The Future of Humanity
Page 28
The first and most immediate is nuclear proliferation. The bomb is spreading into some of the most unstable regions of the world, such as the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and the Korean peninsula. Even small countries may one day have the ability to develop nuclear weapons. In the past, it took a large nation-state to refine uranium ore into weapons-grade materials. Gigantic gaseous diffusion plants and banks of ultracentrifuges were required. These enrichment facilities were so large they could easily be seen by satellite. This was beyond the reach of small nations.
But blueprints for nuclear weapons have been stolen and then sold to unstable regimes. The cost of ultracentrifuges and purifying uranium into weapons-grade material has fallen. As a result, even nations like North Korea, which is perpetually teetering on the brink of collapse, can amass a small but deadly nuclear arsenal today.
Now the danger is that a regional war, between India and Pakistan, say, could escalate to a major war, drawing in the major nuclear powers. Since the United States and Russia each possess about seven thousand nuclear weapons, this threat is significant. There is even a concern that nonstate actors or terrorist groups could procure a nuclear bomb.
The Pentagon commissioned a report from the Global Business Network think tank that analyzed what might happen if global warming destroys the economies of many poor nations such as Bangladesh. It concluded that, in a worst-case scenario, nations may use nuclear weapons to protect their borders from being overrun by a flood of millions of desperate, starving refugees. And even if it does not cause a nuclear war, global warming is an existential threat to humanity.
GLOBAL WARMING AND BIOTERRORISM
Since the end of the last glacial period about ten thousand years ago, the Earth has been gradually warming up. However, over the past half century, the Earth has been heating at an alarming and accelerating rate. We see evidence of this on numerous fronts:
· Every major glacier on the Earth is receding
· The northern polar ice has thinned by an average of 50 percent over the past fifty years
· Large parts of Greenland, which is covered by the world’s second-largest ice sheet, are thawing out
· A section of Antarctica the size of Delaware, the Larsen Ice Shelf C, broke off in 2017, and the stability of the ice sheets and ice shelves is now in question
· The last few years have been the hottest ever recorded in human history
· The Earth’s average temperature has increased by about 1.3 degrees Celsius in the past century
· On average, summer is about one week longer than it was in the past
· We are seeing more and more “one-hundred-year events,” such as forest fires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes
There is the danger that, if this global warming accelerates unabated into the coming decades, it could destabilize the nations of the world, create mass starvation, generate mass migration from the coastal areas, and threaten the world economy and prevent the transition to a Type I civilization.
There is also the threat of weaponized biogerms that could potentially wipe out 98 percent of the human population.
Throughout world history, the greatest killers have not been wars but plagues and epidemics. Unfortunately, it is possible that nations have kept secret stockpiles of deadly diseases, such as smallpox, which could be weaponized using biotechnology to create havoc. There is also the danger that someone could create a doomsday weapon by bioengineering some existing disease—Ebola, HIV, avian flu—and making it more lethal or causing it to spread more quickly and easily.
Perhaps in the future, if we ever venture to other planets, we may find the ashes of dead civilizations: planets whose atmospheres are highly radioactive; planets that are too hot, because of a runaway greenhouse effect; or planets with empty cities because they used advanced biotech weaponry on themselves. So the transition from Type 0 to Type I is not guaranteed and in fact represents the greatest challenge facing an emerging civilization.
ENERGY FOR TYPE I CIVILIZATION
A key question is whether a Type I civilization can make the transition to energy sources other than fossil fuels.
One possibility is to harness uranium nuclear power. But uranium fuel for a conventional nuclear reactor creates large amounts of nuclear waste products, which are radioactive for millions of years. Even today, fifty years into the nuclear age, we still do not have a safe way to store high-level nuclear waste. This material is also quite hot and can create a meltdown, as we have seen in the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.
An alternative to uranium fission power is fusion power, which, as we saw in chapter 8, is not ready yet for commercial use, but a Type I civilization a century more advanced than ours may have perfected the technology and could use it as an indispensable source of nearly unlimited energy.
One advantage of fusion power is that its fuel is hydrogen, which can be extracted from seawater. A fusion plant also cannot suffer a catastrophic meltdown like the ones we saw at Chernobyl and Fukushima. If there is a malfunction in the fusion plant (such as the superhot gas touching the lining of the reactor) the fusion process automatically shuts itself off. (This is because the fusion process has to attain the Lawson criterion: it must maintain the proper density and temperature to fuse the hydrogen over a certain period of time. But if the fusion process gets out of control, the Lawson criterion is no longer satisfied, and it stops by itself.)
Also, a fusion reactor only produces modest amounts of nuclear waste. Because neutrons are created in the process of fusing hydrogen, these neutrons can irradiate the steel of the reactor, making it slightly radioactive. But the amount of waste created in this fashion is only a tiny fraction of that generated by uranium reactors.
In addition to fusion power, there are other possible renewable energy sources. One attractive possibility for a Type I civilization is to exploit space-based solar energy. Since 60 percent of the energy of the sun is lost passing through the atmosphere, satellites could harness much more solar energy than collectors on the surface of the Earth.
