by John Michael Greer
The Archdruid Report (September 19 2007)
Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial
society
One of the besetting sins of today's intellectual climate is the habit
of overspecialization. Too often, people involved in one field get
wrapped up in that field's debates and miss the fact that the universe
is not neatly divided into watertight compartments. With this excuse, if
any is needed, I want to shift the ground of The Archdruid Report's
discussion a bit and talk about Fermi's paradox.
First proposed by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, this points
out that there's a serious mismatch between our faith in technological
progress and the universe our telescopes and satellites reveal to us.
Our galaxy is around thirteen billion years old, and contains something
close to 400 billion stars. There's a lot of debate around how many of
those stars have planets, how many of those planets are capable of
supporting life, and what might or might not trigger the evolutionary
process that leads to intelligent, tool-using life forms, but most
estimates grant that there are probably thousands or millions of
inhabited planets out there.
Fermi pointed out that an intelligent species that developed the sort of
technology we have today, and kept on progressing, could be expected
eventually to work out a way to travel from one star system to another;
they would also leave traces that would be detectable from earth. Even
if interstellar travel proved to be slow and difficult, a species that
developed starflight technology could colonize the entire galaxy in a
few tens of millions of years - in other words, in a tiny fraction of
the time the galaxy has been around. Given 400 billion chances to evolve
a species capable of inventing interstellar travel, and thirteen billion
years to roll the dice, the chances are dizzyingly high that if it's
possible at all, at least one species would have managed the trick long
before we came around, and it's not much less probable that dozens or
hundreds of species could have done it. If that's the case, Fermi
pointed out, where are they? And why haven't we seen the least trace of
their presence anywhere in the night sky?
Fermi's paradox has been the subject of lively debate for something like
half a century now, and most books on the possibility of
extraterrestrial life discuss it. There are at least two reasons for
that interest. On the one hand, of course, the possibility that we might
someday encounter intelligent beings from another world has been a
perennial fascination since the beginning of the industrial age - a
fascination that has done much to drive the emergence of the folk
theologies masquerading as science in today's UFO movement.
On another level, though, Fermi's Paradox can be restated in another and
far more threatening way. The logic of the paradox depends on the
assumption that unlimited technological progress is possible, and it can
be turned without too much difficulty into a logical refutation of the
assumption. If unlimited technological progress is possible, then there
should be clear evidence of technologically advanced species in the
cosmos; there is no such evidence; therefore unlimited technological
progress is impossible. Crashingly unpopular though this latter idea may
be, I suggest that it is correct - and a close examination of the issues
involved casts a useful light on the present crisis of industrial
civilization.
Let's start with the obvious. Interstellar flight involves distances on
a scale the human mind has never evolved the capacity to grasp. If the
earth were the size of the letter "o" on this screen, for example, the
moon would be a little over an inch and three quarters away from it, the
sun about sixty feet away, and Neptune, the outermost planet of our
solar system now that Pluto has been officially demoted to "dwarf
planet" status, a bit more than a third of a mile off. On the same
scale, though, Proxima Centauri - the closest star to our solar system -
would be more than 3,000 miles away, roughly the distance from southern
Florida to the Alaska panhandle. Epsilon Eridani, thought by many
astronomers to be the closest star enough like our sun to have a good
chance of inhabitable planets, would be more than 7,500 miles away,
roughly the distance across the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of
North America to the east coast of China.
The difference between going to the moon and going to the stars, in
other words, isn't simply a difference in scale. It's a difference in
kind. It takes literally unimaginable amounts of energy either to
accelerate a spacecraft to the relativistic speeds needed to make an
interstellar trip in less than a geological time scale, or to keep a
manned (or alienned) spacecraft viable for the long trip through deep
space. The Saturn V rocket that put Apollo Eleven on the moon, the most
powerful spacecraft to date, doesn't even begin to approach the first
baby steps toward interstellar travel. This deserves attention, because
the most powerful and technologically advanced nation on Earth, riding
the crest of one of the greatest economic booms in history and fueling
that boom by burning through a half billion years' worth of fossil fuels
at an absurdly extravagant pace, had to divert a noticeable fraction of
its total resources to the task of getting a handful of spacecraft
across what, in galactic terms, is a whisker-thin gap between
neighboring worlds.
It's been an article of faith for years now, and not just among science
fiction fans, that progress will take care of the difference. Progress,
however, isn't simply a matter of ingenuity or science. It depends on
energy sources, and that meant biomass, wind, water and muscle until
technical breakthroughs opened the treasure chest of the Earth's carbon
reserves in the eighteenth century. If the biosphere had found some less
flammable way than coal to stash carbon in the late Paleozoic, the
industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth century wouldn't
have happened; if nature had turned the sea life of the Mesozoic into
some inert compound rather than petroleum, the transportation revolution
of the twentieth century would never have gotten off the ground.
Throughout the history of our species, in fact, each technological
revolution has depended on accessing a more concentrated form of energy
than the ones previously available.
