Never Kiss an Alien Girl. Or, an Ode to the Death of Science

 

I remember having read a science fiction novel, several years ago, that told of the encounter between an alien spaceship and a human one, somewhere in deep space. In the story, humans and aliens breathe different atmospheres and can only make contact through a glass barrier. But, slowly, they begin to understand each other. At one point, one of the Earth astronauts deepens his relationship with an alien female so much that the captain has to rebuke him, saying, "Be careful! You don't want to fall in love with a green alien who breathes chlorine and drinks hydrochloric acid." (The novel was by Soviet writer Ivan Yefremov, if I remember correctly). 

We don't often fall in love with Teflon-skinned aliens, however, it happens sometimes to be fascinated by diversity, by discovering completely unexpected worlds. Sometimes, even shocking worlds that you wouldn't want to exist. But diversity always enriches you. If something exists -- and perhaps somewhere there really are chlorine-breathing aliens -- there must be some reason why it exists. 

I had such an experience while reading a post published on the blog of a friend of mine, A text I can only describe as alien. Not that it is not understandable: it is written in a Terrestrial language that I can, more or less, decipher. But I cannot find a single sentence in it that is consistent with my view of the universe. Nothing that matches the data I have, or with which I might even vaguely agree. For all I can tell, it could be from another galaxy. Try reading it yourself. If you have any technical-scientific education at all, you will get the same impression. And note that it is not the only one of its kind, it is part of an onrushing wave that's washing humankind's memesphere. 

Warning. I am not publishing this text to expose it to the ridicule of anyone, or even to criticize it. On the contrary, I am admired by the frankness of the author. I don't know her personally, but I am overwhelmingly convinced that she is an excellent person. If I present this text to you, it is a bit like presenting a funeral ode. This text is not a poem, but, in a way, it has poetic value. It is an ode to the death of science. 

Science, yes, the science that had started with the Renaissance astronomers who meticulously, painstakingly, night after night, collected data on the motion of the planets and stars. Perhaps they really thought there were angels pushing, but that did not make their work any less meticulous. Galileo's science, the one that says that "wisdom is the child of experience." Science, the one made of "1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration," the science for which nothing that is not rigorously proven is true, and where everything is quantified, everything is measured, everything is evaluated. That science we were taught when we were freshmen in college. Maybe it never really existed, but we believed in it. And if we believed in it, it existed, in a sense. 

And it's all gone. I don't know what effect it has on you to see the face of one of the many TV virologists who have been raging for the last two and a half years. To me, it feels like what I would expect if I were to kiss an alien who just drank a hydrochloric acid cocktail. And I'm not the only one who has that feeling. I know many people who feel heavily cheated by the way they have been treated during the past two and a half years, always under the guise of "science." These people have lost all faith in science, at least in "official" science. It's not that they've all become Flat Earthers, but now they notice the many hoaxes they are foisting on us in the name of science. And I'm guessing that these people are not those on the dumb side of the Gaussian curve. 

Unfortunately, you can also go too far with this attitude. There has also emerged a group of people who reject science outright and remake their own view of the universe on the basis of completely different assumptions. As does, among many others, the author of the text, below. And there is no way to find an agreement with them. Science (that thing we used to call "science") starts from certain assumptions, postulates if you like. You can't really prove them: you can only accept or reject them. There is no rigorously rational way to convince someone who believes that science is a hoax that it is not. It is the scientists' fault that in the eyes of so many people science has become a hodgepodge of corrupt hucksters paid by the powers that be. 

It may be that, like so many other things, like Communism or the cult of Jupiter, science too has come to an end. Perhaps it had to for some reason -- perhaps someone in high places wanted to destroy it because it was annoying with its insistence on certain things, like the need to do something about climate change. Either way, that's the way it was. 

So what? Well, we'll just march into the future in the dark, blindfolded, and with our optic nerves severed. What could possibly go wrong with that?  

 

Note added after publication: I received several comments on the text below. Some said that it was a bunch of idiocies and criticized me for having reprinted it. Others said that they saw nothing wrong with it, on the contrary, they agreed with most of its statements. I am impressed (and also scared) by the depth of the chasm that separates the two positions. Will we ever be able to mend this knowledge fracture? Probably not: it looks more like a sort of epistemological version of California's St. Andreas fault. It is causing epistemological earthquakes and, eventually, one of the two sides will disappear underwater.  

