The Great Filter theory has a very big assumption attached to it, and it's troubling that it's seemingly become accepted as fact by the constant references to "The Great Filter" as a real thing. The assumption is that in a universe with other civilizations we'd certainly be aware of them. I can't say what prior we should have on that, but it's definitely not 100%. Certainly if we find bacteria on Venus all of the claims of "The Great Filter was the creation of cells" will be wrong, and in retrospect it will be shocking to think we could be so ignorant as to be unaware of bacteria on our nearest neighbor for so long. In other words, if it took us this long to find bacteria on Venus, why should we assume anything about our ability to determine life beyond our Solar System?
It is safe to say that the universe is teaming with life even though we are not aware of it off of earth. Here is a simple thought experiment: assume that there was a civilization that stagnated on our exact level of technology and interest in other life - when would they have detected us at various distances?
As we can see by this announcement they wouldn't have detected the first primal soup that formed life (we don't have any probes), but given enough time they would have sent a probe to our planet and detected single celled life, and they would have seen evidence of life.
At 5 light years (the closest start is just less than that) they wouldn't have had a chance before about 1900, and they might needed until 1960 (I give a range because there is room for debate on exactly what would be proof, they might have not been sure) to detect out radio transmissions. We would probably have made contact with them in the 1970s.
At up to 100 light years the above applies with more of a timeshift. After 200 we don't have the ability to detect ourselves (the technology of 1820 didn't give any emissions to go on.) I'm not sure if they would know there is a planet with water where we are (There has been great progress in detecting small planets but I don't know what their abilities are).
The farther out you go the harder it gets. Eventually they are still seeing the big bang form our galaxy and so have no idea life will eventually happen here (or where we will be as the universe is moving all along in directions that they cannot predict)
If you go just be what's detectable by radio emissions, there seems to be another problem.
Back when we started broadcasting radio, we needed very powerful transmitters since the receivers were pretty primitive - you could make receivers with no power source at all (Galena radios).
Then we started using them for other purposes. Powerful radars appeared. TV was invented. Later on we added digital signals and most traffic shifted to binary for computer to computer communication.
Now we have things like WIFI and 5g. The problem is that the technology has advanced so much that cellular antennas can talk to puny transmitters from miles away, while the transmitters are only outputting milliwatts. We can also electronically 'steer' transmissions so they will 'point' at the other party (beamforming).
Long range communication is shifting to satellites and fiber optic cables. Those are pretty directional and not very strong signals, by comparison (and fiber optic of course has none). We have been slowly shutting down TV stations in favor of internet streams.
Civilian radars still exist but they are relatively weak. They are also slowly being phased out in favor of technologies like ADS-B, which broadcast a fraction of the power. GPS signals are very weak.
Military radars are also more sensitive than before - and increasingly look like background noise. Given the high emphasis on stealth, they are also more directional and lower power than before. And may not even be on all the time.
Given this, it is possible that, if you are taking a SETI approach, there's only a very small window before a civilization switches to more efficient and less noisy RF comms.
> At up to 100 light year
At 100 light years you'll have very faint, possibly undetectable signals, as the strength decreases with distance squared. Unless they are pointing at us.
Advanced civilization, sure. But wouldn't a sufficiently designed spectroscopy telescope from afar have been able to detect the presence of oxygen on our exoplanet for hundreds of millions of years?
I'm not at all suggesting that the Great Filter is a real thing. I consider the other main solutions of the Fermi Paradox (Alien life being too alien, Simulation Hypothesis, Dark Forest, Zoo and other) just as intriguing!
Great Filter is neat because it bundles many different solutions together into one class. Any solution saying that civilizations in the Milky Way are incredibly rare is basically a variation on Great Filter.
>why should we assume anything about our ability to determine life beyond our Solar System?
It isn't farfetched to assume that sufficiently expansionist/numerous Kardashev type 2+ civilizations should be easier to detect from Earth than bacteria on Venus.