The modern faith in progress assumes that this process can continue
indefinitely. Such an assertion, however, flies in the face of
thermodynamic reality. A brief summary of that reality may not be out of
place here. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and left to
itself, it always flows from higher concentrations to lower; this latter
rule is what's called entropy. A system that has energy flowing through
it - physicists call this a dissipative system - can develop eddies in
the flow that concentrate energy in various ways. Thermodynamically,
living things are entropy eddies; we take energy from the flow of
sunlight through the dissipative system of the earth in various ways,
and use it to maintain concentrations of energy above ambient levels.
The larger and more intensive the concentration of energy, on average,
the less common it is - this is why mammals are less common than
insects, and insects less common than bacteria.
It's also why big deposits of oil and coal are much less common than
small ones, and why oil and coal are much less common than inert
substances in earth's crust. Fossil fuels don't just happen at random;
they exist in the earth because biological processes put them there.
Petroleum is the most concentrated of the fossil fuels, and the biggest
crude oil deposits - Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, Cantarell in Mexico, the
West Texas fields, a handful of others - represented the largest
concentrations of free energy on earth at the dawn of the industrial
age. They are mostly gone now, along with a great many smaller
concentrations, and decades of increasingly frantic searching has failed
to turn up anything on the same scale. Nor is there another, even more
concentrated energy resource waiting in the wings.
If progress depends on getting access to ever more concentrated energy
resources, in other words, we have reached the end of our rope. The
resources now being proposed as ways to power industrial civilization
are all much more diffuse than fossil fuels. (Nuclear power advocates
need to remember that uranium-235, which has a great deal of energy when
refined and purified, exists in very low concentrations in nature and
requires a hugely expensive infrastructure to turn it into usable
energy, so the whole system yields very little more energy than goes
into it; fusion, if it even proves workable at all, will require an
infrastructure a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive than
fission, and the same is true of breeder reactors.) More generally, it
takes energy to concentrate energy. Once we no longer have the nearly
free energy of fossil fuels concentrated for us by half a billion years
of geology, concentrating energy beyond a certain fairly modest point
will rapidly become a losing game in thermodynamic terms. At that point,
insofar as progress is measured by the kind of technology that can cross
deep space, progress will be over.
We can apply this same logic to Fermi's paradox and reach a conclusion
that makes sense of the data. Since life creates localized
concentrations of energy, each planet inhabited by life forms will
develop concentrated energy resources. It's reasonable to assume that
our planet is somewhere close to the average, so we can postulate that
some worlds will have more stored energy than ours, and some will have
less. A certain fraction of planets will evolve intelligent, tool-using
species that figure out how to use their planet's energy reserves. Some
will have more and some less, some will use their reserves quickly and
some slowly, but all will reach the point we are at today - the point at
which it becomes painfully clear that the biosphere of a planet can only
store up a finite amount of concentrated energy, and when it's gone,
it's gone.
Chances are that a certain number of the intelligent species in our
galaxy have used these stored energy reserves to attempt short-distance
spaceflight, as we have done. Some with a great deal of energy resources
may be able to establish colonies on other worlds in their own systems,
at least for a time. The difference between the tabletop and
football-field distances needed to travel within a solar system, and the
continental distances needed to cross from star to star, though, can't
be ignored. Given the fantastic energies required, the chance that any
intelligent species will have access to enough highly concentrated
energy resources to keep an industrial society progressing long enough
to evolve starflight technology, and then actually accomplish the feat,
is so close to zero that the silence of the heavens makes perfect sense.
These considerations suggest that White's law, a widely accepted
principle in human ecology, can be expanded in a useful way. White's law
holds that the level of economic development in a society is measured by
the energy per capita it produces and uses. Since the energy per capita
of any society is determined by its access to concentrated energy
resources - and this holds true whether we are talking about wild foods,
agricultural products, fossil fuels, or anything else - it's worth
postulating that the maximum level of economic development possible for
a society is measured by the abundance and concentration of energy
resources to which it has access.
It's also worth postulating, along the lines suggested by Richard
Duncan's Olduvai theory, that a society's maximum level of economic
development will be reached, on average, at the peak of a bell-shaped
curve with a height determined by the relative renewability of the
society's energy resources. A society wholly dependent on resources that
renew themselves over the short term may trace a "bell-shaped curve" in
which the difference between peak and trough is so small it approximates
a straight line; a society dependent on resources renewable over a
longer timescale may cycle up and down as its resource base depletes and
recovers; a society dependent on nonrenewable resources can be expected
to trace a ballistic curve in which the height of ascent is matched, or
more than matched, by the depth of the following decline.
Finally, the suggestions made here raise the possibility that for more
than a century and a half now, our own civilization has been pursuing a
misguided image of what an advanced technology looks like. Since the
late nineteenth century, when early science fiction writers such as
Jules Verne began to popularize the concept, "advanced technology" and
"extravagant use of energy" have been for all practical purposes
synonyms, and today Star Trek fantasies tend to dominate any discussion
of what a mature technological society might resemble. If access to
concentrated energy sources inevitably peaks and declines in the course
of a technological society's history, though, a truly mature technology
may turn out to be something very different from our current
expectations. We'll explore this further in next week's post.
_____
The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA),
John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland,
Oregon.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/09/solving-fermis-paradox.html#links
http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp