Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Hibernation in Alien Civilizations

An alien civilization that had passed through the industrial revolution might see the need for mining of the other planets, satellites and remaining objects of its own solar system. As the civilization moves into and through the genetic grand transition, they may need more resources, and have to go to distant planets or even objects beyond the range of their furthest out planet. It might well be assumed that just like our solar system, the typical solar system will have many objects farther out, where their orbits are not sorted out by the main planets, but still within the gravitational grasp of their star. The period of time to go out to these planets might be quite long, compared with the lifetime of an alien. Is hibernation the answer?

Recall first that there are less expensive ways to move within a solar system, once travel becomes necessary and not too infrequent. As discussed elsewhere, putting a transport vessel in an elliptical orbit and using the gravity of the target object to resteer the trajectory back to the home planet, and then doing the opposite, cuts the propulsion mass and propulsion energy down to that needed for just steering operations. These orbits are long, however.

For comparison, the New Horizons spacecraft flew nine years to get from Earth to Pluto, even with a gravity assist from Jupiter. That’s an example of a direct flight. For these cheap orbit transport times, we might use the orbital period of Pluto, which is about 248 years. It might be thought that these cheap orbits are too long to use for supplies, but remember that they would be like pipelines. It doesn’t matter how long a pipeline takes to move something, as long as there is a constant flow in and a constant flow out. They take time to fill up and get moving, but an alien civilization, planning on lasting for the order of a million years with these resources, wouldn’t have any problem with this. So, if aliens need to be move from their home planet out to some distant mining station, they need some trick to help them survive the journey, and intergenerational ships are just a ridiculously expensive idea. Hibernation is not.

Some alien civilizations might have evolved to hibernate before they became intelligent, and kept that going during all the civilizational transformations that they passed through. Even so, seasonal hibernation, if it were anything like what happens on Earth, aren’t exactly what is called for by interplanetary flight. An Earth bear hibernates by slowing down his respiration rate, his metabolism rate, and his activity level. Cellular processes are still going on. The bear uses up stored energy, fats and then whatever else provides energy, as it hibernates. If there was an intravenous supply of energy, hibernation might be extended, provided the external signals to wake were excluded. The bear is still aging, although at a reduced rate.

Hibernation for interplanetary flights might involve some other technology developed by the alien civilization during the genetic grand transformation. Aging might be eliminated, or at least reduced in impact, by genetic changes. The metabolic changes for hibernation might be written into the aliens’ genetic code, or perhaps if they can achieve genetic fluidity, it could be an option rather than a necessity. Again, speciation is a possibility, and one new species of aliens would be created for interplanetary work. Many changes in the structure and chemistry of an alien might be made for this species, but one of the changes might allow episodes of hibernation.

Elsewhere it was discussed how species might be created, intelligent to whatever degree desired, distinct from the aliens for the purpose of performing work for their civilization. These were called “intellos”, who are disposable creatures, might like humans regard cattle, sheep, dogs, and other domesticated or farm animals. Instead of aliens being transformed into a more suitable species for interplanetary travel, a separately designed species could be formed, completely tailored to the tasks and travel necessities for interplanetary mining. It is almost a policy decision, as to whether such creatures would be classed as aliens or intellos. How the alien civilization would treat them would be quite different. Either way, hibernation would have to be a technology that was used to enable aliens or intellos to be transported via cheap orbits out to the more distant objects of their solar system.

There are social aspects that crop up if it is aliens who do the hibernation and travel. These social aspects seem extreme to us, living in the industrial era, but after an alien society passes through the genetics grand transition, they would not have such an extreme impact. For example, suppose an alien is living on the home planet, decides or is chosen for an interplanetary mission, and goes to sleep on a transport vessel for two hundred and fifty years one say, and the same for the return. Assume their lifetime was only a hundred years. This means when they returned, five lifetimes would have passed. No one they knew before would still exist, except if there was some home planet hibernation for some reason unfathomed by us. But after the genetics grand transition, aliens are much more fungible. Everyone would have the same basic genetics, the same intelligence, the same health, the same education, the same training, and so on; each one of these would have been optimized to grant each alien the best possible life. But this means that there is not much difference between aliens after the genetics grand transition as before.

There would also be industrial gestation, meaning families would not exist, so relatives would not exist and there would be no parting with relatives at the start of the trip. Other things would be nearly indistinguishable, as the technology would have stopped changing, so society would have stopped changing. Population would likely be the same, at some optimum level. The cities would be continually regenerated, so there would be only a few details different, rather than whole new cities formed and other ones shrunk or otherwise changed. There would be no upgrade in education, as everything would have been known before the alien left on his voyage and it would still be know when he returned. So the impact of hibernation and extended life and interplanetary voyaging would be fairly minimal, both to the alien and to the civilization in which he lived.

