that resets the curve of the resource consumption they dismiss it by stating the frequency of said innovation has to increase with increased energy usage and interconnectedness resulting in a certainty at some point innovation will not be fast enough to delay running out of resources. For this argument to work we have to accept unquestionably that "unbounded growth" has to continue until either a civilisation runs out of resources and regressed or achieves "enlightenment" and shifts its priorities towards homeostasis. To this I say why are they so sure, that as through growth of economic activity we raise our collective standard of living people don't start valuing their happiness over economic output? In fact observations of highly developed societies seem to support that. In addition the birth rate of people declines in modern societies often below replacement numbers so that "unbounded growth" looks really unlikely.

Yet another Malthusian paper. Why would a planet’s boundary be the civilization’s boundary? This could be an issue on a super-earth and an inability to leave the rock with chemical rockets but even then… or, as Dr Zubrin would say ‘most dangerous are the people who believe a limit in resources is the reason that we must fight each other’

I think the Fermi Paradox is more easily explained by three things.<p>1. It is possible that self-aware life with the ability to manipulate the environment is rare. Most people assume that self-aware life will build cities, but crows, cetaceans, octopuses, and elephants don’t do so despite having quite a bit of smarts. They lack hands.<p>2. It is possible that the speed of light is a very real boundary and that cannot be broken limiting the ability of life to spread itself within a life time. As anything that persists spends energy to do so, it may be that living things won’t willingly take the chance for themselves and posterity of living on a ship for many generations.<p>3. Nuclear war. Most intelligent life is predatory. If you want to manipulate your environment, you also have to focus. Most animals with eyes on the front of their heads that can focus well, are also predators. That predatory instinct creates violence, and that leads to war in pack-oriented social predators. With enough advancement, nuclear weaponry and war may be the rule not the exception.

The burnout-collapse trajectory is another kind of homeostasis, only one with very wide range of variation. Though that produces huge human suffering and lossy cultural transmission so it might be worth avoiding.<p>But homeostatic awakening is continually underway, from 20th century discourse of technique and enframing to our modern drives for global sustainability. Would it not be wise to err on the side of caution, reaching for the stars at some slowest effective rate (Elons per millenium;) until we know more?<p>Another concern is civilization may execute both futures parallelly via splitting: where some &#x27;elite&#x27; Gosper glider-like sets off from home planet, and the Gosper glider gun remains to reset the cycle. If collapse assumed this is your K shaped recovery.<p>The Fermi paradox does not overly worry me for some reason. Everything Is just so improbable really.

What if there is no real way to create an advanced civilization without fossil fuels, and the existence of them is more rare than we can estimate?

There is an assumption embedded in the Fermi paradox which is that life might originate within an environment already colonized by life. This is not the case in our experience on earth. As far as we know, all life is related which means that all life descends from a common ancestor.<p>If intelligent life relatively rapidly (say within 1M years) gains the ability to travel at near the speed of light and consume interstellar resources, then new life <i>would never know</i>. There is no case where you could look up and see a galactic empire because if you could see it then it would have been expanding long enough to reach you, and you wouldn’t exist.

My take (which does not involve maths, just analogy with other organisms) is that we are bacteria that eat all that&#x27;s on a petri dish.<p>Dying as a species is (IHMO) rather unlikely, except for external factors and a few contamination scenarios. Eating all resources, starving most population, and going back to a pre-industrial civilization. Except for a few living high-tech standards. But with devices, they can use but cannot replace.

Lots of pretty words that translate to &quot;reduce population and living standards or die.&quot; If true this is the hardest warning that people refuse to hear. If false it is a way to co-op guilt and fear to sell control. How I wish I knew which it was.

The Fermi &quot;paradox&quot; is such an annoying meme. We have no evidence that extraterrestrial life isn&#x27;t absolutely everywhere. To think we do is to greatly misunderstand the scale of the galaxy.

This article claims population growth increases on shorter and shorter timescales, leading to infinite population growth.<p>If this is true, we should have had baby boom, bigger echo boom, giant boom.<p>Instead, we had baby boom, smaller echo boom, and now Social Security&#x27;s about to implode because the original boomers are retiring without being replaced. (Or maybe being replaced by immigrants, which led directly to Donald Trump being elected and the near-implosion of our political system.)<p>This article might be the basis for an interesting and thought-provoking sci-fi story. But if it&#x27;s supposed to be a serious scientific prediction of what actual aliens in our own universe are like, it&#x27;s just embarrassing. If you make claims of supposedly near-universal trends in alien societies and say those claims are basically guaranteed by math and physics, then your claims certainly ought to at least be consistent with what we observe in our one known data point of an actual intelligent civilization (ourselves).<p>And for the claim of technological population acceleration, actual observation suggests the effect runs in the opposite direction, at least here on Earth.