A recent study at the crossroads of astrophysics, astrobiology, and the social sciences has allowed a thousand years of potential futures for a technological society like ours to be simulated. The authors defined about ten plausible scenarios, and it must be said that most of them are dismal.
Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter
We hear quite often about collapse, especially within a relatively young field: collapsology. How long could our technological civilization endure? If collapse becomes a possibility, what would be its causes? Is it possible to imagine a stable future for humanity? Celia Blanco, a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist at the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid (Spain), led a study aimed at answering this type of question, published on the arXiv preprint platform on April 15, 2026.
At the heart of these works lies the Fermi paradox, namely the striking mismatch between the high mathematical probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the complete absence of evidence (or contact) concerning them. A hypothesis linked to this paradox, the Great Filter, suggests that during the journey from simple life to a flourishing interstellar technological civilization, there is a particularly difficult stage that would condemn most of these civilizations before they become visible on a larger scale.
“The duration for which a technological civilization remains active, and what determines whether it collapses or persists, is a central question, both for projecting humanity’s future and for estimating the frequency of detectable intelligences in the galaxy.”, one reads in the study.
10 Scenarios, 200 Simulations per Scenario
For Celia Blanco, some answers to these questions could come from highly advanced numerical simulations. Here, the researchers listed about ten plausible scenarios concerning a “Earth-origin” civilization, over a thousand years. For each scenario, the authors conducted roughly 200 simulations allowing them to observe dynamics of growth, crises, collapses, and possible recoveries. Moreover, the different trajectories were influenced by three major variable factors, namely resource constraints, the sociopolitical architecture, and events such as pandemics, natural disasters, etc.
There is no need to describe each scenario, but it should be understood that while some civilizations managed to endure sustainably, others collapsed more or less quickly and/or definitively, while others experienced technological crashes followed by a period of silence, then full or partial rebound. In any case, most scenarios depicted a civilization facing difficulties capable of causing a collapse as brutal as it is total.
What Do These Works Really Say?
According to the study’s authors, the path toward the prosperity of a civilization, toward a definitive collapse, or toward a fall followed by a rebound (sometimes multiple times), naturally shapes the destiny of that same civilization. However, it would also constitute a dynamic that defines its potential signature in the atmosphere of its planet. Here we are talking about “technosignatures” possibly embodied by industrial pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, tetrafluoromethane, CFC‑11, or CFC‑12.
If these signatures could help detect extraterrestrial civilizations, the gases mentioned here do not share the same atmospheric lifetimes. For example, the gap between nitrogen dioxide and tetrafluoromethane is large, with persistence in the atmosphere of a few hours (or days) for NO2 and about a millennium for the long-lived gases. This implies the following idea: long-lived atmospheric pollutants could prolong the detectability of civilizations that no longer exist and this, long after their disappearance.
As for Earth and humanity, the vast majority of the researchers’ scenarios presented two parameters: the rate of resource depletion and the capacity to recover after collapse. According to the researchers, fictional civilizations that were more successful at reducing their resource consumption had a greater ability to rebound compared with those that were more unstable, based on overexploitation.