A space-based solar energy system might consist of many huge mirrors orbiting the Earth collecting sunlight. They would be geostationary (orbiting the Earth at the same rate at which the Earth rotates, so they appear to be in a fixed location in the sky). This energy can then be beamed down to a receiving station on the Earth in the form of microwave radiation, and it would then be distributed through a traditional electrical grid.
There are many advantages to space solar energy. It is clean and without waste products. It can generate power twenty-four hours a day, rather than just during daylight hours. (These satellites are almost never in the shadow of the Earth, since their path takes them considerably away from the Earth’s orbit.) The solar panels have no moving parts, which vastly reduces breakdowns and repair costs. And best of all, space solar power taps into a limitless supply of free energy from the sun.
Every scientific panel that has looked into the question of space solar has concluded that the goal is achievable with off-the-shelf technology. But the main problem, like all endeavors involving space travel, is cost. Simple estimates show that this is currently many times more expensive than simply putting solar panels out in your backyard.
Space solar energy is beyond the means of a Type 0 civilization like ours, but it may become a natural source of energy for a Type I civilization for several reasons:
1. The cost of space travel is dropping, especially because of the introduction of private rocket companies and the invention of reusable rockets.
2. The space elevator may be possible late in this century.
3. Space solar panels can be made of lightweight nanomaterials, keeping weight and costs down.
4. The solar satellites can be assembled in space by robots, eliminating the need for astronauts.
It also is generally considered safe because while microwaves can be harmful, calculations show that most of the energy is confined within the beam, and the energy that escapes outs
ide the beam should fall within accepted environmental standards.
TRANSITION TO TYPE II
Eventually, a Type I civilization may exhaust the power available on its home planet and look to exploit the enormous energy found in the sun itself.
A Type II civilization should be easy to find, because they are likely immortal. Nothing known to science can destroy their culture. Meteor or asteroid collisions can be avoided using rocketry. The greenhouse effect can be avoided using hydrogen-based or solar technologies (fuel cells, fusion plants, space solar satellites, et cetera). If there are any planetary threats, they can even leave their home in large space armadas. They might even be able to move their planet if necessary. Since they have enough energy to deflect asteroids, they can whip them around their planet, causing a small shift in its trajectory. With successive “slingshot” maneuvers, they could move the orbit of their planet farther from the sun if their star is late in its life cycle and beginning to expand.
To supply energy for their civilization, they might, as we mentioned earlier, build a Dyson sphere to harvest most of the energy from the sun itself. (One problem with building such gigantic megastructures is there might not be enough building material on the rocky planets to construct them. Since our sun is 109 times bigger than the Earth in diameter, it would require an immense amount of material to build one of these structures. Perhaps the solution to this practical problem is to use nanotechnology. If these megastructures are made of nanomaterials, they might only be a few molecules in thickness, which would vastly decrease the amount of building materials required.)
The number of space missions needed to create such megastructures is truly monumental. But the key to building them may be to utilize space-based robots and self-organizing materials. For example, if a nanofactory could be built on the moon to make panels for the Dyson sphere, they could be assembled in outer space. Because these robots are self-replicating, an almost unlimited number of them could be built to create this structure.
But even if a Type II civilization is virtually immortal, it still faces a long-term threat: the second law of thermodynamics, the fact that all their machines will create enough infrared heat radiation to make life impossible on their planet. The second law says that entropy (disorder, chaos, or waste) always increases in a closed system. In this case every machine, every appliance, every apparatus generates waste, in the form of heat. Naïvely, we can assume that the solution is to build gigantic refrigerators to cool down the planet. These refrigerators do in fact lower the temperature inside them, but if we add everything up, including heat from the motors used by the refrigerators, the average heat of the whole system still increases.
(For example, on a very hot day, we fan our faces for relief, thinking that this cools us down. Fanning ourselves does cool down our face, giving us temporary relief, but the heat generated by the motion of our muscles, bones, and so on actually produces more net heat. So fanning ourselves gives us immediate psychological relief, but our total body temperature and the temperature of the air around us actually go up.)
COOLING DOWN A TYPE II CIVILIZATION
A Type II civilization, in order to survive the second law, may necessarily have to disperse its machinery or overheat. As we discussed earlier, one solution would be to move most of the machinery to outer space, so that the mother planet becomes a park. This means that a Type II civilization might build all its heat-generating equipment off the planet. Although it consumes the energy output of a star, the waste heat generated is in outer space and hence dissipates harmlessly.
Eventually the Dyson sphere itself begins to heat up. This means that a Dyson sphere must necessarily emit infrared radiation. (Even if we assume that the civilization creates machines to try to conceal this infrared radiation, eventually these machines themselves become hot and radiate in the infrared.)
Scientists have scanned the heavens looking for the telltale signs of infrared radiation from a Type II civilization, and they have failed to find it. Scientists at Fermilab outside Chicago scanned 250,000 stars looking for signatures of a Type II civilization but only found four that were “amusing but still questionable,” so their results were inconclusive. It is possible that the James Webb Space Telescope, which will go into service late in 2018 and will look specifically for infrared radiation, may have the sensitivity to find the heat signature of all Type II civilizations in our sector of the galaxy.