Well, that depends on how you define "the Great Filter" I suppose. For many it's attempting to explain why intelligent civilizations are rare, rather than why Kardashev type 2+ civilizations are rare. Of course, if you strictly define it as "the thing that makes it look like intelligent civilizations are rare" I guess that would also work... I just rarely get the impression that this is what people are referring to.
I see. Well, we cannot say whether life or intelligent life is rare. There could be millions of worlds with civilizations like ours and it wouldn't be that strange we missed it.
However, it does seem that the Milky Way is not collonised (not even the other galaxies as far as we can tell), and if that's truly the case, then it would suggest that there is some kind of filter barring all civilizations from ever doing it.
I consider interstellar travel not ever being viable a legitimate filter.
Of course there is a plethora of other solutions as well.
What it considered is not the current state of the human race. The real question is more like "why isn't the entire galaxy colonized by a super advanced civilization?".
A galactic civilization is expected to leave traces. The most advanced civilizations are expected to use a huge amount of energy (information is energy too). Even if we don't find spaceships, we could see otherwise unexplained high/low entropy regions. In fact, there is a theory that says that life is the most powerful entropy generator, and that Earth has a distinct IR glow because of it.
Currently, it doesn't seem there is anything preventing us from colonizing interstellar space in the far future. Lots of unanswered questions but the laws of physics don't exclude it.
The Great Filter theory is that because we don't see any sign of a galactic civilization, there is something in the way. It can be behind us (ex: the appearance of life) or ahead of us (ex: civilizations tend to get wiped off before they can colonize other star systems).
And even if the great filter is simply that even the most advanced civilizations can stay undetected (so no real filter), finding evidence that the great filter is less likely to be behind us make it more likely to be ahead of us (or inexistant).
I completely agree that the great filter theory is a bit circular in its logic on that premise: Imagine the evidence the average HN reader would need to accept that an extraterrestrial civilization existed. Now contrast that with the portion of human history when we've had the ability to produce evidence like that. It seems a bit reckless to assume that ANY AND EVERY high-tech alien civilization would produce conclusive evidence on a scale such that any civilization like modern humanity around any given star would be able to detect it.
I also wanted to point out that life on Venus would not even necessarily move the great filter. It is possible, though not experimentally proven, that lifeforms could survive a cataclysmic ejection from one planet after an asteroid impact and float to another planet in the same system. In other words, the life on Venus may have come from Earth or vice-versa.
> It seems a bit reckless to assume that ANY AND EVERY high-tech alien civilization would produce conclusive evidence on a scale such that any civilization like modern humanity around any given star would be able to detect it.
"ANY AND EVERY" is not remotely a part of any plausible premise of either the Great Filter or the Fermi paradox. Please be charitable in stating assumptions of theories you disagree with.
The assumption is not just about being able to identify civilizations out there. It also assumes that someone should have come to us by now. (Any theory that thousands of other civilizations out there just wouldn't be interested in exploring / expanding / communicating / etc requires every single civilization out there to be that way.)
>(Any theory that thousands of other civilizations out there just wouldn't be interested in exploring / expanding / communicating / etc requires every single civilization out there to be that way.)
Space is difficult, interstellar space exponentially more so. It isn't necessary to make any claims about any or all civilizations if the nature of physics alone makes it extremely unlikely for any species, however curious, to ever make it out of their local gravity well, much less sustain the technological infrastructure, knowledge base, energy consumption, unified political will (despite vast cultural and biological evolution) and control over every other variable across millions of years as a species to be able to stumble across our planet even once among the billions upon billions of galaxies' worth of stars in the observable universe.
One might say "it only has to happen once." I submit that it could have happened a thousand times and we could still never know.
In this sense, there's a variant of the Great Filter where the Filter isn't the existence of other civilizations, but over the probability mass they'll cross paths with another and each can mutually grok the other exists. Arguably this is a much more grounded way to view the Filter theory, since it's less assumption-laden. It also surfaces the assumptions of the usual Filter theory more starkly. We only recently even became intelligent enough for the concept of us recognizing another civilization to even make sense.
