Lol this is hilarious. This political issue is what stops aliens civilizations from reaching interstellar levels? This article comes at an opportune time, doesn't it? Yeah, "climate change" is killing all the alien civilizations, that must be it. What a joke... get politics outta here.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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The work addresses the thorny problem of waste heat. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, a small amount of heat will always be released into the planet's atmosphere no matter what energy source we use — be it nuclear, solar, or wind — because no energy system is 100 percent efficient.
"You can think of it like a leaky bathtub," study coauthor Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology, told LiveScience. A small leak in a bathtub that's barely filled doesn't let out a lot of water. But as the tub continues to get filled — and our energy demands grow — that tiny leak can flood the whole house, Lingam explained.
I thought the problem was that CO~2~ was acting like a blanket trapping in all the heat. Is this "heat leaking" really a problem? If so, what about solar cells then?
It is, they're grasping at straws
Heat exchangers have >100% efficiency.
We just need to use those to move the extra heat outside the environment.
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Nothing we do is 100% efficient, everything produces heat - CPUs pretty make all their energy into heat
Heat can't travel good in a vacuum. So it can only radiate of, which isn't really effective
So just by using all our infrastructure, we would cook ourselves in there future.
The CO2 blanket only accelerates it much more
Thank you for explaining. That was the context I was missing.
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They're not making the point that "all civilizations will end because of this". The more interesting and credible point they're making is that 1,000 years of energy consumption growth rates at our speed must inevitably, even using 100% renewables, cook the planet. They're not saying "we can't beat climate change under any circumstances", they're saying (if I have understood them) that the way to do it is at least some amount of degrowth, which is quite reasonable.
You would think some alien species would figure out a way to make sure the worst individuals aren't put in charge of production and energy generation, as opposed to how us humans apparently have evolved to do.
If you take a long term view of things you could just not do the thing that cooks the planet until you figure out a technological solution for it, instead of going head first for it because that's the most profitable thing to do this quarter.
If you take a long term view of things
This is probably why they had to use aliens for the hypothetical scenario.
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It also seems to me that the circumstances implied don't seem the most likely? Like, we're working on space exploration and development right now, it's still early stages, but given another thousand years it would be strange for it to not go anywhere. It's not even like we'd need to stop building new energy using things in a few hundred years (which, given the current trends in population growth, we might I suppose), we literally just have to spread the things out rather than just piling more and more onto a single planet.
The literal scenario should be less emphasized than the subtler point that degrowth is a far more direct way to address climate change than any specific green (or greenwashed) technological advance, since consumption itself (merely using that amount of energy, regardless of its sources) is enough to destroy our habitat.
The issue there is the cause and timescale. Waste heat from energy use isn't what is causing our current climate change, it's the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on the energy absorbed from sunlight. They're related in that the greenhouse gas emissions are generally waste products too, but they're different physical problems that seem equivalent because they have same ultimate consequence, so they shouldn't be taken as having identical solutions. Not that degrowth wouldn't be a way to solve our current issues too, but it's not the only way to, and the point where it becomes such because we reach the physical limits of the planet is a long way off. In the meantime, it has a lot of downsides to consider vs the various other ways to deal with the current problem.
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