I wrote this essay after reading (and commenting upon) John Michael Greer’s essay on the Fermi Paradox (“Solving Fermi’s paradox”) on his website at: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ . Readers might want to check it out. He reaches a conclusion which overlaps substantially with mine, but which also differs significantly as well. 


Peak Oil and the Fermi Paradox

Talking about the likelihood of other civilizations existing in our galaxy, physicist Enrico Fermi reportedly asked in 1950: “Where is everybody?” This question became known as the Fermi Paradox. The Paradox arises because there should be at least a few other civilizations in our galaxy of 400 billion suns.

In 1960, Dr. Frank Drake, created the Drake equation (see discussion at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation ), which indicated that there ought to be at least 10 other civilizations in our galaxy right now. Yet we can find no evidence for their existence. Which takes us back to Fermi’s question: “Where is everybody?”

If other civilizations exist, then it would seem reasonable that at least some would be more advanced than ours, and would presumably be able to travel to nearby star systems. After a few millions of years they ought to have colonized the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Radio astronomers have been searching ever since Frank Drake undertook the first scientific search for extraterrestrial civilizations with Project Ozma back in 1960. Yet there is no sign of extraterrestrial civilization anywhere in our galaxy. The silence across the galaxy has been deafening. So where are they?!

I think that the actual answer to the Fermi Paradox lies in the fact that while life itself is likely very common throughout the universe, the conditions needed for intelligent life--basically environmental stability for geological ages--are hugely improbable. Thus intelligent life is very, very, rare.

This theme is developed in great detail in the book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, two University of Washington astrophysicists.

In my new book, which will be published late this year (2007) The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow: A Guide to Survival, Transformation and Renewal, I discuss this idea:

Location, Location, Location: The Earth As Prime Real Estate in the Universe

If the sun were more massive than it is, it would have exploded into a nova and then burned out into an ever cooling white dwarf star by now—not allowing enough time for a species such as humanity to develop. If it were smaller and dimmer, its habitable zone, where water remains liquid would be much smaller. Thus, the chances that a planet would form at just the right distance from the sun within this narrow habitable zone would be much reduced.

This problem of remaining within the star’s habitable zone would be compounded because all stars heat up as they age. This means that the time that any planet could remain within a dimmer sun’s habitable zone would be far briefer than the four-plus billion years required for an intelligent species to evolve on Earth. Our sun has proved to be just bright enough to allow us this immense period of time for our evolution.

Our Earth’s placement within the habitable zone has also proved optimal. Consider Venus with its hellish runaway greenhouse atmosphere, and frigid Mars as examples of not-quite-right placement. Mars’ thin atmosphere and lack of plate tectonics also demonstrates what a not-quite-right size has on the chances for complex life to evolve.

Additionally, Earth orbits around the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a 226 million year long orbit. This orbit fortuitously keeps us far away from the dangerously radioactive core of our galaxy and outside of the galaxy’s supernova producing spiral arms. Our solar system possesses a galactic orbit that accommodates the needs of carbon based life such as we are.

Also, Earth possesses a large satellite—our moon. This keeps the Earth gravitationally stable so that it does not tilt erratically on its axis, which would cause unending climatic chaos. Additionally the planet possesses a molten core that drives plate tectonics which seems to be critical for life to evolve in complexity.

I go on to look at the necessity of plate tectonics if complex life is to evolve. Here's a quote from Rare Earth, which I excerpt in The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow.

