Earth is heating up and climate change is threatening its existence. But, we might not be the only world in the cosmos to inflict this horror upon ourselves. As per a new model, an advanced alien civilisation can destroy its planet because of climate change in less than 1,000 years. This, the researchers say stands true even if they are using renewable sources of energy.
The new research has been posted to the preprint database arXiv and is being peer-reviewed.
The study touts that any civilisation that is experiencing massive technological growth and energy consumption, would heat up its planet and make it uninhabitable in less than 1,000 years. This is irrespective of its energy sources, since no matter what they use, there would be inevitable leakage in the form of heat, as predicted by the laws of thermodynamics.
The scientists conducting the study noticed that human energy use had witnessed a major increase since the 1800s. In 2023 alone, about 180,000 terawatt hours (TWh) of energy was used, almost the same amount of energy that hits Earth from the sun.
Gas and coal are the major sources of this energy, and are heating up the planet. However, even if wind and solar power were creating this energy, the planet would continue to become hotter since the population would also keep increasing, consequently pushing up the demand for more energy.
Planets will always eventually heat up
Manasvi Lingam, an astrophysicist at Florida Tech and a co-author of the study, told Live Science that the team applied the second law of thermodynamics to this problem. According to this law, no energy system is perfect and some amount of energy will always escape the system. This escaped energy will cause a planet to heat up over time.
The team found that as this energy leakage builds up more and more, the planet will eventually overheat to a point where it is no longer habitable. More and more energy creation will lead to disastrous levels of climate change and only needs less than 1,000 years from the start of energy production.
Scientists also cite this as a reason why they cannot find life elsewhere in the universe. They say that 1,000 years pass in the blink of an eye in cosmic terms, considering planets like Earth take hundreds of millions of years to become habitable.
So what is the solution?
The team suggests a civilisation should choose equilibrium and flatline its growth. Living in "harmony with its surroundings", a species and its descendants "could survive maybe up to a billion years," Lingham said.