Climate Corner: The Great Filter and the coming election

Jul 20, 2024

Jean Ambrose

editorial@newsandsentinel.com

As a writer for Climate Corner, I am always excited to share news of the progress being made around the globe to develop renewable energy sources.

In the United States, the investments being made in modernizing our infrastructure, especially our electricity production, will be coming on line in this decade. It’s a race to see if humanity can find the will to change our habits and flatten the curve of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

As we all know, there is a political race taking place right now as well and we are not hearing much about the implications for our planet that this election holds. Our political structure is the focus of a no holds barred backlash by the fossil fuel industry to make sure their investments have value for as long as possible. This is short-term thinking at its worst, to encourage the industries that are polluting our only home to stay in the driver’s seat. “Drill baby, drill!” sums up a political platform that just this week unapologetically intends to make the climate crisis worse.

As a reminder of what is at stake here, the 2023 Interconnected Disaster Risks report published by the United Nations examines six immediate and increasing risks across the world:

* the accelerating extinctions of species (and the decline of ones essential for our own lives, such as bees, leading to ecosystem collapse);

* the depletion of groundwater aquifers. (Groundwater is ancient stored water that is not being replaced;)

* the retreat of mountain glaciers, the source of much fresh water to the world’s ecosystems

* unbearable heat — the growing number of places facing temperatures too hot for humans to live;

* the rise in uninsurability as insurance companies abandon writing policies in areas prone to flooding and fires, leaving people with no economic safety net after catastrophic losses; and

* the growing amount of space debris. (A map of the debris field around our planet shows that we have trashed the space around us to the point that the debris threatens our navigation and communications systems.)

This report spotlights how the interconnectedness of these threats makes them more complicated to address, and will take our best minds and most courageous hearts. In fact, when asked about the consequences of the coming election, climate scientist Michael Mann responded that it could be “game over.”

Mann’s two-word analysis of the climate crisis connects to the Fermi Paradox, raised by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi in 1950 that — despite decades of searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence – there had been no evidence of interplanetary species. With the unfathomable number of stars and planets in the universe, our advanced telescopes should have picked up technology signatures sprinkled across the stars. But there have been no signals, no voices from other worlds, when according to the numbers, the universe should be bursting with them. That’s the paradox.

A theory called the Great Filter seeks to answer the question. It was first proposed by astronomer Robin Hanson that intelligent interstellar life forms must clear basic hurdles to become a truly advanced space faring civilization. He hypothesized nine steps, with humanity at step eight, where we are developing the technology needed for space exploration. Given the age of the universe, there should be a few species to have colonized their solar system or even galaxy. If the whole universe has been silent so far, is there a step that just can’t be cleared? Or are we on track to be the first civilization to emigrate beyond our planet? Is ever increasing exploration of the galaxy our future? Or does our inability to overcome our differences or our greed to capture our planet’s resources for ourselves alone doom us to be the end of the line? Time is running out quickly. The decision is humanity’s to make.

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Jean Ambrose talks to her 5-year-old granddaughter Adena about taking care of the Earth.