0001-01-01

We will all boil

My teenage daughter, even though she is not a scientist or engineering type, humours me quite often by discussing with me various philosophical questions about the domains which can be described as the humanist ones. One of the topics that we’ve been discussing a couple of times already is the Fermi paradox.

Fermi paradox: a quick recap is the question about what happens, what happened with other species in the universe. We know that we are alive. We are alive on one planet in a single solar system that exists for one star. We know that in the universe there are billions of stars with billions of billions of planets. This is very highly probable that we are not the only intelligent species in the universe.

So where are the other species? This is the Fermi paradox. Even though it is highly likely that other intelligent species should exist, we never saw them. Why? There are multiple answers that try to resolve this paradox. For example one of the theories (and this is one that I really like) is the theory of the dark forest. The idea of the dark forest is that the universe is so hostile to intelligent species that the moment that some species show that they exist they are immediately eaten by bigger more advanced civilizations. That’s why everybody is sitting silent and hopes they won’t be discovered for as long as possible.

Another explanation is that we are simply the first. Someone has to be first and maybe we are the first. It’s not like we are super old in the terms of the lifetime of the universe. Maybe we are just the first. Maybe we will be the species who is going to dominate the universe. It’s possible. Unlikely but possible.

And in this piece I want to address another theory which is called the Great Filter. The Great Filter is something that prevents civilizations from progressing toward the higher state and being able to actually communicate with the other intelligent species in the universe. There are a couple of ideas about what this Great Filter might be:

Maybe simply due to meteors killing the planets, the species is going to be killed before they get to advance.
Or maybe the wars are going to wipe the civilizations, internal conflict.

I have my own theory which I believe is highly likely and I would like to share it with you.

And this theory is: everybody are going to boil.

I will start with adjacent knowledge. Right now we cannot really say that we are in the age of industry because in the age of industry long past we are probably more in the age of the technology where technology actually rises. We have problems with our planet right now that we are quite aware of. One of the biggest problems that we are aware of is global warming. Global warming is a fact and I’m not going to dispute this. I also believe that even though global warming exists there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. It’s not something that we can worry about.

It is also important to recognize that global warming is in effect and we will most likely see very negative effects of it in the future, which might impact our socialization very highly and it might even add to the extinctions of the human race. Of course not in a day or in a week. Given that the progress is going to be hotter and hotter, the resources are going to be more scarce than scarce. Even today we have AI, which uses a lot of water, which is a very important resource when we are talking about global warming. At some point there are going to be fewer children and fewer possibilities to grow out and to develop ourselves and to evolve. At some point we are just going to wither. It’s maybe going to take 300, 500, or 1,000 years. I have no idea because we as humans are highly adaptable but I do believe that at some point global warming is going to impact our demise.

And here is the piece of the puzzle that, for me at least, explains Fermi’s paradox. This piece of the puzzle is all about engines. And second law of thermodynamics and can be phrased as: Not all heat can be converted into work in a cyclic process.

Can you already see connections I’m trying to make? If not I’ll be more direct.

The Age of Industry started to happen a couple of hundred years ago. It doesn’t really matter where precisely but the fact is that right now we are producing things for a couple of hundred years already. Industry is creating stuff. It doesn’t really matter what kind of stuff. We are producing rails, we are producing fonts for print, we are producing books, we are producing different kinds of items, pretty much for hundreds of years. This usually is automated to some degree by automation. In this particular area we are using engines and we know that it’s not possible to have a perfect engine. We will always lose some heat in the process. This heat, of course, we are talking about the heat itself but we don’t really consider what happens more with the heat. Heat is not the only product. There might be more. There might be, for example, a couple on the outside.

Could it be that the current situation with global warming is a result of our industry age that started happening at the start of the industry age and right now, a couple of hundred years later, we figured out, “Okay we are fucked”? This is what I believe.

And I believe this is a law that this happens everywhere in the universe, that we are not the first intelligent species and we are not the last intelligent species that’s going to experience this. I believe that every intelligent species in the world, in the universe, is sooner or later going to enter the Age of Industry. At the beginning the Age of Industry is obviously an infant phase so it’s not like you enter the Age of Industry and then you know everything about the planet, about the space, about everything that you’re living on. I think that our process is, I would say, quite standard and could be traced to other intelligent species that might exist in the universe. I believe that everybody is happily producing things until the moment where they figured out that this process of producing things actually started to heat up the planet.

And as I mentioned regarding the Earth, I don’t think this process is reversible. I think it is a simple effect of how we are evolving.

Before going further I will, however, analyze this idea of mine because we’ve been discussing this a couple of times. I highly believe in Occam’s razor of not multiplying the entities beyond the need.

When you are talking about different kinds of Great Filters, like meteors or ancient civilizations or black holes, we are creating entities from the thin air. We don’t know if they exist; it’s just a theory.

Here my theory is actually we have all the data. We don’t have to create something that doesn’t exist. We know that perfect engines cannot exist. We know that heat is one of the side products. We know that we’ve been in the industry of agents, like nobody objects to that. We know that we have global warming. Everything that we know just existed. I don’t need to create new entities and there’s not a lot of them, like three or four in total maybe. It’s simple and Occam’s Razor backs up the simple ideas.

And so in short the pattern goes like this:

Intelligence is developed and then it progresses by making buildings by evolving culturally.
Then slowly it enters the age of industry. It finds that it can produce items important for every day need with great enthusiasm.
The civilization starts to produce more and more and that industry progresses and more and more heat is being released in the process. This is invisible at the beginning but this specie is contributing to the global warming of the specific planet.
There is even more heat and at some point the species starts to notice that the warming of the planet happens. The species also notice that it’s going to have a very big impact on the world and on the species itself and they try to reverse it but it’s not possible to reverse it.
From that population of this specie starts to drop because of the difficult conditions on the planet. The progress halts and that’s it.
Maybe after a couple of thousands or millions of years the planet recovers and there is a new intelligent species but in the end it doesn’t really matter because the same cycle is going to repeat over and over.

I believe in my theory. I think it’s simple. I think it’s elegant. It doesn’t change a thing. It’s just a philosophical answer to a philosophical question.

Now if you like that, now you can call it Alexander & Alice Kaminski’s Universe Theory. It would be fun to have my own :)