Fermi's Paradox and the End of Cheap Oil(费米佯谬与廉价石油的终结)

I've been thinking of Fermi's Paradox since I saw the documentary film A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, with its dire predictions of the wars and disruptions that could occur on the downward slope of the Hubbert curve. While I remain an optimist about the power of human ingenuity to surmount enormous challenges, I have enough sense of history to know that catastrophes do happen, that societies fail to make the right choices, and that civilizations fail.

What if the answer to Fermi's paradox is not the absence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but merely the absence of high technology? The movie makes the case that the extraordinary flowering of our society has been driven by our profligate use of oil as an incredibly cheap energy resource – and one that won't last. With haunting images of once vibrant oil fields that are now ghost towns, the movie is a thought-provoking counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth. If the movie's contentions are correct, we're truly caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Either global warming or peak oil will lead to an urgent transformation of civilization as we know it, or our failure to transform quickly enough might well lead to the end of civilization as we know it. And if indeed cheap oil is a prerequisite to the first flowering of technological civilization, might a Roman-Empire-style collapse due to some future disaster make it difficult to rebuild to spaceflight-capable levels due to lack of said resource the next time around? Many of the large scale energy technologies that we imagine replacing oil are energy intensive to build. They are, in a sense, themselves dependent on oil.

The idea that peak oil is far from a fringe idea was brought home by a recent NY Times story, For Exxon Mobil, $10.9 Billion Profit Disappoints:

…even as it posted the second-most profitable quarter in its history, Exxon’s earnings managed to disappoint investors because of a drop in oil production. Shares closed down $3.37, to $89.70, on a day the Dow industrial average rose 189.87 points…. Record oil prices have lifted corporate profits to new heights throughout the industry but they are also masking an increasingly tough business environment for international oil companies, marked chiefly by rising development costs and stagnating hydrocarbon production.

The connection between the idea of Peak Oil and Fermi's paradox came back to mind after I read Nick Bostrom's piece in Technology Review, Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

…the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a “Great Filter,” which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come.

Bostrom's provocative thesis is this: once we find evidence of primitive life elsewhere, we've narrowed the likelihood that the Great Filter is behind us, and increased the likelihood that it is still ahead of us, in some unknown disaster to come:

The other possibility is that the Great Filter is still ahead of us. This would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development from progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space colonization. For example, it might be that any sufficiently advanced civilization discovers some technology–perhaps some very powerful weapons tech nology–that causes its extinction.

Bostrom speculates about everything from nuclear war to gray goo to germ warfare to asteroid strikes as the locus of possible Great Filters. While diminished access to readily available natural resources after a crash of civilization is, like all of these other scenarios, merely food for thought, it seems to be a thought worth sharing. In any event, I recommend the movie.

翻译：xiaochong

看了纪录片“A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash（粗暴的觉醒：石油危机）”以及它关于战争的可怕预言（Hubbert曲线急速下降的时候就可能发生）我一直在考虑费米佯谬。尽管我对人类的聪明才智能克服所有挑战还保持着乐观态度，我已经强烈地感觉到灾难将会发生，社会将作出错误选择，文明将会终结。

如果费米佯谬的答案不是地外文明并不存在而是仅仅缺乏高科技手段将会怎样？这个电影认为社会的极度发展是由我们将石油作为一种不可思议的廉价能源而肆意挥霍来驱动的——但是这种情况不复存在了。影片中有一些已经荒废的油田城市的镜头，它们曾经也是生机勃勃。和“An Inconvenient Truth（难以忽视的真相）”一样这是部发人深醒的电影。如果影片中的观点是正确的那我们真是进退两难了。要么全球变暖或石油峰值导致人类文明的紧急转变，要么是转移不够迅速导致文明的毁灭。而且，如果廉价石油真是第一次科技文明发展的先决条件，那一个罗马帝国式的毁灭后重建星际旅行会因为缺乏上诉能源而变得困难吗？很多我们打算替换石油的大规模能源技术都是能源密集型技术，一定程度上它们本身就依赖石油。

最近纽约时报的一篇文章让我们又想起石油峰值的问题，“埃克森美孚，109亿美元利润落空”：

……尽管它发布了历史上第二好的季度，埃克森的收入由于石油产品的衰退而使投资人失望。股票跌3.37美元至89.70美元，而同一天道琼斯指数上涨189.87点……创纪录的油价尽管将整个产业的公司收益提升到了新的高度，这也预示着这些国际石油公司面临更艰难的商业环境，像不断上涨的发展成本和不景气的碳氢化合物产品。

读了Nick Bostrom在Technology Review的文章“为什么我希望搜索外星生命的计划什么也找不到”，我想起了石油峰值和费米佯谬的联系。

……能够进行外星移民的进化之路要通过一个“Great Filter（大过滤器）”，可以把它看作一个可能性栅栏。（我从George Mason大学的经济学家Robin Hanson那里借用了这个词。）这个过滤器由一个或更多进化转变或者说步骤组成，每一步有一定概率通过，这样才可以产生一个孕育出可以进行星际探索文明的类地行星。从无数的生命萌芽开始，最后我们什么也没看到。这个过滤器一定非常强大——通过它一定是几乎不可能——尽管经历了无数次尝试，一无所获：没有外星人，没有太空飞船，没有信号。至少我们在我们周围什么也没发现。

现在，这个大过滤器在哪里？有两种可能性：可能在我们后面，在我们遥远的过去；另一种可能是在我们前面，几十年后，几百年后，几千年后。

Bostrom的理论是：一旦找到了其它什么地方原始生命的证据，我们就会减小大过滤器在我们身后的可能性，而更去相信它还在我们前面的说法，未知的灾难将会降临。

另一种可能性是大过滤器还在我们前面。这可能意味着某种巨大的奇迹妨碍了现阶段技术文明没有发展到大规模外星移民的程度。比如，某种足够先进的文明发现了一些技术——可能是一些超级武器技术——它们引起了毁灭。

Bostrom分析了所有可能是大过滤器的事情，从核战争到纳米机器人，到细菌战争，再到小行星撞地球。尽管文明毁灭后的自然资源使用会更弱还只是个想法，这是一个值得分享的思想。我绝对推荐这部电影。