Recall that a synthetic civilization is used here to mean one which is a mixture of robots, other AI organisms perhaps with no bodies, modified animals with intelligence, new species that the native aliens created to improve themselves in their genetics laboratories, and perhaps some hybrids. There may be no more of the evolved species of aliens left, as they could simply choose not to have any more and only gestate some improved aliens. The new aliens might not be a species, simply individual organisms, but whether they are or not would depend on choices made in the alien civilization. If they conceive of some catastrophes in their future, they might want to make sure they are a species that can reproduce if necessary. There are certainly perils we know about, such as basalt floods and asteroid collisions, which would destroy the civilization but perhaps not all its inhabitants. Thus, having an ability to recover in case something like this happens might be a good insurance policy. Then again, they might simply have a small reservoir of their own species left to share the planet with newly designed creatures.
What would death be like in such a civilization? Robots wear out parts, but parts can be replaced, and any information in the control system of the robot simply transferred over. So, robots are almost immortal but they are not quite; there should be a new word for something which is just a set of replaceable parts. Biological creatures could have organs regrown and replaced, or perhaps a technology of regeneration would be developed which would eliminate the need for such replacements. This would be a sort of immortality, except that damage happens cell by cell, and even the best genetic copying is still going to have errors. There should be cosmic ray damage everywhere in the galaxy, not just on Earth, so they would be subject to that degradation.
Built-in cell death might be programmed away, as microbes do not have it. The process in higher organisms on Earth is that each generation of cells past some starting time chips away at a clock-like mechanism within the cell. The cells are only approximately running at the same rate, but when large numbers of cells reach their end-of-life signal, death happens. This might be written out of higher organisms, but that means that cellular damage, beyond that which can be repaired by the cell’s mechanisms, would accumulate and be inherited on a cell generation level. Thus, gradual degradation appears to be inevitable in biological organisms without some external intervention.
Possibly it will be possible for an alien civilization and their asymptotic technology to have a medical process which involved gradual replacement of the cells with cells grown in a protected environment, where they were largely free from damage, or which were grown rapidly from perfected genetic code so that no damage could accumulate. If these could be substituted by some process in a biological organisms, it would be brought back to a state of youth.
The brain in an organism, assuming it to be a neural net such as all mammals on Earth use, would be a separate issue. Figuring out how to generate new neurons in the brain without destroying the knowledge and capability of the organism might be impossible. Perhaps everyone in the alien civilization will get used to memory loss as time goes on.
Thus, immortality in a slightly degraded sense might be possible for alien civilizations. However, it is not clear that this is a realistic technology, or that the cost of it would not be so high that the civilization would just opt for death and replacement.
If death was part of the alien civilization, there is a question of how it would be handled. Should all biological organisms be grown with genetic code that stretches life to the longest extent, and medical technology, admittedly far beyond what we can imagine, used to prolong it in all cases, both from accidental injury and from senescence? We on Earth know the costs of such medical intervention grows greatly with the age of the organism, so, if costs were a consideration in the alien world, would there be some threshold upon which prolongation no longer was done?
The other alternative would be to go in the opposite direction, and provide some fixed term that each alien could expect to live, at the end of which there would be euthanasia. It is our natural instinct to avoid death, but some cultures on Earth accept it more naturally than others. Could an alien civilization go farther and make it an acceptable way of organizing a life?
In either of these two situations, there would be a date on which life no longer went on for any particular organism, either because medical intervention became too costly or because the alloted term was used up. We might refer to this as a Last Day arrangement, as each alien would understand when his/her/its last day was, and could choose to spend it as they wished.
There could be some coordination with the government, so Last Days only happened once a year, or on some other schedule, and it was turned into a type of celebration rather than the onset of mourning. Could it be possible that the culture could be adjusted so that the natural instinct to try to survive was subdued, and aliens willingly participated in Last Day ceremonies, either on a large scale or on a more private scale?
This has implications beyond the life of an individual alien. If part of their culture was the acceptance that organisms have a fixed length of time, and after that they willingly cease to exist, then they might apply that not only to individuals, but also to species, or to life in general, or to life on their planet, or to their culture. When it comes time to decide if they are going to go and colonize another planet a thousand light years away, or else just let their culture and species go extinct, this thinking may color their choices. “Everything has a lifetime, and our is up. Forget about the stars and let’s celebrate the end of our culture.”
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