A new simulation projecting the future of humanity over a thousand years suggests that the end of a technological civilization does not have to be definitive. In certain scenarios, societies may experience cycles of decline, reconstruction, and resumption of technological advancement.
This study was conducted by Celia Blanco and colleagues with the aim of investigating a possible explanation for the Fermi paradox—the question about the absence of signals from other technological civilizations in the Universe, should they exist.
The researchers considered the hypothesis that technological civilizations may be transient, being destroyed by factors such as systemic instability, conflicts, or ecological collapse. However, destruction does not necessarily imply total annihilation; the team assesses the possibility that civilizations can arise, collapse, re-emerge, and resume growth, spending long periods in a state of technological dormancy.
Two hundred simulations were performed for each scenario. In them, civilizations could progress until exhausting their resources or being affected by a random existential risk, such as an environmental disaster or a technological failure. After the collapse, the recovery of some societies depended on the availability of remaining technology and resources, as well as the speed with which they could restore their structure.
The team defined the term 'activity cycle' to describe the proportion of time a civilization remains technologically operational. The results showed great variation, oscillating between about 38% and 100% of the simulated time. Two scenarios, named 'Golden Age' and 'Out of Eden', did not suffer collapse in any run, while seven out of ten scenarios collapsed in all rounds.
In the specific case of 'Living with the Land', the activity cycle was only 38%, whereas 'Ouroboros' alternated between collapse and recovery, maintaining a significantly higher activity cycle of 87%. The findings demonstrate that a technological civilization should not follow a single path, from primitive societies to becoming a space civilization, or directly from technological development to extinction. Instead, it can resemble a flame that varies in intensity over time.
This perspective is also relevant to the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. To detect a civilization, it would be fundamental to observe it during a period when it is technologically active. For this reason, the researchers introduced the concept of 'effective detectability duration,' which modifies the longevity concept used in the Drake equation to account for times when a civilization is not technologically active.
If a civilization produced detectable technology only 40% of the time, for example, its effective observation window would be much smaller compared to another civilization with the same total duration but which transmitted signals continuously. When two civilizations have intermittent periods of activity, the probability of their technological periods coinciding can decrease even further. This mechanism may help explain the Fermi paradox and the apparent lack of signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, despite the vast age and extent of the Universe.
More details on the implications for humanity
Beyond the implications for the search for extraterrestrial beings, the model reached a conclusion more directly related to the human condition. Among all the parameters analyzed, two consistently exerted the greatest impact on the capacity of civilizations to remain active: the rate of resource consumption and the magnitude of the resource base they could recover after a collapse.
Small modifications within certain limits could generate disproportionate changes in the resilience of the civilization over time. According to the authors, this suggests adopting measures such as reducing resource consumption, preserving knowledge and infrastructure, and facilitating reconstruction by future generations after a catastrophic event.
One of the suggested solutions involves decentralized infrastructures and so-called 'apocalypse recovery kits': structured repositories of essential knowledge created to expedite post-collapse reconstruction. Such archives could contain data on agriculture, medicine, energy, and communication. The researchers cite the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as an example of this initiative.
Despite the results, the researchers themselves point out significant limitations. The simulations were developed based on hypothetical scenarios for Earth and employ major simplifications, including linear technological growth and fixed rates of resource depletion. Furthermore, the model considers human structures and modes of organization; an extraterrestrial civilization could operate in a completely different way, perhaps with an organization closer to that of a beehive or a group of dolphins.
The researchers emphasize that the model does not predict that humanity will inevitably enter a cycle of collapse followed by reconstruction. Similarly, the results do not serve as proof that extraterrestrial civilizations are hidden. The intention of the study is to provide a new way to conceive of the Fermi paradox and the possibility of technological civilizations passing through phases of activity and inactivity. The work was published on arXiv, thus being a preprint that has not yet undergone peer review. The original article was first released on Olhar Digital.