Instead, the pressing question is whether it is better to create aliens on the home planet and ship them out to the mining colony, or ship out enough equipment to create aliens there, train them, and let them live their whole lives in the colony. This is an economics question, and likely depends on the size of the ore deposit, plus a large number of aspects that we haven’t begun to think about yet. So, hibernation is possible, technologically and socially, but may not be used for economics reasons.

Monday, August 28, 2017

Intelligent Design by Bombing

Intelligent Design means the design of the genetic coding for some creatures or a whole planet by some intelligent alien civilization. This is not a remarkable and astounding achievement, but something that will fall within the capability of any alien civilization that continues progress in technology. Genetics is part of the last group of scientific knowledge that will be gained by an alien civilization, as it depends on some previous technology to enable the research that makes it possible. Massive computing and automation is necessary to unlock the secrets of a genetic code and even more so to create a new genetic code from scratch, and test it in a simulation before committing it to actual DNA. It is part of what we call in this blog the genetics grand transformation, as it will transform any alien society even more than the industrial grand transformation.

Intelligent design of a whole-planet genetic system must depend on predictions of what evolution will do. A given species only exists for a few tens of millennia, perhaps more and perhaps less, and the extreme expense of designing a whole planet’s genetic structure and delivering it to a planet free from life could hardly be justified if the life on the planet only lasted for a few tens of millennia. There must be an understanding of how it would change with time. This opens up a whole set of questions. Since life on a suitable planet might be expected to last for billions of years, exactly what was the purpose of the alien civilization’s attempt to introduce life there?

Colonization seems to have a problem with time scales. Let’s suppose there is an alien civilization on a planet, and they have reached asymptotic technology within ten thousand years of the first little city being founded, meaning science is done and everything is known. Suppose also they are very frugal with their resource, very industrious about searching for them on their entire solar system, and very motivated to last as long as they can, keeping their population well limited. With this motivation, they would be searching for a solar system to go to when the resource of their home solar system begin to give out. This might be a few million years out from the first city founding; suppose it’s two million. Very early in this time they are able to build large telescopes to scan neighboring stars for suitable planets, and can tell which ones have oceans, land masses, not too heavy or too light an atmosphere, not too much geological activity, a star which will last a long time and does not erupt too often, a magnetosphere to block some of the high-energy particulate radiation from the sun from killing off surface life, and probably a dozen or two other things we might not have thought of yet. Now let’s suppose they find one or more suitable candidates: lifeless planets which have all the characteristics of a potential new home for their civilization.

There’s no need to go there immediately, as if they want their civilization to last as long as possible, they wouldn’t want to be burning through the resources of two solar systems at once. Rather, they would wait until they are seeing shortages of resources at home, but not so badly that they could not afford to build a starship. It would be as small as possible to do the job they set out for it, but what exactly should that job be?

If they want to transfer their civilization there, many preparations have to be made. Do they need oxygen in the atmosphere? That takes, if Earth is any guide and our scientific deductions on that are reasonable, a couple of billion years. Without oxygen, seeding the planet with life means seeding it with cyanobacteria or perhaps something else that can survive in an anaerobic environment. Multicellular organisms are possible in this environment, but none attractive to an alien civilization looking for some place like home. Perhaps the alien civilization will be sufficiently creative to make oxygenation of their target planet occur faster, but doing it remotely in under a million years seems beyond possible. Oxygen is a very reactive element, and there are many sinks for it in the rocks of a planet. These have to be filled up before the atmosphere can become highly oxygenated, and it just takes a while for this to happen.

If colonization of a barren planet takes too long, why else might an alien civilization decide to seed a distant planet with life? Recall that there is no clear reason why a particular alien civilization might choose as its goal the propagation of its own species or its own culture. They could also simply choose to be the bringers of life to the universe. Deciding to spread life is somewhat easier that preserving one’s own civilization on a distant exo-planet.

If the organic oceans hypothesis on the origination of life that was developed in this blog is true, then the probability of life can be low on planets which could support it. In that case, an alien civilization would certainly know that there might be hundreds of planets which could evolve life in the Milky Way galaxy, provided only that it gets started. They could take it upon themselves to be the agent for that initiation, and be motivated by that goal. It might be that they realize that colonization cannot happen, and take the propagation of life itself as a substitute.

If that is the case, then sending a starship with some cyanobacteria and bombing the oceans and coastlines of the target planet with them would do the job. The starship would have to be designed to last for the thousands of years of the voyage to the distant solar system, so it might be not much harder to design it to last for a few more thousands of years in orbit over the target planet. If so, perhaps it could also detect the populations of cyanobacteria in the oceans and shallow water areas, and report back to the home planet that the mission was a success. Certainly the aliens would have some equivalent of champagne for this.