I think people intuitively perceive the universe as being roughly analogous to Earth's oceans. Obviously we know it isn't objectively true, but subjectively we're just not capable of comprehending the true scale and emptiness of space, of reconciling the Hubble Deep Field image[0] with the fact that less than 5% of the entire universe is physical matter. Even the distance between the Earth and Moon is mind-boggling on human scales, and humans have traveled it.
So it seems reasonable that if any interstellar civilization were out there, one would have found us by now, or their presence would be obvious to us. After all, Rome knew of China, even if they never directly interacted, and Spain eventually stumbled across the New World. Von Neumann probes make sense because it doesn't occur to us that the chances of any arbitrary path along the universe intersecting with a star would be effectively zero. We look up at the night sky and we can see so many of them, and they seem so close together, obviously you'd run into one no matter which way you went, sooner or later. Right?
It's more comforting to make up rationales as to why we might be alone than deal with the ramifications of being surrounded by life we may never see in a universe in which the entirety of physical reality amounts to a rounding error in a zero.
True, the one thing I keep trying to remind myself and other of is that we really don't appreciate the cosmic scale all that well.
There's a point where it's all just "big". A million and a billion seem equally big. Even though, as it has been said before, that the difference between 1 billion and 1 million is about 1 billion.
There are so many fundamentally difficult problems with deep space exploration, that it may never be logistically possible to over come them. And that's of the ones we know about.
Rome and China were roughly at the same technological level, more or less.
Given modern technology, we would be able to observe both without being noticed. It would be pretty trivial from space. It wouldn't be quite so trivial close up, but it would be possible.
A time difference of ten thousand years? The invisibility would be rather more effortless, and might even include direct memory manipulation in the victims.
A million years? Can anyone even imagine what a million year difference would look like? Never mind the technology - we can't even imagine what its motivations would be.
So assuming an advanced civ is going to do what we'd do - build ships, colonise, hoard and transform resources - is more than a little naive and unimaginative.
It's not unlike a protohominid assuming that life is about hunting, and any other two legged creature they meet is going to want to talk about flint knapping and these new arrowhead shapes.
> So assuming an advanced civ is going to do what we'd do - build ships, colonise, hoard and transform resources - is more than a little naive and unimaginative.
The assumption is weaker than you suggest. It's not that your typical advanced civ will do what we'd do, just that some proportion (perhaps extremely small) of civilizations will be expansionary.
But what is to make them expansionary. Space is so vast and resources plentiful that it is doubtful any run of the mill system would be interesting. After you are sufficiently advanced you probably do not need much resources at all.
We're not capable of comprehending the true scale/emptiness of space, sure - but it seems like many commentators are having difficulty comprehending the length of time the universe has been around for.
If a single civilization in our galaxy made a machine capable of replicating itself and going to other star systems less than a billion years ago, we should have seen that.
> it doesn't occur to us that the chances of any arbitrary path along the universe intersecting with a star would be effectively zero
I fail to see how this is a strong critique of Von Neumann probes, maybe you can clarify.
>I fail to see how this is a strong critique of Von Neumann probes, maybe you can clarify.
Allow me to attempt to clarify.
Let's say a civilization creates Von Neumann probes. Ignore whether such devices are even technically feasible. It sends these Von Neumann probes out into the universe in all directions.
The chances of any one of them ever encountering anything larger than a grain of dust before the heat death of the universe is practically zero. In almost all possible universes, all of the probes are swallowed up by the void. In almost all of the rest, one probe finds enough material to be able to replicate, and all of those are swallowed up into the void.
The scenario whereby a stable chain of exponential reproduction and growth via interstellar transfer occurs lasting long enough for a significant amount of stellar matter to be consumed and for an obvious trace to be left which just happens to be visible to us, is not the most likely scenario in a universe where such devices exist, it is still so unlikely that its feasibility borders on requiring sorcery. Because the universe is just that empty.
