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The article refers to an interesting paradox: >>> However, the longer a civilization lasts, the moresustainable its practices would need to have become in orde
by lifeisstillgood 7y ago
The article refers to an interesting paradox:
>>> However, the longer a civilization lasts, the moresustainable its practices would need to have become in order tosurvive
- bribroder 7y agoThe opposite of a paradox
- Iv 7y agoThe paradox is that, because of that the longer a civilization survives, the less visible it would be in the geological record.
- corporate_shi11 7y agoThat's not a paradox though. More of an archaeological inconvenience.
- atq2119 7y agoIt's a paradox because a plausible first thought is that the longer a civilization exists, the more artefacts it leaves for future archeologists to find. The really long term truth might be the opposite, hence there's a paradox (in one sense of the word).
- ytgrfdeswqa 7y agoNot a paradox, just an indication that these authors (and you) are not good at thinking like archaeologists. As an archaeologist myself, this whole paper reads like complete nonsense.
- mytailorisrich 7y agoI don't think we can imply that 'sustainable' means 'less geological evidence'. Biologically-produced oxygen resulted in one of the worst mass extinction, with ample geological evidence, but turned out to be quite sustainable.
- joe_the_user 7y agoThis might explain "Fermi's paradox". It seems like all the models of extraterrestrial life being visible rest on the assumption that this life would be the product of the equivalent our present rate of growth continuing and quickly reaching cosmic scales. If that's basically impossible and intelligent life that survives is living sustainably, then we wouldn't have star-enfolding Dyson spheres and similar things that are detectable at cosmic distances.
- joe_the_user 7y agoOr, another possibility is that the sustainability of continuous short-term exponential growth varies from location to location but it's not going to be infinitely sustainable anywhere. Thus we might see blips but we won't see a "colonized galaxy". IE, the societies that keep up exponential growth to a cosmic scale probably still won't have solved the problem of indefinite exponential growth. We know the ways that, on Earth, the increase in human knowledge and productive produces unintended consequences with significant chances of destroying us. We don't yet know similar mechanism in space but it seems quite plausible these would exist. Dyson spheres aren't even gravitationally stable (see Larry Niven's Ring World series).
- marcus_holmes 7y agoI noticed that they didn't provide a citation for that statement, or the statement about "the more sustainable its practices, the less geological impact it would have". I'm not disputing them, but it did cause me to stop and ponder a bit. If we end up spreading solar panels all over our deserts, and wind farms over our continental shelves, will that be less detectable? Especially since there appears to be natural causes for large changes in atmospheric carbon (volcanoes hitting large oil deposits seems to be the thing they propose for this).