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Has Climate Change Already Been Solved By Aliens?
There is a thought-provoking article in The Atlantic on whether or not aliens have already faced climate change, and, if so, can we tell how they've beaten it.
Remarkably, science has now advanced to point where we can take a first step at answering this question. I know this because my colleagues and I have just published a first study mapping out possible histories of alien planets, the civilizations they grow, and the climate change that follows. Our team was made up of astronomers, an earth scientist, and an urban ecologist...
Of course, we have no direct evidence relating to any exo-civilizations or their histories. What we do have, however, are the laws of planets. Our robot emissaries have already visited most of the worlds in the solar system. We’ve set up weather stations on Mars, watched the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, and seen rain cascade across methane lakes on Titan. From these worlds we learned the generic physics and chemistry that make up what’s called climate. We can use these laws to predict the global response of any planet to something like an asteroid impact or perhaps the emergence of an energy-hungry industrial civilization.
Larry Niven provides us science fiction fans with one of the grandest, most memorable, and possibly even observable-at-a-great-distance solutions to puppeteerogenic climate change:
"We had brought suitable worlds from nearby systems, increasing our agricultural worlds to four, and setting them in a Kemplerer Rosette."
Read the article How Do Aliens Solve Climate Change? at The Atlantic.
There’s lots of hope riding on our talk about building a sustainable civilization on Earth. But how do we know that’s even possible? Does anyone across the cosmos ever make it?
"...we found that a sun was a liability rather than an asset. We moved our world to a tenth of a light year's distance, keeping the primary only as an anchor. We needed the farming worlds and it would have been dangerous to let our world wander randomly through space. Otherwise we would not have needed a sun at all."
(Read more about Larry Niven's Kemplerer (Klemperer) Rosette)
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/10/2018)
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