So this is a mystery. If Type II civilizations are virtually immortal, and they necessarily emit waste infrared radiation, then why haven’t we detected them? Perhaps looking for infrared emissions is too narrow.
Astronomer Chris Impey of the University of Arizona, commenting on finding a Type II civilization, has written, “The premise is that any highly advanced civilization will leave a much larger footprint than we will. Type II or later civilizations may employ technologies that we’re tinkering with or can barely imagine. They might orchestrate stellar cataclysms or use propulsion by anti-matter. They might manipulate space-time to create wormholes or baby universes and communicate by gravity waves.”
Or, as David Grinspoon has written, “Logic tells me that it is reasonable to look for godlike signs of advanced aliens in the sky. And yet the idea seems ridiculous. It is both logical and absurd. Go figure.”
One possible way out of this dilemma is to realize that there are two ways to rank a civilization: by its energy consumption, but also by its information consumption.
Modern society has expanded in the direction of miniaturization and energy efficiency as it consumes an exploding amount of information. In fact, Carl Sagan proposed a way to rank civilizations by information.
In this scenario a Type A civilization consumes a million bits of information. A Type B civilization would consume ten times that number, or ten million bits of information, and so on, until we hit Type Z, which can consume an astounding 1031 bits of information. By this calculation, we are a Type H civilization. The point here is that civilizations may advance on the scale of information consumption while consuming the same amount of energy. Thus they may not produce a significant amount of infrared radiation.
We see an example of this when we visit a science museum. We are amazed at the size of the machines of the industrial revolution, with gigantic locomotives and huge steamboats. But we also notice how inefficient they were, generating a large amount of waste heat. Similarly, the gigantic computer banks of the 1950s can be surpassed by an ordinary cell phone today. Modern technology became much more sophisticated, intelligent, and less wasteful of energy.
So a Type II civilization can consume a vast amount of energy without burning up by distributing their machines in Dyson spheres, on asteroids and nearby planets, or by creating superefficient miniaturized computer systems. Instead of being consumed by the heat generated by their huge energy usage, their technology may also be superefficient, consuming vast amounts of information and producing relatively little waste heat.
WILL HUMANITY SPLIT APART?
There are limitations, however, to how far each civilization will advance in terms of space travel. For example, a Type I civilization, as we have seen, is limited by its planetary energy. At best, it will master the art of terraforming a planet like Mars and begin to explore the nearest stars. Robotic probes will begin exploring nearby solar systems and perhaps the first astronauts will be sent to the nearest star, like Proxima Centauri. But its technology and its economy are not sufficiently advanced to begin the systematic colonization of scores of nearby star systems.
For a Type II civilization, which is centuries to millennia more advanced, colonization of a sector of the Milky Way becomes a real possibility. But even for a Type II civilization, eventually they are constrained by the light barrier. If we assume that faster-than-light propulsion is not available to them, it may take many centuries to colonize their sector of the galaxy.
But if it takes centuries to go from one star system to another, then eventually the ties to the home world
become extremely tenuous. Planets will eventually lose contact with other worlds, and new branches of humanity may emerge that can adapt to radically different environments. Colonists may also genetically and cybernetically modify themselves to adapt to strange environments. Eventually, they may not feel any connection to the home planet.
This seems to contradict the vision of Asimov in his Foundation series, with a Galactic Empire emerging fifty thousand years from now that has colonized most of the galaxy. Can we reconcile these two very different visions of the future?
Is the ultimate fate of human civilization to splinter into smaller entities, with only the sketchiest knowledge of one another? This raises the ultimate question: Will we gain the stars but lose our humanity in the process? And what does it mean to be human anyway if there are so many distinct branches of humanity?
This divergence seems to be universal in nature, a common thread that runs through all of evolution, not just humanity. Darwin was the first to see how this occurs through the animal and plant kingdoms when he sketched a prophetic diagram in his notebook. He drew a picture of the branches of a tree, with different arms diverging into smaller branches. In one simple diagram, he drew the tree of life, with all the diversity of nature evolving from a single species.
Perhaps this diagram applies not only to life on Earth but to humanity itself thousands of years from now, when we become a Type II civilization capable of colonizing the nearby stars.
GREAT DIASPORA IN THE GALAXY
To gain some concrete insight into this problem, we have to reanalyze our own evolution. Looking at the sweep of human history, we can see that roughly seventy-five thousand years ago, a Great Diaspora took place, with small bands of humans moving away from Africa through the Middle East, creating settlements along the way. Perhaps driven by ecological disasters, such as the Toba eruption and a glaciation period, one of the main branches went through the Middle East and journeyed on to Central Asia. Then this migration split further into several smaller branches about forty thousand years ago. One branch kept on going east and eventually settled in Asia, forming the core of the modern Asian people. The other branch turned around and went into northern Europe, eventually becoming Caucasians. Yet another branch went southeast and eventually passed through India and into Southeast Asia and then Australia.