(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists have long been concerned about the question of why humanity is not visited by aliens?
Recently, two researchers decided to answer it and put forward an unusual hypothesis: developed civilizations simply stopped their development, or died. The scientists published their findings in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
A new hypothesis suggests that as alien civilizations grow and develop technologically, they eventually reach a crisis point where innovation can no longer keep up with energy demand.
Further there will be a collapse. The only reasonable way is to abandon the “steady growth” model in favor of maintaining balance. In this case, civilization will lose the ability to expand through the stars, the researchers say.
Scientists came to such conclusions when they studied the process of urban growth. These studies have shown that cities increase in size and energy consumption at an exponential rate as their population grows, inevitably leading to crisis points, or singularities, that lead to rapid disruptions in growth, followed by an even more rapid, civilization-terminating collapse.
“We hypothesize that once a civilization transitions into what can be described as one practically connected global city, it will experience ‘asymptotic burnout’, an ultimate crisis where the time scale of the singularity interval becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation,” they wrote.
These near-collapse civilizations will be the easiest for humanity to detect, the researchers suggest, as they will dissipate large amounts of energy in a “wildly erratic” way. This means that humanity will be the first to discover intelligent life, but as yet underdeveloped, the researchers write.
To prevent their demise, civilizations can redirect their production from unlimited growth to the stars to social well-being, the researchers suggest. While such civilizations may not completely abandon space exploration, they will not expand on a scale large enough to make contact with Earth.
The scientists emphasize that their proposal is simply a hypothesis, taken from observation of the laws that seem to govern life on Earth.
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