Translated from Italian. The author's name and Web address are withheld.

<..> It should be kept in mind that the same centers of power (military first and foremost) that ride the anthropogenic climate catastrophism and provide their solutions are the same ones that constructed the climate change "narrative," aware of the role and power that such a narrative could entail in the future.

That climate change depends on the earth's history and its natural cycles of cooling and warming is a sensible assumption since the earth is not a machine; it is a living organism that evolves, influences other organisms, and is affected by them. Then there is the responsibility of that part of mankind that has damaged and still damages the ozone layer by exploding nuclear bombs and launching rockets and satellites, that uses electromagnetic technologies capable of modifying the ionosphere, that sprays the skies with substances that shield sunlight bringing about a change in climatic conditions, as well as being harmful to all living things.

Perhaps the deception of co2 as the worst of all possible evils is revealed when we realize that it is not a pollutant, it is the main component of living things, and without it plants will not survive..... and neither will human beings, at least as long as they remain as such 

One might think that it has been released in excess, but then why does earth's history show that periods with higher CO2 concentration (higher than the present one) corresponded to a maximum explosion of plant life? and then why are the "climate change deniers" who see the decarbonization program as an environmental catastrophe being obscured without allowing them a confrontation?

Once upon a time, deniers were rightly accused of being paid by oil companies to deny climate warming (later changed to change).

With the same eagerness we should have asked who the promoters of climate catastrophism were funded by (Al Gore, Club of Rome, UN, WHO IPCC, NATO WWF........ behind them we would have found Rockefeller, Soros, the British monarchy......)

I don't know what impact CO2 has on climate change, but more importantly, I don't know if the climate is changing and what the causes are, for sure the overlords of evil will never declare war on the war machine and its emissions of chlorides heavy metals radiation and co2, just as they will never pick on the rockets that take Musk's and Bezos' satellites into the sky.

They just happen to be picking on the least harmful molecule among many...... who knows, maybe someday in addition to accusing us of being too many, they will ask us to reduce the exhalation of carbon dioxide...... just as some "environmentalists" are blaming tree corpses for emitting co2 during decomposition.

Meanwhile, under the guise of energy emergency, in some parts of Europe (Romania) "protected" forests are being allowed to be cut down, the use of shale gas is being implemented, the use of coal is increasing, nuclear power plants are being reactivated, dangerous high-pollution regasifiers are being imposed, oil extraction is increasing, monstrous wind turbines and photovoltaics will be installed everywhere..... in short, we are witnessing an acceleration of the destruction of the earth and "the inevitable" increase of co2 in the atmosphere.

Well wrote a friend of mine about the ridiculous clock that marks the time until the catastrophe..... because it is also in the grotesque details that we see the deception. In this regard, it is useful to recall some famous apocalyptic statements from "authoritative" voices: UN 1989: if global warming is not reversed by 2000, rising seas will cause disasters,

Al Gore 2008: the entire Arctic ice cap will disappear within 5 years (2013).

Of these statements with "randomly" shot dates there have been countless, and all of them have been meant to instill fear, to make people familiar with a future danger and the need for someone to manage it.

This morning the sky was blue, clear, then the usual planes began to spray forming a thin veil. It is a case of saying that they make it right over our eyes! So many people have no memory of the beautiful blue skies of the past. It's as if the sky is an entity that doesn't "belong" to them, it's none of their business...... and to me this mentality looks more much more worrisome than CO2.

The reality is that they are deceiving us by pointing out one problem to hide other and far more serious ones. By turning co2 from a life-sustaining molecule into yet another invisible enemy to be fought, the evil overlords have embarked on the final confrontation against nature, which is called the ecological/digital transition. The plan to control and manipulate life, including climate, is being carried out, so we can identify climate change theory as the tool to bring it to fruition, and with the blessing of the green mass, who have become useful idiots of the 'Transcodigital Agenda'.

According to Nigel Calder's testimony, in the late 1980s Margaret Thatcher went to the Royal Society and said to the IPCC engineers, "here's the money to prove the thesis of anthropogenic global warming!" They came up with the first major report that predicted climate disasters as a result of global warming. When Calder went to the scientific press conference, he was impressed by two things: First, the simplicity and striking power of the message. Second, the total indifference about all climate science at that time and especially the role of the sun, which had instead been the topic of a major meeting at the Royal Society only a few months earlier.