First, plate tectonics promotes high levels of global biodiversity. In the last chapter we suggested that major defense against mass extinctions is high biodiversity. Here we argue that the factor on Earth that is most critical to maintaining diversity through time is plate tectonics. Second, plate tectonics provides our planet’s global thermostat by recycling chemicals crucial to keeping the volume of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere relatively uniform, and thus it has been the single most important mechanism enabling liquid water to remain on Earth’s surface for more than 4 billion years. Third, plate tectonics is the dominant force that causes changes in sea level, which, it turns out, are vital to the formation of minerals that keep the global level of carbon dioxide (and hence global temperature) in check. Fourth, plate tectonics created the continents on planet earth. Without plate tectonics Earth might look much as it did during the first billion and a half years of its existence: a watery world, with only isolated volcanic islands dotting its surface. Or, it might look even more inimical to life; without continents, we might by now have lost the most important ingredient for life, water, and in so doing come to resemble Venus. Finally plate tectonics makes possible one of Earth’s most potent defense systems: its magnetic field. Without our magnetic field Earth and its cargo of life would be bombarded by a potentially lethal influx of cosmic radiation, and solar wind “sputtering” (in which particles from the sun hit the upper atmosphere with high energy) might slowly eat away the atmosphere, as it has on Mars. 

For those cosmically rare occurrences where an intelligent species does evolve, it is likely that some will never develop an agricultural civilization much less industrial technology based upon hydrocarbons,  before they become extinct. After all most of humanity's 100,000 thousand year history was spent as hunter-gatherers. Agriculture only took root (so to speak) about 10,000 years ago. During the long millennia when humanity was a hunter gatherer species confined to Africa, the volcanic eruption at Toba 70,000 years ago nearly finished ALL of our ancestors off. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory for details. Also check out a new book on this very topic by my friend Marie Jones entitled Supervolcano: The Catastrophic Event that Changed the Course of Human History.)

However, assuming an intelligent species survives until it develops an industrial technology, there is only a very short window of opportunity for an emergent planetary civilization to bootstrap itself into the solar system. Again quoting from The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow:

It is important to understand that only a high energy, high technology; civilization is capable of bootstrapping itself into the solar system. There it can harness the vast resources of raw materials and energy found in the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud, the atmospheres of the gas giants—hydrogen in particular—and the endless supply of energetic sunlight which radiates outward ceaselessly, from our sun.

However, as we have seen, such a civilization has only a very narrow window of opportunity in which to transition from a civilization wholly dependent upon planetary energy and material resources, to one able to utilize the thousandfold greater resources of the entire solar system. This is because of the rapid onset of peak oil and global climate change, which in turn swiftly terminates high energy planetary civilization. Once such a civilization falls it can never be restarted again, as the easily exploitable hydrocarbon resources, as well as necessary metals and minerals, are gone.  

The hydrocarbon energy available to a planetary civilization is analogous to the yolk of an egg: just as the yolk offers a newly emerged creature needed energy to break out of the egg and get established in the wider world, so too does a planet's hydrocarbon energy deposits provide an emergent technological civilization the boost it needs to leave its birthworld and establish itself in its solar system. It offers a very brief window of opportunity to allow a species to develop the technologies and techniques to bootstrap itself off of its planet of origin. Once out into space, a civilization can take advantage of the thousandfold greater material and energy resources found across the solar system. Meanwhile the birthworld can rest and regenerate from its difficult birthing.

Slightly changing my metaphor, the umbilical cord can then be cut and the expanded civilization can then live off of the vastly greater resources of not just one planet, but of an entire solar system, without further material aid from its home planet. A civilization whose scale is that of an entire solar system can indeed accomplish interstellar travel.

I believe that star flight will always be difficult—nothing at all like Star Trek—but that it is indeed possible for a solar system wide civilization. Such a civilization would indeed ultimately spread across the galaxy over a very long period of time.
 
Readers might wonder if there are actually sufficient solar system resources available, and if these are easy enough to obtain to allow for an off-Earth civilization to become wholly self-sufficient. The clear answer to this question is yes.

Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter there exists a vast asteroid belt. Contained within it is not only every metal and mineral needed to sustain a civilization, but also vast quantities of water ice as well as other frozen volatiles such as methane ice (note that methane is natural gas!). See the recent article in New Scientist at: http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn8887--clandestine-comets-found-in-main-asteroid-belt.html.  Readers wishing to research this topic further might read Mining the Sky by University of Arizona astrophysicist John S. Lewis. Also Islands in the Sky: Bold New Ideas for Colonizing Space by Stanley Schmidt and Robert Zubrin.

