Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Um, I think, you know, there's a problem with type one, which is that, you know, we already know about climate change, right? The effects of our harvesting energy to do the work of civilization is already changing the climate state. Right. And that's something that, you know, uh, Kardashev couldn't have recognized when you, you know, there's, there's, uh, The first law of thermodynamics, right?
Which is just about energy, you know, the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy. And Kardashev wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there's waste heat. You don't get to use it all, right?
You can only, second law tells you that if, you know, I have a tank of gasoline, I can only use a certain fraction of the energy in that tank and the rest is going to go to heating up the engine block. So that second law tells you that, you know, you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, uh-oh, you know, sorry, it's going to change on you.
So there's a way in which we probably can't get to a type one without like devastating the Earth's climate. So we're probably going to have to figure out The most important thing actually here is probably this is why space becomes the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we've been working on for a while called service worlds, right?
That at some point, you probably move a lot of your industry off world, right? We've got mercury, for example. There's nothing on mercury. There's no life on mercury. Why don't you put your energy harvesting there, right? Because you can't mess with the biosphere. The biosphere is more powerful than you are, right? And so, yeah. So, yeah.
There's limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere.
This is the frontier we are, and that was the topic of my last book, Light of the Stars. It's like you have to do the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. You have to see the transition that we're going through now of the Anthropocene on a kind of planetary astrobiological framework.
And that paper we were talking about with the 10 billion trillion worlds, that was actually in service of the work I was doing for this other book where I wanted to know how often – Do you go through an anthropo... Does every technological civilization trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate anthropocene crisis?
And the answer we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably. And then the question is, are you smart enough to figure out how to readjust what you're doing technologically so that you're not... That all boats rise, right? You want to figure out how to do this so that the biosphere becomes even more productive and healthy and resilient. So, yeah, right. It's the kind of...
I think there's probably absolutely limits on how much energy you can use, but how do you use that energy? And then also, yeah, getting off planet eventually. If you want to use 10 times more energy than that, you're not going to do it on world. So how do we detect energy?
How about propulsion plumes, right? If you're expanding, no, no, we just, I literally just put in a NASA proposal now. Thomas Beattie, who's joined us from the University of Wisconsin, has an idea to look for
plumes right if you have a civil if you have a a solar system wide civilization right and you got space truckers going back and forth right you know from mars to you know they're doing the insetilus run they're accelerating and decelerating the whole way there right if you want to get to mars in a couple weeks you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there you flip and burn and have it on you know so you're all you're also always have gravity you have thrust gravity and
So would those plumes be detectable? Cause now you've got spaceships going all over the place and the odds that like, you know, the plume is going to cross your field of view becomes, could become pretty high. So yeah, that's, I think that's a good way of looking for, that's one idea. Um.
of looking for, you know, large scale interplanetary, which is kind of like when you're getting to a type two. Another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining.
This was an idea, it was a group at Harvard Smithsonian that, you know, to be able to look for if you're really chewing up asteroids to build space habitats, can, you know, there'd be dust particles left around and would they look different from just say the dust, you know, from just regular collisions?
Pollution of all different kinds. And trash also. Okay, so trash is an interesting idea when you come to the actual solar system, right? We are actually, there's a whole other field of techno signatures, which are things in the solar system. What if somebody came by a billion years ago, you know, and left some stuff, right? So the Earth has been showing biosignatures for billions of years.
And, you know, a species like us looking at our level, looking at Earth would have been able to know that Earth had life on it, had a biosphere for billions of years. So maybe somebody sent something by, you know, a half a billion years ago. So this idea of looking, say, at the moon for artifacts. is that have been there for a long time is something that people, a number of people are doing.
We're just working on a paper where we just calculated, this was super fun. We calculated how long would the lunar lander exist on the moon before micrometeorites just chewed it down, right? How long would you be able to land on the moon and go, oh look, there's, you know, somebody was here and left some debris.
So there's this process called gardening, which is just the micrometeorite, constant rain of micrometeorites. And that's where you get the lunar regolith, that fine powder on the moon is because of this gardening. And it turns out it is literally hundreds of millions to billions of years. Oh, nice. Yeah, that the lunar lander will be visible.
Yeah, if there are artifacts on – and people have proposed doing this with artificial intelligence. We have – you know, the moon has been mapped down to like a couple of meters with various probes. And all that data is sitting there. So have – why not use machine learning to like look through all those things and look for anything that looks not like the lunar surface?
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