To See Ourselves as Others See Us

 

The Mighty Mark 1 - a place of pilgrimage

On the day of named-storm Eunice in 2022, I managed to keep my appointment with MikeGarrett, Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics at University of Manchester and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. Jodrell Bank, with its famous Mark 1 Telescope - made out of bits of battleships! - a name to conjure with. Many visits as a boy there; a place of pilgrimage during the Apollo program. Keeping just ahead of the storm on the M6, we were inside the Alan Turing Institute when it finally hit, and it was ‘knock-you-off-your-feet’ strong when we exited 2 hours later. It was great to meet a Radioastronomy and SETI group and to present the AMiTe idea. Lots of discussion, suggestions for references and encouragement to think further about observational consequences.

While Mike’s JBCA group of 190 people have wide ranging (multi light-year!) research interests including active galaxy nuclei and giant arrays (running  e-MERLIN, the UK's radio astronomy network), they are also active in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and Mike is currently vice-chair of the IAAs SETI Permanent Committee.

So it’s quite fun to keep tabs on his publications. Here’s one that was publicised only in the last week: What would aliens learn if they observed the Earth? This claims to be the first proper study of the Earth’s Technosignature in 50 years and takes into account all modern human sources of radiation. We currently emit a whopping 4GW of radio noise, just from mobile phone transmission. The team has analysed databases of transmitters and considered the radiation pattern, and the potential for detection at nearby stars. These were limited to nearby systems, including Alpha Centauri, out to a maximum of 8 light-years. The conclusion:

“We worked out that an alien civilisation near these locations would, however, need much better telescopes than we have to detect the Earth’s mobile radio leakage. But that would be quite probable, given most technical civilisations are expected to be much more advanced than we are.”

It would be lovely to think that the closest stars have anciently wise civilisations, just waiting for the ‘youngsters’ (us, a mere 4.5bn years after the Earth cooled) to grow up and invent smartphones. Life may be ubiquitous (C’mon NASAPerseverance) but there again, it’s been a long, hard road here. And despite the best (breeding) efforts of Elon Musk, human numbers may start to decline as early as 2050. If the closest extant technical civilisation may be “outside theMilky Way and therefore forever inaccessible” (Brian Cox musing) then we’re going to need a pretty big ‘scope on the Cheshire Plain to detect that.

But maybe there would be a chance to detect ‘we’re here’ signals from an AMiTe point. I’m still to write up the next version of the paper with suggestions from meeting Mike, but there are some clues in the 'Brian Cox' post. Happy listening!

Picture credit: Unesco

We Forgot the Begat

 

World Population: 5 scenarios

As a follow up to my post last week about the De-Darwinization of the human race due to the development of contraception (but with a brief nod to music at the base), further confirmation this week of my “End-of-the-World-in-5,400CE” prediction.

My projection of population in that article (and in the AMiTe paper on ‘how we’ll really meet E.T.’) was based on human population peaking at 10bn by 2100, then halving every hundred years. This 10bn is now looking like an over-estimate. A new study for the Club of Rome was published this week https://www.earth4all.life/news/global-population-could-peak-below-9-billion-in-2050s suggests the global population could peak just below 9 billion people in 2050 then start falling. With a ‘Giant Leap’ in investment in economic development, education and health then global population could peak even lower and earlier.

So, how about the halving? The second "more optimistic scenario" – with governments across the world raising taxes on the wealthy to invest in education, social services and improved equality – the report estimates human numbers would hit a high of 8.5 billion as early as 2040 and then fall by about a third to about 6 billion in 2100.

This fall of 29.5% in 60 years is very close to my estimate of halving in 100yrs (in fact, it’s equivalent to 44% fall per 100 years, just exponential mathematics). And why would it stop? People tend to revolt from the idea that very low birth rates might become embedded and get dewy-eyed with visions of Little House on the Prairie, but can’t explain why the trend, already a reality in developed countries, would significantly alter. It’s OK, people/societies will be just as happy/unhappy and probably as obsessed and inward looking as they are now.

