Global Warming and the Drake Equation

Global Warming and the Drake Equation

One day, Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with colleagues Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York, all eminent physicists working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.  A recent spate of UFO sightings had entered the discussions on the walk over to the Fuller Lodge for lunch. Although the conversation had moved on, as the group sat down, Teller recalled that in the middle of the conversation, Fermi came out with the quite unexpected blurted out, "Where is everybody?" According to Teller, the result was general laughter because, despite Fermi's question coming out of the clear blue, everybody around the table immediately understood that he was talking about extraterrestrial aliens. 

Fermi had simply considered that the galaxy is billions of years old, there are a billion-billion stars in it, and we are here. What are the odds of being the first and only intelligent life on the scene? Where is everybody, indeed?

Twenty-three years later, Frank Drake, a notable radio astronomer following up on Fermi's logic, was interested in exploring the rationality of searching for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations by monitoring for artificial radio transmissions. So, he devised a rather straight forward equation to evaluate the probabilities of there being other technologically advanced civilizations in our galaxy with which we might hope to communicate. His now-famous formula laid the foundation for the SETI projects ongoing today.  

Starting with the rate of star formation, Drake's equation progressed through a set of six modifying factors: what percent of stars likely had planets, what percent of those would be habitable, what percent would evolve life, etc. The final variable, labeled the "L" factor, was how long the average civilization, capable of interstellar radio communication, could be expected to last. This was important because the issue was not how many advanced civilizations have been or would there ever be, but how many are here now.

Drake and the other scientists who gathered to explore the issue plugged in an admittedly speculative range of assumptions for each factor. They knew they did not know enough to get an accurate answer; the goal was only to define a reasonable range within which the answer might lie. When done, the formula suggested there should be between 20 to 50,000 communicable civilizations currently scattered among our galaxy. The factor that dominated this large range was the longevity factor "L". Probably among the most speculative of the factors, they had ventured a range of 1,000 to 100,000 years.  

At this point, humanity has had radio technology for just about 100 years and does not yet have the ability to meaningfully transmit across interstellar distances. So, we have a long way to go to log the minimum assumed longevity, perhaps even start the clock on Drake's L factor.  

At the time of his conference, Drake had already begun searching. SETI programs, as they are now known, have since grown in capacity and sophistication. After sixty years of earnest listening, nothing has been heard, not a peep. Were the assumptions so flawed, or is there something portentous in this silence?

For billions of years, the only route to biological success on earth has been adaptation to the extant environment, whether by physical form or, in the case of higher organisms, intellectual response. But humans have recently broken that paradigm. We have been adapting the environment to us, on a local scale at least, since the advent of agriculture.  

For the first ten thousand years, it seemed all good to our ancestors, even to very recent generations. In modern times, we have identified isolated demographic collapses in the past, at least contributed to by unsustainable human manipulation of the environment and, in the case of Easter Island, wholly caused by it. But, for the most part, the changes humans have wrought were so localized and slow in implementation that it all seemed natural; whatever we might do, Mother Earth could absorb and adapt to it.  

But with the formalization of the scientific method and the subsequent industrial revolution, our manipulations, we now know, have become global in their impact. No species has attempted to manage an ecosystem and planetary climate before, other than perhaps the twenty- to fifty-thousand advanced civilizations that Dark's equation says should be out there that we can't find. 

Our first real hint that there were serious risks involved in manipulating an entire global ecosystem was discovering that the ozone layer was disappearing. Fortunately, a fairly painless fix was available. But now we realize we are presiding over an ongoing and accelerating mass extinction. We are witnessing a decline in biomass. The food chain of the oceans is at risk, due to warming and acidification, a consequence of altered the composition of the atmosphere of the planet in ways that inherently impact the climate.  The frank reality is that we have unwittingly taken Earth off its climatic autopilot and will never be able to hand it back.

True, other natural variables also impact the climate, but that only complicates the situation as it muddies the waters about what is due to us and what is not and what the combined consequences will be of any particular action taken or not taken.  

How we conduct ourselves, as relates to the climate, is now a permanent item on our collective global policy agenda that will impact different places on the planet in varying ways and degrees and with differing consequences. It is like driving a car with an oiled, smeared windowscreen on a winding road, the controls of which are attached to the critical components with rubber bands.

The tragedy of an overburdened planet.  More to come.

At the same time, a great deal of humanity still lives in subsistence poverty. Climate impacts, combined with overpopulation, are forcing mass migrations, stressing economies, and undermining civil order in many places around the world.  The resulting mass migrations are, in turn, causing serious political divisions in the most advanced nations on the planet. Our military considers all these dislocations an existential threat to national security.    

It seems obvious now, in retrospect, that we are and have been for some time wading into a critical and inherently dangerous transition in status - from participant to manager of our planet's environment.  By tapping what seemed to be a huge buried treasure of stored energy that we assumed we could pull from the ground without consequence, we walked into a dead-end ally.  We have built a world and a population that we can't currently sustain without that energy and yet now realize we can't keep using it either.  We are, in short, out on an environmental and economic limb. 

The connection with the Drake equation is the realization that this transition, which we now can see is inherently fraught with danger, is like a fairytale right-of-passage that every civilization must navigate successfully to advance to the state of development contemplated in the Drake Equation.  Having progressed to the point of learning how to read nature's laws, every civilization risks overplaying newfound powers over their environment before discovering consequences they had not dreamed of.  Perhaps Drake was one factor short in his equation: the T factor represents the percent of advanced scientific civilizations that would successfully navigate this critical threshold challenge and advance to the stage assumed by L, which we have yet to achieve.  

So, how serious is our situation? As a result of a combination of ignorance, scientific conservatism, and political and public relations expediency, I think the problem is being understated. Humanity is about to go through the most profound change since the advent of agriculture. What people aspire to, how we measure personal worth and success, how we define freedom, economic structure and theory, our political values, and how we govern are going to profoundly change in response to this existential challenge. The question is how traumatic the passage to the other side will be, whether it will be utopian or dystopian in direction, and what will be left of the natural biological diversity we inherited on the other side. 

But all that is for another post.  

This issue is not a recent one for me.  Here is an earlier, less formal take on climate change and our collective approach to it.