It's the sort of idea that only works on graph paper assuming a "perfectly spherical cow in a frictionless vacuum" kind of universe. The lack of a universe awash in Von Neumann probes is not a strong argument against the existence of life or advanced civilization in the universe, it is, itself, a strong argument against the feasibility of Von Neumann probes.
> The chances of any one of them ever encountering anything larger than a grain of dust before the heat death
This is why no civilization would randomly fire off Von Neumman probes in random directions. They would understand that this is a problem.
If you want to efficiently use them, you fire them at nearby stars. They will either find materials and restart the process, or they won't (and potentially report this, but it's not required). A non-zero number of them may encounter sufficient material (given how plentiful planets seem to be, that's a fair assumption). Those star systems would now fire off a bunch of probes, at near stars. Rinse and repeat. It's a slow process, initially, but given the exponential nature, it should be surprisingly quick.
"Aiming" at star is not something that's too complex even for us. It might require mid-course corrections to account for errors, but we could build a probe that would conceivably reach a star. Ensuring it would be alive and operational by then is more challenging, but it is an engineering one. Actually entering the star's orbit might be even trickier depending on relative speed. But that's peanuts for a civilization that could build such things.
> The lack of a universe awash in Von Neumann probes is not a strong argument against the existence of life or advanced civilization in the universe, it is, itself, a strong argument against the feasibility of Von Neumann probes.
It is. But that's assuming we can even recognize one.
Sorry I still don't get what you are saying - wouldn't the probes be sent off to the nearest "interesting object" rather that onto a straight line into nothingness?
> It sends these Von Neumann probes out into the universe in all directions. The chances of any one of them ever encountering anything larger than a grain of dust before the heat death of the universe is practically zero.
Haha okay. I think most would view this as a pretty uncharitable assumption (appears contingent on these civilizations not having telescopes or AI), but if that's your view I can understand why we disagree.
Why are you assuming that such a probe is not targeted? Targeting radically changes the results. An interesting middle ground to explore is untargeted probes taking gravity into account
Targeted probes would be more complex, and thus more prone to mechanical or software failure, or copy failure across generations. Untargeted probes could remain dormant in interstellar space, whereas targeted probes would have to remain active (and thus consume energy) in order to course-correct and continue to approach their target.
If the goal is to mine the resources of one specific location, then a targeted probe makes sense. But if the goal is to proliferate and explore (or consume) as much of the universe as possible as efficiently as possible, then targeted probes seem less likely to succeed over the scale of time necessary.
> Targeted probes would be more complex, and thus more prone to mechanical or software failure, or copy failure across generations
I'd argue that your argument is either
a. not intrinsically true of complex probes or
b. just a modified version of the great filter argument
You could imagine an advanced civilization that creates an artificially intelligent probe that is pretty effective at problem solving and resilient to these sorts of failures. Even if targeted probes have to remain active, there is no reason they couldn't consume energy harvested from their origin world to course correct.
If your claim is that every form of intelligence will inevitably fall to mechanical or software failure, etc. then that claim seems to just be identical to the great filter claim.
> targeted probes seem less likely to succeed over the scale of time necessary.
Your own GP seems to provide a very compelling reason why this is not true.
Is "targeting" really a large requirement to add on to a device that needs to be able to fabricate spacecraft from raw materials wherever it lands?
>But if the goal is to proliferate and explore (or consume) as much of the universe as possible as efficiently as possible, then targeted probes seem less likely to succeed over the scale of time necessary.
Less likely than non targeted ones that you say wouldn't get past the first generation?
> Filter isn't the existence of other civilizations, but over the probability mass they'll cross paths with another and each can mutually grok the other exists
The idea is that "probability mass they'll cross paths with another and each can mutually grok the other exists" is a monotonically increasing function of the number of other civilizations, which bridges the problem you've identified.