The most cogent reason for a here-to-stay trend was hinted this week by Elon Musk and his pals, re Artificial Intelligence, GPT etc in Pause Giant AI Experiments: AnOpen Letter - Future of Life Institute. The key question re human futures (and decisions on family size) was, for me, not all the tosh about A.I. being inimical or running amok. Much more significant was the socio-economic question of “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?“  This will entrench the worries of parents, on top of the global turbulence we are seeing now (and the rest…) about whether their kid(s) will find fulfilling roles; the conventional wisdom will become to be conservative on number of progeny.  But water finds its own level, so society will be just as happy/unhappy as ours, self-similar, in-fact.

It makes you yearn for the good old days, when we were “a little bit naïve” The Begat: Finian’sRainbow. How’s that for a bit of Darwin-related music (‘Ratio of increase so high…”)? We performed that at our folk-music session last week, minus dancing.  

Chuck Cooper & cast in FINIANS RAINBOW 2009 Broadway (Harburg & Lane)

Picture credit: Earth4All report (linked article), FiniansonBroadway.com

Eight Billion on 15th November, extinct by 5,400C.E.?

 

"Just your friends making reasonable choices"

The UN has named Tuesday as ‘Eight Billion Day’, see: 8 Billion Day 15 Nov 2022 - Population Matters. Clearly this is the forcing function for all our environmental problems (proportional to ‘N’) and a good many of our wars.

The best response to 8bn is to spread a pointed message: “if you don’t like your first two children, have a third”, and have smart, humane tax and migration policies. But I’ll save practical suggestions for another time (it would include a bollock tax for individuals like Boris Johnson and… *see below!).

Demographers are now seriously considering ‘peak human’ and started to map out various scenarios of decline – but all far enough away not to affect current economics. An exception is Elon Musk* Elon Musk IsTotally Wrong About Population Collapse, who is dead right about the collapse but only worried because it spoils his dream about him being the enabler of humankind’s expansion out of the Solar System (he’s dead wrong about that, see AMiTe page on this blog).

But the collapse, yes. I started thinking about this twenty years ago after many years business in Japan.  With a female friend experiencing professional sexism and ‘expectations’ around marriage, and making some consequent choices, I was interested-but-not-surprised to learn of the very low Total Fertility Rate in Japan and Korea and also noted the low Western Europe rate of 1.6. I did a thought-experiment extrapolation at the time and have been banging on about “the human race dying out in 5,400CE due to lack of interest!” ever since. See the graph above which I published in a scientific paper in Feb 2021 (see AMiTe page for its unusual context and link to the full paper).

TFR = 1.6 might sound impersonal but think of it in the following way. How about where your friendship group of [ten] all pair up, let’s say for life; four couples have 2 kids each (or 3,2,2,1), and one couple just decides not to. Ten parents, eight kids. That’s TFR of 1.6, just by your friends’ choices. Sound familiar? Try your siblings & cousins as a check. Repeat for a few generations. TFR = 1.6 is also the average of OECD countries and 40 countries are at that rate or below.

Those thinking that something will turn to reverse this trend had better sharpen up their arguments; Matt Reynolds deals with it pretty well in the Wired article using France as an example. See also my personal French famille nombreuse discount card below from 1995, another failed government attempt to stimulate breeding. This population collapse is an example of ‘de-Darwinization’ – departure from Natural Selection – a phenomenon implicitly recognised by Charles Darwin and explicitly by Daniel Dennett: see From Bacteriato Bach and Back, eg p148. Darwinian evolution and de-Darwinization neatly link two of the subjects of this blog!

Since bringing a child into the world is now, or is becoming, pretty much a matter of absolute choice, the driving force is individual happiness in a modern (constrained) society rather than Natural Selection.  

But there’s plenty of time before my log graph reaches the ‘last humans’ – over 3,000 more seasons of the Premier League and Strictly Come Dancing. I included the population graph in the AMiTe paper to show that, while there isn’t likely to be time enough for humans to reach the Stars, there’s plenty of time to get the technology right to get the Stars to come to us.

My discount card from 1995 - valid for two children!