A mostly entertaining but sometimes disturbing essay on the Fermi paradox, detailing 12 strange reasons why we haven´t found the darn aliens. Here is the most bizarre reason:
>>>A sufficiently advanced alien species will inevitably heat up its planet as its society and its energy needs grow. This could trigger runaway climate change, as humans are doing on Earth, and may doom those aliens to an early extinction. But what if the fast-growing alien society made an early switch to eco-friendly, renewable energy? Could that spare them, allowing the aliens to grow, thrive and expand throughout the cosmos without consequence.
>>>Sorry, but no, according to a bleak theoretical study published to the preprint database arXiv in September 2024. The study found that an exponentially growing alien species using 100% renewable energy would still heat up their planet with waste heat, which is inevitably produced from any energy expenditure according to the second law of thermodynamics. This waste heat would continue to build up as long as the society's energy demands grew, eventually triggering disastrous climate change within 1,000 years of that society's industrial revolution.
We can´t say we haven´t been warned.
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