This is entirely consistent with the great filter.
> 1. it extremely unlikely for any species, however curious, to ever make it out of their local gravity well
ie. it is more likely that they would go extinct before making it out of their local gravity well, which means the discovery of other life local to us would make it substantially more likely that filter preventing us from attaining interstellar travel is ahead of us.
I think it's important, in this case, to distinguish between simple multicellularity where identical cells form clumps (known to have evolved at least 25 times in eukaryotes, as well as in prokaryotes according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism - and which has been observed evolving in the lab before your linked paper), multicellularity that has cell differentiation (evolved in 6 groups), and multicellularity that has enough behavioural complexity that we might reasonably expect the emergence of intelligence (only in animals).
I don't think simple multicellularity has ever been something that seemed like a likely candidate as a particularly strong filter (although you could argue that it's a weaker filter combined with others)
That was perhaps misleading phrasing. Animals have both true multicellularity (shared with plants, fungi, and some other algae), and much higher behavioural complexity. Multicellularity is almost certainly necessary for behavioural complexity, but it obviously isn't sufficient, because as cool as plants and fungi are, you don't see any of them doing anything that one can imagine leading to intelligence in any form that we'd recognise.
Now, broadly, I think (in my capacity as an armchair biologist) what we care about here is an nervous system, or something like it that is capable of fast communication and complex feedback loops that can be built into complex "computation". Interestingly, nervous systems aren't present in sponges, which are most likely the basal animal group (and which are immobile), but are present in all other animals. I'm therefore speculating that "able to develop a nervous system" could be the filter we care about for behavioural complexity.
Being non-photosynthetic (so more advantage to being able to move around and find food), not having cell walls (so potentially more able to be motile, and form flexible structures), as well as just whether there are existing cellular pathways that control ion gradients in a way that can be co-opted for communication (which are present in sponges) all seem like plausible things that could predispose a multicellular organism to develop nerves, but if it is a filter, it could well also be that it's really hard to develop something as complicated as nerves, and an early animal got very lucky.
> because as cool as plants and fungi are, you don't see any of them doing anything that one can imagine leading to intelligence in any form that we'd recognise.
Reminds me of a documentary I once watched, watching a timelapse of a vine growing upwards. It grows spiraling, and it looks like it is "looking" for where the walls are, adjusting its trajectory whenever it touches a wall.
It's fascinating, and for me it definitely does have some quality of "intelligence" to it.
That's true - and we see that sort of "seeking" behaviour in single celled organisms as well (e.g. https://www.mit.edu/~kardar/teaching/projects/chemotaxis(And...) - but this can be explained by a pretty simple feedback loop, and so the the difference in complexity between that and, say, the ability to keep track of different individuals in a social group and reacti differently, is orders of magnitude.
The Great Filter isn't a thing! There is no Fermi paradox! The Drake equation is malformed; multiplying expected values is a bad way to combine probability distributions. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
> The Great Filter isn't a thing! There is no Fermi paradox!
Just spent the time to read this whole paper, I think you're misstating some of the claims. A lot of people seem to be confused as to what is stated by the Great Filter/Fermi paradox/Drake equation.
First, let's define some terms (from wikipedia!): "The Great Filter, in the context of the Fermi paradox, is whatever prevents non-living matter from undergoing abiogenesis."
To be clear, the Great Filter is a solution to the Fermi paradox. If the Great Filter is true, then there is no paradox. The statement that there is no Fermi paradox is not the same as saying there is no Great Filter.
This paper suggests that there is a huge amount of uncertainty in $f_l$ and it actually can be quite small, meaning that it is not unlikely that we would see no alien life. (I won't comment on their choice of log-uniform priors, which does not seem intrinsically justified and lets them get much smaller results than if they had just picked uniform)
But that is the Great Filter argument! If there is a great filter, that would be a reason why $f_l$ would be lower and the fermi paradox doesn't occur. The paper never suggests that there is no great filter.
