Health & Science

A team led by Jonathan Jiang, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has produced a new estimate for when humans might be able to produce the amount of energy that Earth naturally receives from the Sun, a feat that would o cially distinguish us as a Type I civilisation,status: the year 2371, or thereafter.

Over the course of thousands of years, humans have harnessed increasingly bigger energy yields, starting with ancient camp res and domesticated animals and progressing to modern sources, such as fossil fuels, nuclear power, and renewables such as wind, hydro, and solar. at said, we are still a long way from being ranked a Type I civilisation, according to the Kardashev scale, a metric that ranks the advancement of a civilisation based on its power-generating capabilities. e researchers reached their estimated date of 2371 by analysing “the consumption and energy supply of the three most important energy sources”—fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and renewable energy—while factoring in our likelihood of wiping ourselves out with these power sources, a concept known as the Great Filter, according to a study published on the preprint server arXiv.

Named after its inventor, the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, the Kardashev scale starts with the planetary level category, Type I, then imagines a Type II civilisation that could access all the energy of its star, before concluding with a Type III civilisation that could tap into the power of an entire galaxy. Jiang and his colleagues also invoke the “K formula,” developed by the American astronomer Carl Sagan, which expresses the Kardashev scale as gradient, rather than as three distinct

When we might have the proper fuels to survive

stages.

“In its early formulation, the Kardashev Type I civilisation was based on the overall consumption of energy of a given civilisation,” said Jiang in an email. “However, it should also encompass that civilisation’s stewardship of their home world.

“ erefore in this study, when we analyse the consumption and energy supply of the three most important energy sources (fossil fuels, nuclear energy and renewable energy) based on Carl Sagan’s K formula, we are inspired to also consider environmental limitations suggested by Unite Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency,” said.

Humans are likely to be thousands of years away from becoming Type II or Type III civilisations, assuming such enormous energy yields are even attainable at all. ough we are already an impressive 73% of the way toward cinching Type I status, that progress has come at an unsustainable price. Fossil fuels primarily power the world, but they are also causing rapid climate change, a trend that is amplifying deadly phenomena such as natural disasters and pollution, all of which threatens to leave us on the wrong end of the Great Filter.

“Development is an eternal theme for human society. But in the process of development, we can’t just develop for the sake of development,” said Fuyang Feng, an astronomer at Beijing Normal University who co- authored the study, in an email. “More importantly, we can understand some truths in the process of development, so that we can re ect on past history, what shortcomings we have made, and it can give us more inspiration for our future development. Only in this way can we develop sustainably and have the ability and possibility to understand the nature of the world better.”

Feng added that if humans fail to nd the right balance between our major energy sources, then our “biggest problem is not how many years we will take in reaching Type I civilization, but whether we will survive until we reach Type I civilization and succeed in avoiding the Big Filter.”

For this reason, the new study assumes that humans must rapidly abandon our consumption of fossil fuels within the next three decades just to survive, let alone become a Type I civilisation. Beyond that horizon, alternate energy sources—such as nuclear, solar, hydro, and wind power—must swiftly increase their yields to meet, and ultimately exceed, the power demands of global society. at said, the study also isolates nuclear power as another form of energy that could place humanity at risk if its hazardous byproducts are not properly handled.

“Another major and inevitable concern with the increasing development of nuclear energy are the dangers to all life on Earth posed by such a powerful resource, while trying to successfully avoid the Great Filter,” the team said. “ us, in concert with signi cantly increasing the growth rate of nuclear energy generation,” they added, we must adopt “improved technology for even more secure disposal radioactive wastes, all while transitioning to cleaner forms of energy.”

Jiang and his colleagues cite another similar study that estimated when humans might reach Type I status, which came up with the year 2347 as a possible tipping point. But the new study is slightly more conservative in its estimation of the growth rate of clean technologies, as it factors in the role of policy changes involving energy use and other complex factors, resulting in a date a few decades later.

Taken together, the research suggests that if humans are able to switch to renewables within the next few decades, we might expect to earn our Type I stripes sometime in the 24th century. Working toward this goal is not just some aspirational futurist goal, it may be essential to ensuring our species evades extinction, according to co-author Philip Rosen, a retired energy expert.

“Stagnation, or worse, backsliding into decline are simply not options for the long-term survival of humanity,” Rosen said in an email. “While continued technological development, and the associated increasing energy demand, certainly poses risks, those genies cannot be stu ed back into their bottles.”

While the researchers acknowledge the di culties of making predictions about an outcome riddled with so many inherent uncertainties, they suggest that the exercise has value as a means to consider the awesome responsibility of humans to safeguard our planet and all its inhabitants.”

Yet, more breakthroughs on cancers

Landmark ndings o er researchers a whole trove of new resources to guide future studies on tailored cancer treatments. is breakthrough comes after an extensive study has analysed the genomes of cancer cells from more than 12,000 patients, identifying 58 new mutational signatures that o er clues to novel causes of cancer.

Cancer cells can harbour thousands of di erent and unusual mutations but only a few are known to really drive the development of a tumour. A groundbreaking 2020 study was rst to begin seriously cataloguing these mutational signatures but this new research dramatically expands on those prior ndings, delivering the most complete picture of what mutations cause the majority of human cancers.

“ e reason it is imporon the new study. “Some mutational signatures have clinical or treatment implications – they can highlight abnormalities that may be targeted with speci c drugs or may indicate a potential ‘Achilles heel’ in individual cancers.”

Cataloguing these mutational ‘ ngerprints’ allow researchers to home in on particular lifestyle or environmental factors that can cause cancers. For example, prior studies have found a distinct mutation in melanomas can be linked to exposure from ultraviolet (UV) light, so we know for sure that excessive exposure to UV is a powerful cause of skin cancer. e new study con rmed 51 mutational signatures chronicled in prior studies and found 58 entirely new mutational signatures. e causes behind the majority of these new mutational signatures are unknown and the researchers suggest this indicates there are plenty of factors that can trigger cancer we haven’t discovered yet.

Between this new study and the 2020 work, researchers are con dent they have now discovered most of the mutational signatures that drive the development of common cancers. It is thought that what is still unknown accounts for rarer forms of cancer covering less than one percent of tumours.

At this point, the research is more an academic achievement than a pragmatic one. However, building this body of knowledge moving forward could help inform profoundly valuable research discoveries such as new understandings into environmental exposures that cause cancer.

is library of mutational signatures also helps researchers understand the mechanisms that drive the development of particular tumours. Knowing how these cancers develop helps researchers test ways to therapeutically target those pathways, creating new and more personalised cancer treatments.

“Mutational signatures are an example of using the full potential of WGS (wholegenome sequences),” said Matt Brown, from Genomics England. “We hope to use the mutational clues seen in this study and apply them back into our patient population, with the ultimate aim of improving diagnosis and management of cancer patients.” e new study was published in the journal Science. Other Source: University of Cambridge