Four facts from the future

 

There is no production growth – just increasing consumption

Neither Norway nor the world has seen real production growth for many years. We have had steadily increasing consumption, and financed this consumption by using up an ever-increasing portion of our capital, i.e. natural resources. In Norway, we have long been doing what we call oil production. But oil production ended 145 million years ago. We are pumping up our capital, the values on the seabed, and using them up, and we call this production. It is the same as withdrawing money from your savings account, spending it, and calling it ‘income’. Accountants will, rightly, be accused of fraud if they convert savings to income in this manner.

In 2014, a report was published that calculated the annual value of ecosystem services worldwide at 145 trillion 2007 dollars. (Costanza et al.: ‘Changes in the global value of ecosystem services’, Global Environmental Change 26 ). Based on these calculations, the annual loss of ecosystem values due to land use changes alone was estimated at between 4.3 and 20.2 trillion dollars per year.

Earth Overshoot Day in 2025 is estimated to fall on 25 July. By then, we will need 1.75 Earths for the extraction of natural resources to be in balance with nature's production capacity. This date is coming earlier every year. Norway's Overshoot Day fell on 16 April, so if everyone in the world consumed as much as we do, we would need 3.5 Earths to be in balance.

There is no ‘advanced civilisation’ out there

The terms ‘advanced’, “intelligent” and ‘civilisation’ are anthropocentric: they are words of praise that we use to describe (what we perceive to be) our own best qualities. And then we assume that our (supposedly best) qualities are universally valid and applicable.

The fly agaric mushroom gathers information from its surroundings through long root threads. It uses this information to regulate growth. The spruce communicates with its surroundings through its roots (via root fungi) and by releasing aerosols. In this way, it warns other individuals of bark beetle attacks so that they can prepare a defence. The spruce also subsidises its closest relatives by feeding them through its roots via the root fungi: Is all this an expression of ‘intelligence’? Corn has many more active genes than you and I have. Does that make corn more advanced? If you represented one of the 2,400 known species of termites, would you ask: Will we find creatures in space that build mounds as intelligently designed as ours, with equally advanced cooling and ventilation systems?

The idea that life evolves ‘forward’ is a late Victorian notion of development and progress. The world was constantly improving thanks to the blessings of civilisation – such as the steam engine and Five O'clock Tea. But evolution, unlike the English colonists, has no destination in mind: not forward, not backward – just here and there in fits and starts. In this way, it ensures that life forms are constantly changing in line with changing conditions. The housefly has evolved through many more generations than you and I: does that make it more ‘advanced’?

If we find something similar to multicellular life out there, it will be much more different from you and me than the fly fungus, the spruce, the corn or the termite. It will share no common ancestors with us. Why would they build what we call ‘civilisation’? Not even the hedgehog has come up with anything like that, and the hedgehog is one of our closest relatives.

Two astronomers. (Tom Westby and Christopher Conselice: ‘The Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong Limits for Intelligent Life’, ‘The Astrophysical Journal’, June 2020) have used Drake's equation to calculate that there are at least 36 civilisations in the galaxy capable of communicating across interstellar distances.

But 97% of stars are older than the Sun. Most of these civilisations should have been here millions of years ago – but there is no trace of them. If I set even stricter requirements, the same calculation leaves only 0.58 such planets in the galaxy.

Homo habilis imperceptibly transitioned into (a kind of) human: it developed culture as a survival strategy. Macaques and chimpanzees also have culture, you say: Of course. Both Putin and your neighbour Fredrik have weapons: Putin has nuclear weapons, and Fredrik has a slingshot.

Language, culture and technology are based on a genetic adaptation that is unique to us. There was no reason why language skills had to emerge in any of the many hominids that roamed Africa two and a half million years ago. If we suddenly disappeared, it would not be chimpanzees that would take over after us, as in Planet of the Apes. It would probably be the cockroaches.

If I don't use Drake's equation, but instead use the probability that 10 critical events that have been necessary for human evolution would also occur on another planet that is a twin of Earth, I get a combined probability that beings like us would arise of 1.125 x 10-10. And then there are probably many other random but necessary events in the evolution of life that I have overlooked.

How we can travel to the stars

Give a spaceship a steady acceleration of 1 G, i.e. the same gravity as on Earth. After two and a half years, the spaceship is travelling at 99% of the speed of light. You will then have travelled 6 light years! In a ‘stationary’ coordinate system, 6.8 years will have passed. Now you start to slow down with 1 G. After another 2.5 years (on the spaceship), you will have travelled a total of 12 light years. You then land on one of the planets of Tau Ceti and start your new life, five years older than when you left. ‘At the same time’, 13.6 years have passed according to how your friends back home measure time.

In order to reach a solar system 12 light years away as quickly as we would like, a 100,000-tonne spacecraft must be supplied with a total of 30.4*1018 kWt. Every year, the Sun delivers more than 100 million times as much energy as these 30.4*1018 kWt. Our hyper-intelligent descendants, the AIs, can use solar power to produce antimatter. This would enable them to reach the edge of the universe within a human lifetime. But they cannot travel home again: if they do, they will discover that the Earth has aged 27 billion years while they have been away.

How long can consumption growth continue?

Humans are like bacteria in a Petri dish: We increase our consumption exponentially, until the dish is full. Unlike bacteria, we have always been able to find larger dishes, once the one we are in is full. Let us see how long this can go on.

From the Industrial Revolution to the present day, humanity's energy consumption has increased by 1.7% per year. In 2015, our consumption reached 1.6*1014 kWt – approximately 1/10,000th of the amount of energy that the Sun shines down on Earth.

Let's assume we continue with a modest annual growth rate of 1.4%. That means we double our consumption every 50 years. In practice, we only manage to use 50% of the solar energy that hits the planet. That means growth here on Earth will come to an end in the year 2630. But:

We can build a Dyson sphere and utilise half of all solar energy. Then we have another 1550 years.

The Sun is a fairly average star, so roughly speaking, we can assume that the galaxy produces 300 billion times as much energy as the Sun. If we continue to double our consumption every 50 years, we will have used up all the available energy in the entire galaxy after 1906 years. In the year 6086, it will be full.

But the universe has about 100 billion galaxies, according to cosmologists. We will be able to fill them up in 1827 new years. So in the year 7913, growth will come to an end. Completely. We therefore have approximately 5900 years of exponential growth ahead of us before the laws of nature, the universe and the exponential function pull the plug. Then the largest of all Petri dishes, the universe, will be full. We will have to find more universes.