Now contextualizing to this discovery. If there is life on Venus, that changes our estimate of $f_l$, reducing our uncertainty and increasing the posterior probability mass towards life developing, which means that the fact that we haven't seen life must push the probability of development beyond that stage down or our current state of affairs is more unlikely than it was before.
Okay, you're right to say I shouldn't say "there is no Great Filter!" and I was fast and a bit too punchy with claims. What I want to say is "Nick Bostrom's Great Filter argument is not a cause for fear!" (https://nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf).
> First, let's define some terms (from wikipedia!): "The Great Filter, in the context of the Fermi paradox, is whatever prevents non-living matter from undergoing abiogenesis."
I think you ended this sentence early. Wikipedia continues that sentence "...from undergoing abiogenesis, in time, to expanding lasting life as measured by the Kardashev scale."
In the context of the Fermi Paradox ("where are they?"), Bostrom is saying that he hopes the Great Filter is "whatever prevents non-living matter from undergoing abiogenesis" ($f_l$), but it might not be. The Great Filter might be a thing that is ahead of us, says he. And, yeah, the prior that it isn't abiogenesis is higher if we find life in our backyard.
So, you're right, finding life on Venus reduces some uncertainty with $f_l$ and pushes some of the probability mass down the Drake equation, which remains a chain of expected value multiplications, which is a bad way to combine probability distributions.
Bostrom's whole argument is predicated on the proposition that the galaxy "should be" teeming with life, and if the argument that it "should be" teeming with life is bogus (boiling down bathtub curved or otherwise not-normally distributed probability distributions to means/point estimates and then multiplying them, even if we had $f_l$ nailed down exactly), then I think that's a win for not worrying about Bostrom's argument so much.
But you are right, it's hard to say "don't worry about it!" if I don't well and clearly define what "it" is, or worse, define it wrong ("the great filter!"). Thanks for pushing this into better clarity.
> Drake equation, which remains a chain of expected value multiplications, which is a bad way to combine probability distributions.
Perhaps the paper wants to say that the problem with the Drake equation is intrinsic to multiplying expected probability, but what they're really doing is laundering their great filter assumptions upwards in the Bayesian hierarchy (ie. into their prior distribution hyperparameters and choice of distribution)
ie. they are still using expected values, they're just using them
This discovery would totally undermine the thesis of this paper. Here's the paper:
> While the analysis above required us to make our own judgment calls about how to represent the state of scientific uncertainty for each of these parameters, our qualitative result is robust to many of these assumptions and can be driven by our claimed uncertainty in f_l alone
This is much less impressive than it sounds. What this means is that if we could verify there is alien life on Venus that independently evolved, then the prior they have for f_l is massively off and their claimed uncertainty is way off. Using a log-uniform + the lowest estimate for f_l they can find in the literature already explains most of their results, not the mere process of multiplying expected probabilities.
> So, you're right, finding life on Venus reduces some uncertainty with $f_l$ and pushes some of the probability mass down the Drake equation, which remains a chain of expected value multiplications, which is a bad way to combine probability distributions.
The only reason they get such a low result is because they push a lot of the probability mass of $f_l$ super super super super far to the left. By their model, the probability that $f_l$ is less than 0.0001 is something like 42%... if we discovered independently evolved life on venus that would shift extremely far to the right and change their results completely.
I only read the abstract, but from that I gather that the paper points out the (rather obvious) fact that the classic Drake equation ignores uncertainty, and that when you put realistic uncertainty bounds on the parameters, the total uncertainty is so large as to make the result meaningless.
> Imagine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 billion alien civilization. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one parameter Drake Equation, we determine that on average there should be 5 billion alien civilizations. Since we see zero, that’s quite the paradox, isn’t it?
No. In this case the mean is meaningless. It’s not at all surprising that we see zero alien civilizations, it just means the coin must have landed tails.
