Space Aliens Are Neo-Malthusians!

Yahoo links, somewhat misleadingly, a strange paper in which the authors argue that Malthusianism governs the destiny of life in the universe.

NASA scientists have explained in a new paper why they believe it’s likely we haven’t ever encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life — and it’s heartbreaking.

Curious, I went to the paper itself. The lead author, Jonathan H Jiang, is a "principal scientist" (whatever that means) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with degrees including a PhD in fields related to astrophysics. This is a field that, like linguistics, seems to be dominated by wild speculation, so that's red flag number one. Number two is that, although he's the lead author, his co-authors include Philip E. Rosen, who is listed as an "independent researcher" in Vancouver, WA but is elsewhere listed as "retired"; Kelly Lu, a member of the class of 2024 at Santa Margarita Catholic High School; Kristen A. Fahy, a member of the Tropospheric Composition Group in the Earth Science Section at JPL, who holds an MEd in Physics Education; and Piotr Obacz, a lecturer in the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He holds a PhD, but apparently not in astrophysics or a related field.

I don't know if his co-authors qualify as a group red flag, or if each one qualifies as a red flag individually. The paper is located at a site called arXiv.com, and it doesn't appear to have been vetted by any peer-reviewed journal. Mr Rosen and Ms Fahy frequently appear with Dr Jiang as co-authors on numerous papers related to extraterrestial life. Mr Jiang and Ms Fahy appear together on the YouTube video A Beacon in the Galaxy to Message ET: Are We In The Dark Forest?

The best we can conclude is that two of the authors are employed at JPL, but I don't think we can assume that it's endorsed by either JPL or NASA, and it isn't peer reviewed. However, it proposes an intriguing solution to Fermi's Paradox, as the paper puts it,

Even as ambitious programs such as SETI aim to solve the technological challenges, the results have so far turned up empty for any signs of life in the galaxy. We postulate that an existential disaster may lay in wait as our society advances exponentially toward space exploration, acting as the Great Filter: a phenomenon that wipes out civilizations before they can encounter each other, which explains the cosmic silence.

Note the presence of "exponential" in the premise, which is a key component of Malthusian theory, that populations expand exponentially while resources grow only linearly. The piece goes on to argue that the Great Filter may be several things, like pandemics or nuclear war, but it certainly includes climate change. Maybe, that is, all civilizations throughout the universe grow exponentially until they exhaust linear resources, if they don't blow themselves up in the meantime. You'd think they'd be on the verge of Jiang's Law, an equation showing the inevitable rate at which those things predictably happen, but of course they're nowhere close.

Returning to the Drake Equation, recent modeling suggests that it is the lifespan of civilizations capable of interstellar comminication, "L", which is the most influential among its seven variables. Taking this claim as stipulation, it follows immediately that the sub-factors comprising "L" must be identified and studied in detail if we are to maximize humanity's lifespan.

Parsing this out, of course, we have no idea what the value of "L" is, since we haven't located a single civilization capable of interstellar communication, much less determined how long it took to get that way. However, if we stipulate that "L" has a value, we need to study what that value is in order to maximize humanity's lifespan. But isn't this a non sequitur? We have an unknown variable, but we'll postulate it's knowable, and we'll arbitrarily agree that it has everything to do with humanity's lifespan. But if, as the authors agree, we haven't even seen a civilization (including ours) that's capable of interstellar communication, how can we know anything about it? Where have you been, H G Wells?

Nevertheless, the authors conclude that nuclear disaster and climate change must be avoided if we're to communicate with aliens, even though Jiang's Law so far asserts that the other alien civilizations have already destroyed themselves. So, er, if there's nobody to communicate with anyhow, why bother?

Doesn't matter. We have to shrink our carbon footprint so we can do this.

There are lots of things we can conclude here, but the first one is that the workers at JPL must live lives in many ways comparable to those who've worked, up to now, at Twitter. They've spent countless hours generating this gobbledygook on taxpayer money. Whether they get free breakfast, free wine, and yoga rooms remains to be seen.

One disturbing sign, though, is that both Yahoo and Hot Air took this piece of fluff seriously.