The bottom line is clear: our civilization could have expanded off planet and established itself among the moons, asteroids, and in the case of Mars, even planets of our solar system. Except that we didn’t.  Instead we had the Cold War, we had the Vietnam War, while Soviet Russia had its Afghan War, etc. In just the past half decade, a fraction of the monies that will ultimately be squandered on the futile Iraq war (trillions of dollars) could have, if directed by a pragmatic visionary such as Robert Zubrin, bootstrapped our species out into the solar system.

Without our realizing it, the window of opportunity for humans to expand into our solar system is rapidly closing. With all of the multiple crises which are bearing down upon our civilization—peak oil, climate change, capture of our government and our economy by rapacious, undemocratic corporate elites, etc., I do not believe that we will (pun intended) rise to the occasion.

Across our galaxy this story has likely played out multiple times during the last two billion years or so in which intelligent life might plausibly have evolved. The core problem is that the window of opportunity for solar system expansion is so very brief, that of the small number of planetary civilizations which have probably emerged in our galaxy thus far in its history, none have succeeded in taking advantage of it before the window slammed shut forever.

That is the stark answer to the Fermi Paradox, as I see it.

While our window is not yet fully shut, humanity most likely will also fail to take advantage of this once-in-a- planet's-lifetime opportunity.

That said, while dealing mainly with more immediate issues of what to do in the context of looming civilizational collapse, in The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow, I propose a strategy intended to allow us to retain our options with respect to expansion into the solar system *despite* civilizational collapse. It is at this point, a long shot (pun intended), but what have we got to lose?

At a deeper level I have come to the conclusion that perhaps even the vast resources of our solar system are themselves ultimately limited. If a solar system wide civilization were to emerge, it would likely grow to a population of hundreds of billions. If such a civilization were to merely be an expanded version of our present day civilization, it seems likely that we would just end up consuming or destroying utterly irreplaceable resources on not just a planetary scale, but rather upon a solar system wide scale. This is not good as these resources could be put to effective use by a more culturally evolved civilization—unless they had already been senselessly trashed by cultural primitives such as ourselves.

Consider that some wiser successor civilization to ours--whether human in the relatively near future, or something else, or say, a species of intelligent avians perhaps, which would evolve in the distant future--might actually possess the cultural advancement needed to properly utilize these resources. Eventually after geological ages have passed some new oil will be generated. This might provide the more culturally advanced new civilization just enough of a boost to get them out into the solar system. My new book actually features a short story about an avian-descended species living 65 million years in the future, that learns about our fate and tries to get things right the second time around.
 
So, in the greater scheme of things, it might be for the best that our present immature, selfish and destructive, civilization not leave the Earth just yet. In my new book I make this point in detail, and go on to propose that perhaps a transformed, wiser, more humane, post-Collapse civilization would be better suited to accomplishing this immense task. As I've said just above, I do explain a strategy for keeping our options open, post-Collapse, with respect to achieving this transcendent goal when we, as a species, are finally ready. I hope that day comes. Just possibly WE might be the first species in our galaxy to solve Fermi's paradox. However, it won't be our present civilization which accomplishes this, but rather some more *culturally* advanced successor.

In The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow I talk about how we can use the rapidly approaching crises of our civilization to transform ourselves into that worthy successor civilization. One way to approach the coming Collapse of our civilization is to treat it as a learning experience. Our impending disasters have come about not because of the intervention of cruel, malicious gods; rather it is our deepest values which have led us to the abyss. In the years ahead, we will have an opportunity for deep and fundamental change within ourselves, as well as in the deep nature of our civilization. In fact if we don't learn these lessons, we probably won't survive at all. In The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow, I describe how we can organize together to attain this transformational objective and create a humane, ecologically rational civilization.