Saturday, August 19, 2017

Bifurcation by Voluntary Speciation

There is another way that an intelligent species can bifurcate other than by accidental, geographic speciation; by voluntary speciation after the genetic grand transformation. Splitting into two separate species can happen if there is a faction that can afford or obtain improved genetics, and another residual one which cannot.

This arrangement could happen in several ways. One is through a geographic separation. One continent or landmass is more technologically advanced, and invents the genetic means for improving the species, indeed modifying its chromosomes, and does it for those who live within its bounds. The other areas, other continents or islands or landmasses, have been left technologically behind, and cannot offer their residents this genetic change. This would seem to be a temporary problem, as technology has a tendency to seep via trade or other means, and so at some later instance, the continent without the advanced genetics capability would gain it, and catch up. This might not happen if there was some reason why technology flow was restricted. This might be connected with the resources connected to the planet, capability of the population, some financial arrangements, or even military pressure. Many reasons mean such a situation might not be unlikely at all on the various alien civilizations that could arise in the Milky Way galaxy.

Another potential cause for speciation is the caste system. It is possible that an alien civilization arises while maintaining a caste system. This would imply and require a very structured society, as when the industrial grand transformation happens, information begins to flow freely, and requiring individuals to maintain the occupational and status arrangements of a caste system would be more difficult. If the alien civilization remained a theocracy, this might happen, but a theocracy would be under great pressure for change after the industrial grand transformation started. If the theocracy transformed into some hierarchical governance system that maintained castes, this might have a greater chance of lingering into the genetics grand transformation, which would set the stage for improvements in the genetics for only the highest or higher castes.

Any other type of hierarchy of power could result in the limitation of genetic improvements, including speciation, to only those near the pinnacle of power-holders. Many forms of governance, those which do not rotate members of the governing leadership very frequently or maintain it by means of inheritance, could enforce the ban on genetic improvement for lower classes. It might even be done without public awareness, with improvements being done for one or even several generations of the leadership, but in secret. This would require a high degree of secrecy within the society itself, and that might not happen if the industrial grand transformation opens up the conduits of communication to larger numbers of individuals within the society, or within those areas on the planet where technological improvement was happening.

Secrecy might be maintained if there were myths spread about genetic improvement, specifically about the impossibility of it, or the high degree of dangers associated with it. If the society had already bifurcated, into those living perhaps in a legacy theocracy, with limited information flow, and a leadership or otherwise powerful group, then the secrecy needed for the upper group to utilize genetic enhancement might be much easier to maintain.

Is such a divided civilization sustainable, and could it manage to mount an interstellar expedition? One concern is that the lower fraction of the population, where no genetic improvements are available, or perhaps only ones associated with genetic disease prevention are available, would be susceptible to the Malthusian idiocracy that was discussed in several other posts. All that is required for this is some mild degree of affluence and a negative correlation between reproduction rates and intelligence. There are good reasons to think that such a negative correlation would be likely, and affluence is a byproduct of the industrial grand transformation. Thus, the upper faction would grow better and better, as the genetic information and genetic engineering capability improved, and the lower faction would grow worse and worse, by the natural processes.

Sustainability in this type of situation depends on the relative production, managed by the upper faction and facilitated by automation and robotics, as compared to the total population that consumed it. Without automation and robotics, production would not be able to increase, as it would require workers, many of them skilled, to participate in it. Over generations, this quota might not be able to be met, as the general intelligence declined and the population increased. Perhaps there would be a tipping point, when maximum production per capita occurred, and after that, it declined. Malthusian idiocracy does not require some particularly high living standards to occur, and in fact could occur with only some minimum amount of production. However, in this scenario, living standards in the lower faction would continue to decline, and eventually would reach a point where the worst-off individuals were living in hardship.

The technology for interstellar travel, assuming it is possible, would occur near the end of the climb of technology. We are too far from it to understand the requirements, but one point stands out: the long travel times that are necessary. Perhaps only biological starships with regenerative power could prevent reliability failures from dooming the voyages. This implies that the genetics grand transformation has run its course, and this seems to be the last stage before technology is completely known. Thus, there would likely be time for the two-faction situation just discussed to come into hardship. This would imply that it would be hard to amass resources for an interstellar voyage.

