Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?

Abstract

Previous studies show that city metrics having to do with growth, productivity and overall energy consumption scale superlinearly , attributing this to the social nature of cities. Superlinear scaling results in crises called ‘singularities’, where population and energy demand tend to infinity in a finite amount of time, which must be avoided by ever more frequent ‘resets’ or innovations that postpone the system's collapse. Here, we place the emergence of cities and planetary civilizations in the context of major evolutionary transitions. With this perspective, we hypothesize that once a planetary civilization transitions into a state that can be described as one virtually connected global city, it will face an ‘asymptotic burnout’, an ultimate crisis where the singularity-interval time scale becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation. If a civilization develops the capability to understand its own trajectory, it will have a window of time to affect a fundamental change to prioritize long-term homeostasis and well-being over unyielding growth—a consciously induced trajectory change or ‘homeostatic awakening’. We propose a new resolution to the Fermi paradox: civilizations either collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritizing homeostasis, a state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal, making them difficult to detect remotely.

On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems

“…Although it may be argued that human-like innovation has negative adaptive value as evinced by flirtations with self-inflicted collapse ( 61 ), so far, our evolutionary “success” as a species may be attributed, in large part, to our curiosity ( 62 ). Perhaps it will be humanity’s ability to learn, invent, and adopt new collective modes of being that will lead to its long-term persistence as a planetary phenomenon ( 63 – 65 ). In light of these considerations, we suspect that the general principles of selection and function discussed here may also apply to the evolution of symbolic and social systems, but more detailed speculation is beyond the scope of the present paper.…”

Toward Network‐Based Planetary Biosignatures: Atmospheric Chemistry as Unipartite, Unweighted, Undirected Networks

“…It would be of interest to test whether Earth's atmosphere has increased in robustness and resilience as the result of biological forcing over evolutionary history. While admittedly speculative, it may be that extraterrestrial civilizations that have consciously prioritized long‐term homeostasis and wellbeing will purposefully affect their planets' atmospheric compositions such that they provide an even greater degree of stability (Frank et al., 2022; Wong & Bartlett, 2022).…”

Cells as the first data scientists

“…[44][45][46][47][48][49]). Through a series of evolutionary innovations and major transitions, biology has enhanced its data-gathering and information-processing abilities [50], invented minds that can infer causality [51], produced the dataome [52], expanded its cognitive horizon by orders of magnitude from the microscopic to the planetary [53] and may potentially begin to consciously influence its own evolutionary trajectory [54][55][56].…”