It's ok to call me stupid but I can't stop thinking about this: it makes sense regardless of what kind of alien intelligent life we are talking about that they will discover fire before solar panels. and we did almost destroyed the global climate with coal. so it always made sense to me that climate change is the first global obstacle that either entire species has to deal with or perish so climate or extreme environmental change is great filter or probably one of great filters.
There are two types of naive thinking one is we are children of god and god would never kill all of us and we are deeply rational beings when things get critical we will snap out of it and get things done. I believe in gospel of doubt and that there will be no miracles here. Environmentalists are already abandoning their field and reskilling not only because of lack of funding but lack of public attention and change.
Climate change has never struck me as an existential risk. Certainly it is a major problem. But it's slow moving. Slow moving problems are way more soluble than fast moving problems. (For comparison, a hostile AI takeoff theoretically could wipe out humanity in a few minutes given the proper means.) The worst case scenario from climate change itself seems to be a small population of humans living in an artificial habitat in 1000 years. And of course there is a broad spectrum of other outcomes from there. If, for example, we master interplanetary colonization quickly by our effort to get to Mars, this would greatly minimize the impact since we could adapt the technologies used to survive on Mars.
The biggest argument in favor of climate change being a true existential risk is if the conflicts it would spawn would result in a global war.
A lot of people don't seem to understand that this has always been the real nature of the threat. Climate change will cause severe cultural and economic stresses which will have political consequences which will eventually spill over into physical consequences.
It's far more of a threat to human culture and knowledge than to human DNA. The latter is likely to survive it in some form - albeit probably not a very interesting one. The former is already showing signs of stress and climate change has barely started.
At a macro level in that sense climate change is just increasing scarcity. Humans have been pretty good at dealing with issues of scarcity. There is no shortage of matter and energy in the universe, and we are very close to the knowledge needed to create enough energy for our needs through fusion.
Frankly, my belief is the only thing needed to parlay climate change into an accelerant for human progress as opposed to believing it's a hurdle to leap over is for us to see it that way, and use it as an excuse to build energy generation technologies 100x better than our current ones. The focus on renewables is depressing, and the memes around the solution to climate change to be "use less, consume less, focus on more clean energy" are equally so, since they creates a cynical belief there is a tradeoff between energy use and conservatism. We can have both.
We can't have the status quo and environmental conservatism together. A great deal of damage has been done and the trajectory is awful. I appreciate your optimism but I think climate change is only a slow moving problem in the tiny span of a human life. The chances that fusion is still 20 years away at the time civilization violently collapses seem decent to me.
Not to mention that if the problems created by climate change start costing lives and infrastructure, our ability to implement solutions dwindle as well. We need to have done the research and start on fixing the issues before populations and research facilities have been decimated or destroyed. The only reason we have the ability now to even think about colonizing mars and developing a new and unproven energy generation method is because we have such large societies where these things can eke out of the cracks.
The solutions to climate change already exists and the status quo can be preserved. For proof, you only have to compare the per capita carbon footprint different countries like Sweden, Switzerland and France to to the USA, which has similar GDP and ~1/3 the carbon footprint.
Alternatively, you can compare France to China, which has a greater CO2 footprint per capita, and half the GDP per capita.
I don’t think they are exporting more CO2 production than their GDP peers. For example, The USA has 3x the per capita CO2/GDP of France and the USA imports twice as much per capita from China. That is something I would like to learn more about tho if you have any resources.
> The focus on renewables is depressing, and the memes around the solution to climate change to be "use less, consume less, focus on more clean energy" are equally so, since they creates a cynical belief there is a tradeoff between energy use and conservatism. We can have both.
Many climate change activists aren't even countenancing nuclear power, known to be sustainable as well as much safer now than even in the recent past. I strongly agree that we can have both, we just need to build it.
When considering paths forward for climate change, there always seems to be the caveat "great idea, if we went whole-hog on that 20 years ago." This is doubly true, though, for nuclear plants -- just physically building the things takes a while, even if you ignore the problems around getting a massive pile of startup cash for an investment whose payoff hinges on energy prices 20 years out.
