The word affluence is used here to represent a condition of having needs satisfied, in abundance, without the requirement for much effort. It seems, strangely in a sense, that this is the direction that evolution would direct any intelligent alien civilization. Evolution starts out by making species that are more and more efficient at living in their environment, but this transforms into a situation, after the invention of tool-using, to the production of a species which becomes more and more efficient at altering the environment to meet their needs.
Affluence provides
the basic needs for some subset of individuals, the ones to whom the
word is applied in a particular civilization, and then it proceeds to
deal with the non-basic needs. This might mean psychological ones,
or ones related to interactions with others, or ones related to
amusement. There are probably others. For basic needs and secondary
needs, after being initially met, the elements of quality and variety
are introduced as affluence proceeds and strengthens. Quality and
variety can blossom and produce a cornucopia of ways to fulfill
needs. The certain subset of individuals who are in the affluent
class or group or faction, which might be large or small or even
uniform or minuscule, are less and less required to do anything at
all in order to be the beneficiaries of their society’s benefits.
So, a species consisting of producers of goods to meet basic needs,
after technology and social organization become established and grow
stronger in influence, turns into a species where some subset are
simply consumers.
What happens to
individuals when affluence expands within their lifetime? It might
be possible to use alienology to predict what lifetimes might be
conceivable with a species as they gain intelligence and turn into a
civilization, but that can be left to another blog. When an
individual becomes affluent, after having been gestated at a time or
in a group that did not have much of it, they do not lose the habits
that were ingrained in them. One way to say that is that they
preserve the desires, which become needs under affluence, to be
productive, and so they would seek to adapt within their changing
society, or actively seek to modify it, so that individual production
might continue. This would be visible as a migration of work types
as technology eliminates certain classes of it.
Evolutionary
success, which any alien civilization would have achieved, does not
simply consist of having individuals with their needs being met.
Evolution is really about reproduction and the production of future
generations. That is the measure of fitness, not survival, but
reproductive rate. It is reproductive rate which dictates which
genetic mutations spread through the gene pool and which are
eliminated. Survival chances do not figure into evolutionary
success, except so far as they improve the total reproductive rate of
a gene carrier through its lifetime. Among plants on Earth, there
are many annuals which have had great evolutionary success, despite a
fixed and short lifetime. Other examples exist among insects.
Earth’s higher animals, however, are all the equivalent of
perennials.
Thus the proper
question to ask is what does affluence do between generations? The
earlier generation, pre-affluence, learned to work to achieve
sustenance, shelter from elements and perhaps lodging, and of course
reproduction. The later generations learn to consume. What a
generation learns is strongly affected by what the previous
generation chooses to teach it, in multiple ways, such as by example
and by instruction.
Each generation has
a choice as to what to teach its subsequent generation, and as
successive generations have less and less need for diligence and
other character traits that were critical to evolutionary success, it
seems very reasonable that there would be less and less
concentration on those aspects of education, and more on how to
consume, according to whatever fads or other social aspects dictate
within the society how to establish one’s preferences among a
variety of ways to consume, both to fulfill basic needs and to
fulfill secondary ones. Thus it would seem that successive
generations would lose the drives that evolution demands, and turn
into something almost unrecognizable by evolution.
As noted just above,
the only real drive that evolution cares about is reproduction rate,
which must be an instinctual drive in all animals, including those
aliens who achieve civilizational status. But the instincts behind
reproduction can be thought of as needs, and technology can satisfy
them, without requiring much effort directed toward reproduction. In
other words, the affluent class can fail to reproduce sufficiently to
maintain their population. Thus affluence seems to be a malign
influence, which will lead to extinction for those who have it, not
necessarily immediately, but after some numbers of successive
generations. The subset that achieves it, and does not figure out
how to overcome its influence, will die out.
Who, in an alien
civilization, is most likely to achieve affluence? Clearly the
subset which is most successful in meeting their own needs, under
evolutionary times and just after them. This is the subset which has
the genetics that allow them to be comparatively successful, perhaps
dominating others, and which has mastered the use of tools, which
includes the training of successive generations to use them. In
other words, affluence, an inevitable result of success in the
evolutionary period, both in hardware, the genes, and software, the
intergenerational training, results in a potential extinction of
those who achieve it, meaning that the best genes sort themselves
into a group which then becomes extinct.
If evolution is
continually producing these same super-successful genes and training
techniques, there might be a flow of individuals out of the
non-affluent gene pool into the affluent one, where they go extinct
after a few generations. But evolution does not work after
civilization becomes established. The qualities which are selected
for under civilization are quite different from those under pre-tool
conditions, initial tool use conditions, and hunter-gatherer
conditions, if this particular alien species followed this path,
which seems the only possible one to civilization. So, projecting
the future of an alien species becomes quite murky at this point.
The question to be asked is, does the most successful subset of
individuals figure out the dangers of affluence, and do they any
longer care about preserving the evolutionary success qualities?
If the answer is no,
then the mystery of why there are no alien visitors here is
unshrouded.
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