The Long Term Perspectives of Nuclear Energy: Revisiting the Fermi Paradox

This is a revisitation of a post that I published in 2011, with the title "The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi Paradox" Here, I am expanding the calculations of the previous post and emphasizing the relevance of the paradox on the availability of energy for planetary civilizations, and in particular on the possibility of developing controlled nuclear fusion. Of course, we can't prove that nuclear fusion is impossible simply because we have not been invaded by aliens, so far. But these considerations give us a certain feeling on the orders of magnitude involved in the complex relationship between energy use and civilization. Despite the hype, nuclear energy of any kind may remain forever a marginal source of energy. (Above, an "Orion" spaceship, being pushed onward by the detonation of nuclear bombs at the back).

 

 

The discovery of thousands of extrasolar planets is revolutionizing our views of the universe. It seems clear that planets are common around stars and, with about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, organic life cannot be that rare. Of course, "organic life" doesn't mean "intelligent life," and the latter doesn't mean "technologically advanced civilization." But, with so many planets, the galaxy may well be teeming with alien civilizations, some of them technologically as advanced as us, possibly much more.

The next step in this line of reasoning is called the "Fermi Paradox," said to have been proposed for the first time by the physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s: "if aliens exist, why aren't they here?" Even at speeds slower than light, nothing physical prevents a spaceship from crossing the galaxy from end to end in a million years or even less. Since our galaxy is more than 10 billion years old, intelligent aliens would have had plenty of time to explore and colonize every star in the galaxy. But we don't see aliens around, and that's the paradox. 

One possible interpretation of the paradox is that we are alone as sentient beings in the galaxy, perhaps in the whole universe. There may be a bottleneck, also known as the "Great Filter," that stops organic life from developing into the kind of civilization that engages in space-faring. 

Paradoxes are often extremely useful scientific tools. They state that two contrasting beliefs cannot be both true, and that's usually powerful evidence that some of our assumptions are not correct. The Fermi paradox is not so much about whether alien civilizations are common or not, but about the idea that interstellar travel is possible. It may simply be telling us that traveling from one star to another is very difficult, perhaps impossible. It is not enough to say that a future civilization will know things we can't even imagine. Any technology must obey the laws of physics. And that puts limits to what it can achieve. 

The problem of interstellar travel is not so much about how to build an interstellar spaceship. Already in the 1950s, some designs had been proposed that could do the job. An "Orion" starship would move by riding nuclear explosions at its back, and it was calculated that it could reach the nearest stars in a century or so. Of course, it would be a daunting task to build one, but there is no reason to think that it would be impossible. More advanced versions might use more exotic energy sources: antimatter or even black holes.

The real problem is not technology, it is cost. Building a fleet of interstellar spaceships requires a huge expenditure of resources that should be maintained for a time sufficiently long to carry out an interstellar exploration program - thousands of years at least. An estimate of the minimum power that a civilization needs to engage in sustained interstellar travel is of the order of 1000 terawatts (TW). It is just a guess, but it has some logic. The power installed today on our planet is approximately 18 TW and the most we could do with that was to explore the planets of our system, and even that rather sporadically. Clearly, to explore the stars, we need much more.

Of course, we are not getting close, and we may well soon start moving in the opposite direction. John Greer and Tim O'Reilly may have been the first to note that the "great filter" that generates the Fermi paradox could be explained in terms of the limitations of fossil fuels on Earth-like planets. Because of the "bell-shaped" production curve of a limited resource, a civilization flares up and then collapses. I dubbed this phenomenon the "Hubbert Hurdle" in 2011. The hurdle may be especially difficult to overcome if the Seneca effect kicks in, making the decline even faster, a true collapse.

But let's imagine that an alien civilization, or our own in the future, avoids an irreversible collapse and that it moves to nuclear energy. Let's assume it can avoid the risk of nuclear annihilation. Can nuclear energy provide enough energy for interstellar travel? There are many technical problems with nuclear energy, but a fundamental one is the availability of nuclear fuel. Without fuel, not even the most advanced spaceship can go anywhere.