These aren't insurmountable problems, but they are pretty big. With solar, a person can stick it on their house. A grid-level installation can be built over time and starts paying for itself as soon as the things are plugged in.
Our current plans are targeting 2030 for massive carbon reductions, right? I don't see how starting a bunch of nuclear plants now really helps there. The most enthusiastic proponents of preventing global warming have always wanted to target 10-15 years out, so the energy isn't there for nuclear. Unfortunately. It would have been nice if we'd built a bunch of nuclear reactors 30 years ago.
Government borrowing costs, even for terms as long as 30 years, are at the lowest they've ever been. We don't necessarily need private startup capital if we agree that this is an important problem to solve. And unlike much of other such expenditure, these plants can be privatized to enthusiastic infra investors at a later date for a return likely well above the borrowing costs. Not to mention the ancillary benefits of stable energy for economic growth & probability.
As for time, the majority of this 20-30 years estimate consists of inertia and bureaucracy. As a country, we've built far more complicated (Apollo Project) and high-risk (Manhattan Project) things in the past in a compressed time frame, we had no choice then because we've faced clear existential risks. Our inability to countenance all this today says more about us as a society, than it does about the do-ability (within say a decade) of the task at hand.
I guess I can agree with you, but only as pessimist, which is a darn shame really.
It's true that at micro scale, consumers can buy panels and install them. But what matters at the macro scale is PV manufacturing rate. Installation rate can't exceed manufacturing rate.
PV manufacturing is complex and expensive. Most of the cost of PV is in the manufacturing machinery, since the raw materials are cheap. Adding new manufacturing capacity takes time.
It may be that PV can be ramped up faster than nuclear, but some of the new nuclear designs (NuScale and Oklo) could be cranked out pretty fast also.
I don't even think it's a risk to culture and knowledge, speaking as someone who ranks climate change as our highest long-term priority. Unmitigated it will cause millions of excess deaths and have a substantial drag effect on GDP growth, but it's not going to cause us to revert back to paleolithic or even 19th century living standards. Humanity will just be substantially better off in a century if we deal with it now instead of shrugging our shoulders.
That's right. Even _if_ the climate change killed off all the members of a civilization, provided there is any life left, it should rise up again in 100M years and presumably not do it again.
> Environmentalists are already abandoning their field and reskilling not only because of lack of funding but lack of public attention and change.
Thank god. We need people who are logical and pragmatic, not ideological and dogmatic. I don't think anyone has done as much damage to the climate as environmentalists, by opposing nuclear power. Fortunately the climate (no pun intended) slowly seems to be turning.
> I don't think anyone has done as much damage to the climate as environmentalists, by opposing nuclear power.
I think suburban homeowners and their organized interests have had much more to do with nuclear power. I am an "environmentalist" and am largely pro-nuclear power (although less than before due to increasing cost competitiveness of renewables).
Actual environmentalists (ie. people who are passionate about saving the environment and also analytical thinkers) like Stewart Brand have been on top of this for a while.
Environmentalism led to a lot of positive improvements, in spite of non-accomplishments like fake recycling programs. For all we know there could have been additional Fukushima like events if no one opposed plant construction in the past. More importantly, not all environmentalism is anti nuclear even if that was a primary cause at a time it seemed like the biggest existential threat.
I do think we should reinvest in nuclear power at the same time we're making other reforms to the energy sector and economy.
> Environmentalists are already abandoning their field and reskilling not only because of lack of funding but lack of public attention and change.
That tells me that they weren't all together convinced/interested/passionate about it, so good for them for switching. One thing I've noticed from people who love their field of research and are absolutely convinced of it -- they don't care how much it pays or who believes them. They do it partly because ego (want to be the first or among the first for groundbreaking studies) but mostly because of genuine interest and curiosity and the desire to show the world what they've learned.
[0] - https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-witnessed-in-re...