Perhaps if the proportions were reversed, the opposite result could happen. If genetic improvement, including speciation, were to happen in the large majority of the population, and only a smaller fraction was prevented from using it, or chose to ignore its benefits, then there would be no huge drain on the civilization’s resource usage for consumption of an out-of-control population, and enough could be sequestered away to arrange for the trip. Thus, an alien civilization that visited Earth would likely be from a planet where genetic modification was the common thing, although not used for everyone. There would be a large majority species with greatly enhanced intelligence, health, athleticism, and so on, and a small minority of legacy followers, still part of the original species which evolved to start the civilization. As far as the character of any visitors, they would certainly be from the majority. Only if we on Earth took the step first to travel and visit other civilizations would we likely encounter the details of speciation in any other alien civilization. This is not to say that some of what we named ‘intellos’, intelligent creatures created by the alien civilization as workers, would not be on the ship, but these should not be confused with legacy species individuals.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Bifurcation by Accidental Speciation

It would be expected that an alien civilization would have a single species during its development of intelligence. To have a planet with two different species becoming intelligent at almost exactly the same time seem so improbable as to be non-existent. However, through an accident of geography, if migration happens early enough, speciation could occur, where the population on one landmass evolves some genetic change sufficiently great that it can no longer interbreed with the population on another. On Earth, this has happened countless times with all types of species, but it did not happen with humans. On another planet, it might.

In a previous post, the major possibilities for a planet with two separate intelligent species were outlined, but there, separate evolutionary paths were assumed, so the two species were assumed different, in appearance, biology, genetics, and so on. For speciation, where there is simply some genetic shift in one of the species, when the numbers were very small so it became universal, the two species could remain very similar, and perhaps even indistinguishable, except at the genetic level. They simply could not interbreed.

Most likely, one of the two species would develop the means of transportation first, and manage to travel to the other landmass, where they would, for the first time, encounter the other species. If there were appearance dissimilarities, so that one species could easily be told from another, these dissimilarities would remain after the encounters began, as the species could not interbreed and genes controlling the dissimilarities could not pass from one species to another. It is possible, though very unlikely, that the only genetic change that happened since the transfer of individuals from one landmass to another was the very one which caused speciation, and in that situation, no features would exist to distinguish by appearance one species from another. However, genetic mutation being what it is, it would be very unlikely that only one genetic transformation would have taken place. So, the principal type of situation is where the two species are distinguishable, but not very different.

It was pointed out that the behavior taken by the two species after these encounters start may set the example for how the species, one or both if they both continued to exist, would behave when they traveled to other solar systems and encountered yet another species of intelligent aliens. Therefore, the question of speciation on the home planet of an alien species is quite important. How long might it take for speciation to take place? If this is short or comparable with the time needed for a civilization to develop that can travel from one landmass to another from the dawn of intelligence, it might be fairly common on planets with alien civilizations to have two or more intermingling species, or at least a history of two species having a late initial encounter.

There are some geographic situations which would tend to make the time available for speciation longer. The time gap is between where there was some accidental transfer of at least one breeding pair, if there were two sexes on this planet, from landmass 1 to landmass 2, up to where there is the development of means of travel. The initial transfer might have occurred over a land bridge, which was washed away shortly after the transfer by a typhoon or sunk by a tsunami or torn apart by an earthquake. Alternatively there might have been some raft situation which carried survivors across the gap between the two landmasses.

The earlier this transfer happened during the evolution of intelligence, the more dissimilarities there would be between the two species, and the resulting differences in cultural levels when they had their first encounter. Also, besides the normal evolution of greater and greater intelligence, which is a random process to some degree, there is the effect of the size of the landmass, if that translates into the number of aliens there might be on each of them. If one landmass is larger, say a continent compared to an island, it would be expected that the population would be larger there and more mutation opportunities would occur. Or if one of the landmasses has large amounts of area, but much of it is uninhabitable by the alien species, being a desert or glacier-covered, the same distinction would happen.

At the time of first encounter, there might be little difference between the intelligence levels of the two species, or much; there might be little difference in the cultural levels as well if the intelligence was similar, or there might be much. These distinctions might affect how the species that created the means of transportation, assumably the more intelligence or more developed of the two, would regard the other one. With distinctions being very large, there would be no application of rules that developed on their landmass for meetings between factions there. These rules might dictate war was inevitable, perhaps of some particular sort, or they might dictate that peaceful trade would be the preferred mode of interaction. If the distinctions between the two species, both in intelligence and cultural level, were not too great, these rules might transfer over, and the lack of interbreeding capability not play much of a role at all. The second species might take on the role that some factions played on the first landmass, being allowed to continue their dominion over the second landmass, or perhaps only the part of it they already occupied at the time of the first encounter.

On the other hand, if the distinctions were large, some sort of subjugation might be expected. The dominant species might attempt to exterminate the less intelligent or developed one, and simply take over their landmass, bit by bit. They might attempt to enslave them, for whatever purpose might be economically useful. At the most, the dominant species might simply maintain them as vassals of whatever faction discovered them, with some tribute being taken as transport allowed.

The history of the encounter would certainly become part of the lore that undergirded the dominant species' behavioral choices. If they had exterminated the second species, they might undertake exploration of the nearby solar systems with the idea in mind that if they find anything intelligent there, they would kill it. The other end of the spectrum is the ‘let’s share the universe’ concept that might arise if the first species had simply accepted the second as partners on their planet. This example appears to be a fruitful one for further examination.