 
Let's start with the technology we know: nuclear fission. Fissile elements (more exactly, "nuclides") are those that can create the kind of chain reaction that can be harnessed as an energy source. Only one of these nuclides occurs naturally in substantial amounts in the universe: the 235 isotope of uranium. It is a curious quirk of the laws of physics that this nuclide exists, alone. It is created in the explosions of supernova stars and also in the merging of neutron stars. It has accumulated on Earth's surface in amounts sufficient for humans to exploit to build tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and to currently produce about 0.3 TW of power. Fission could power a simple version of the Orion spaceship, but could it power a civilization able to explore the galaxy? Probably not. 

 

The uranium reserves on Earth are estimated at about 6 million tons. Currently, we burn some 60.000 tons of uranium per year to produce 0.3 TW of energy.  It means we would need 200 million tons per year (600,000 tons per day) to stay at the 1000 TW level estimated as needed for interstellar travel. At this rate, and with the current technology, the reserves would last for about 10 days (!). 

 

This is no surprise: it was already known in the 1950s that the uranium reserves are not sufficient even to keep our current civilization going using the fission of U(235) nuclides. Imagine engaging in the colonization of the galaxy! But, of course, we know that we are not limited to U(235) for fission energy. There also exist "fissionable" nuclides that cannot sustain a chain reaction, but that can be turned ("bred") into fissile nuclides when bombarded with neutrons (usually generated by fissile isotopes). We never deployed this technology on a large scale, but we know that it can work at the level of prototypes. So, in principle, it could be expanded and become the main source of energy for a civilization.

 

The naturally occurring fissionable nuclides are isotopes of uranium and thorium: U(338) and Th(232), both much more abundant than U(235). Let's say that, using these nuclides, the resources needed for energy production could be increased by a factor of 100 or 1,000 in comparison to what we can do now. But, even in the most optimistic estimate, at an output of 1000 TW, we would simply pass from 10 days of supply to a few decades. No way!

We can think of ways to find more uranium and thorium, but it is hard to think that bodies in the solar system could be a source. You need an active plate tectonic condition in order for geological forces to accumulate ores and, on bodies such as the Moon and the asteroids, there are no uranium ores. Only extremely tiny amounts, of the order of parts per billion. And that makes extracting it an impossible task. We also know that there are some 4 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater, an amount that would change the game, at least in principle. But the hurdles are enormous: uranium is so diluted that you are thinking of filtering quintillions (10^18) of tons of water to get at those dispersed amounts. Would a planetary civilization destroy its oceans in order to build interstellar spaceships? 

Maybe we can stretch things in more optimistic ways, but within reasonable hypotheses, we remain at least a couple of orders of magnitude short of what is needed. Fission is not something that can sustain an interstellar civilization. At most, it can sustain a few interstellar probes, just like fossil fuels have been able to create a limited number of interplanetary probes. (BTW, the Oamuamua object might be one of these probes sent by an alien civilization). But, sorry, no fission-based galactic empire. 

There is one more possibility: nuclear fusion, the poster child of the Atomic Age.  The idea that was common in the 1950s is that nuclear fusion was the obvious next step after fission. We would have had energy "too cheap to meter." And not only that: fusion can use hydrogen isotopes, and hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. A hydrogen-powered starship could refuel almost anywhere in the galaxy. Hopping from one star to another, a fusion-based galactic empire would be perfectly possible. 

 

But controlled nuclear fusion turned out to be much more difficult than expected. In more than half a century of attempts, we have never been able to get more energy from a fusion process than we pumped into it. And, as time goes by, the task starts looking steeper and steeper.

 

Maybe there is some trick that we can't see to get nuclear fusion working; maybe we are just dumber than the average galactic civilization. But we may have arrived at a fundamental point: the Fermi paradox may be telling us that controlled nuclear fusion is NOT possible.

All this is very speculative, but we arrived at a concept entirely different from the one that is at the basis of the Fermi paradox: the idea, typical of the 1950s, that a civilization keeps always expanding and that it rapidly arrives to master energy flows several orders of magnitude larger than what we can do now (sometimes called the "Kardashev Scale."). 

Maybe we'll arrive to exploit solar energy so well that we'll be able to use it to build interstellar spaceships, but we are talking of a future so remote that we can't say much about it. For the time being, we don't have to think that the Fermi Paradox is telling us that we are alone in the universe. It just tells us that we shouldn't expect miracles from nuclear technology.