Intelligence is like a magic bullet. By intelligence, we do not mean literacy, like the familiarity with a hundred ‘classic’ works of literature. Nor is it numeracy, like knowing how to solve calculus and set theory examples. It is problem-solving ability, which is completely separate from literacy or numeracy, except that they can serve as tools for the problem-solver in his quest to overcome some difficult parts of a problem. Problem-solving takes place every day in every society, as when a person decides how to fix an appliance or substitute cooking ingredients. This is the low level of problem-solving, not involving anything new, just solving a problem that many others have solved before. The high level of problem-solving occurs when no one has solved a problem before, or at least no one in your tribe or city or wherever it is that you might learn from. It is like figuring out how to put a pointed rock on the end of a stick and reduce the threat of tigers by killing them more easily instead of running, climbing or hiding. It is like figuring out how to get somewhere faster by hanging onto the back of a horse and forcing it to go where you want instead of where it wants. It is like figuring out how to heat certain stones very hot and then use the metal that drips out of them. It is, in essence, pushing the envelope of how society used to do things into a region of more capability. It typically uses technology, in the broadest sense that includes organization, management, and delegation just as much as physics, animal husbandry and metallurgy.
If society collapses
for some reason, famine, war, volcanoes, pestilence, or something
else, intelligence cures the problem, sometimes only low-level and
sometimes high-level, perhaps re-inventing something that was wholly
or partially lost. Basically, the ability to solve problems with
intelligence is an almost universal cure for civilizational collapse.
It can’t cure extermination of course, but most lesser problems
involving either population reduction or environmental catastrophe
are eventually solvable, generations in time perhaps, or even
centuries, but sometime. What can’t be solved? In other words,
what problems can’t intelligence solve? This is the question that
will answer the more formidable problem of “Would alien
civilizations collapse prior to reaching asymptotic technology?”
Intelligence can’t
solve problems that involve the destruction of the intelligence
necessary for problem-solving. In other words, we have a tautology.
If there is no more intelligence in a society, no more technology
would get invented, some might be lost, and society can collapse.
So, how could intelligence be destroyed across the board in a whole
civilization? More specifically, how can the level of intelligence
capable of solving higher-level problems be destroyed? If a
civilization maintains lower levels of intelligence, capable of
solving lots of lower level problems, it might get to statis, a fixed
state of civilization, and never go forward to asymptotic
technology. If something happens to an alien civilization that
allows lower level intelligence to flourish, but eliminates some
necessary factor for higher levels of intelligence to occur, it will
hit stasis or collapse. The numbers of individuals who do higher
levels of problem-solving are very few, so it is not necessary to
have any widespread slaughter of anyone who can read or anything like
that, it is only necessary to remove from society those mandatory,
but possibly unknown, factors that allow some low level smart person
to develop his mind and become a genius able to solve some hitherto
impossible problem.
Intelligence comes
from two factors, genetic and environmental. The highest levels of
intelligence need contributions from both of them. If smart aliens
stop having young aliens, in the period before the genetic grand transformation and industrial gestation is possible, then the
genetics side of intelligence will fail and this particular alien
society will fall into stasis, possibly never reaching the genetic
revolution, or into collapse and descend into some earlier state of
living at a lower technology level. If an alien civilization simply
does not recognize the absolute necessity of having a requisite
number of high-level problem-solvers, or does not understand the
genetic lottery that produces them, they could collapse without even
understanding what is happening to them. Consider an alien born into
an alien civilization which is in the industrial revolution stage or
perhaps in a later stage of it or beyond it. Suppose this alien is
one with some portion of the genes necessary to provide a young alien
with the total complement necessary to become a genius
problem-solver. The alien is not a problem-solver, as he does not
have the full complement, and the only way to get to a full
complement is to breed with some other alien who also has a partial
complement. This assumes the alien species is bisexual, which seems
to be a reasonable assumption of evolutionary convergence, meaning
that’s how it has to happen on any planet with evolution, and
therefore Earth is a good example of it.
If either the
partial complement alien decides not to have offspring or decides to
breed with someone without a partial complement of genius genes, he
will produce no high-level problem solvers for the next generation.
So, if the alien civilization could either not reward having offspring,
or need these partial complement people, who have mid-level
intelligence, for other tasks, or promote breeding between partial
complement people and no complement people, or in any other way
interfere with the genetic lottery producing super problem-solvers,
then the civilization can collapse. Maybe after it collapses, it can
recover as the discouragement processes are terminated, or maybe it
does not collapse that far but maintains the traditions of the former
‘golden age’, meaning no high-level intelligences or too small a
number to matter.
The other side of
the coin of intelligence is training and education. If training for
problem solving is abandoned, such as by training everyone to only a
low level and not allowing the best to fulfill their destiny, the
alien civilization could just as easily sink into a slow collapse,
with the collapse time measured in generations. Alternately, the
alien civilization could disparage problem solving and laud such
things as power over others or physical skills or humor or anything
else other than problem-solving, so that those capable of this were
seduced into never using their skills.
In short, it is
certainly possible to devise ways in which the magic bullet of
high-level problem-solving is never fired, or fired such a few times
that the noise of society eliminates any benefits of some problems
being solved. Known solutions could be forgotten, or even worse,
disparaged for some reason or another, and then even stasis would not
be possible, only collapse. If it is a real possibility that any
alien civilization will run into this morass, and sink below the sea
of mediocracy, then this is a potential answer to the question of why
they never came here. The reason is they foundered in idiocracy, but
of a peculiar type: they only got rid of the few who could carry
their civilization to higher levels.
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