Where are all the Alien Super-Civilizations?

Scientific American just published a very significant article titled Alien Super-civilizations Absent from 100,000 Nearby Galaxies. The article reports that "the most far-seeing search ever performed" looking the artifacts that would be produced by advanced Super-civilizations has come up empty handed. This might seem like an interesting piece of scientific trivia or even science fiction, but the reason for this "null result" has important implications for how we develop models of our own World System. It suggests that our preconceptions about how civilizations develop are "deeply flawed".

The new study by Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright used a new approach to searching for alien civilizations. Instead of conducting a traditional SETI survey looking for electronic messages from the stars, Wright looked for the thermodynamic consequences of galactic-scale colonization. Think about this point carefully (physicist Freeman Dyson did in the 1960's): a growing, advanced, energy-hungry technological culture would ultimately be limited by access to energy. In the current age of Peak Oil (or even after the 1973 Arab Oil Crisis), we shouldn't be surprised by this limit to growth, but our current neoclassical economic growth models contain no such limits.

A truly advanced civilization, when faced with limits to growth imposed by decreasing supplies of energy, would be capable of taking extreme measures such as harvesting energy from surrounding stars using Dyson Spheres. The important point here is that Dyson Spheres or any other advanced technology for harvesting energy would leave a mid-infrared glow of radiated heat waste. Astronomer Jason Wright, after examining 100,000 nearby galaxies, found no evidence for large-scale radiated heat waste that would signal the existence of Super-Civilizations.

The possible reasons for the null result are extremely important:

• Possibly, advanced technological civilizations always self-destruct. In the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, civilizations such as ours have come and gone, collapsing from energy limits, environmental damage, nuclear war, etc.
  
• Possibly, any sufficiently advanced, successful technological civilization would be indistinguishable from Nature (a position originally argued by science fiction author Karl Schroeder). Successful advanced civilizations would be more integrated with their natural environments, slower growing (even Steady-State systems), striving for technological efficiency and coming ever-closer to thermodynamic equilibrium.

Current neoclassical economic growth models predict exponential growth forever without limits to growth imposed by energy depletion. They predict the eventual construction of Dyson Spheres or some other technology to harvest energy from surrounding stars. They predict the existence of mid-infrared glow from radiated heat waste. These predictions have failed and it is time to consider neoclassical economic growth models as also having failed.

In future posts I will investigate alternative models that should now be given more serious consideration as replacements for neoclassical economic growth models.