Sunday, January 27, 2019

Death by Erudition

When contemplating why an alien society might never reach its technological zenith, but instead get stuck at some lower point, there are many, many possibilities. If technology never reaches its finale in asymptotic technology, then space travel is impossible, the alien society lives and becomes extinct on its own planet, and we never get visited by them. One boondoggle that an advanced or middle-technology society can get in might be called 'Death by Erudition'.

Erudition is a nice English word which has the meaning of the accumulation of already known knowledge. In other words, it is the opposite of learning by experiment or by trial-and-error. The example that springs to mind is the old Chinese Empire, where opportunities for advancement and personal power were largely confined to the imperial government, and there were tests that were used to filter out the more qualified from the less qualified. The subject of the tests was Confucian learning and the derivations from it. Confucianism is something like a religion, but without any supernatural entities floating around, and a large behavioral code. Alien individuals would need, at that time and at all times, some basis for choosing how to behave in a multitude of situations, and what type of mandatory behavior would be necessary as well. If there was an alien civilization which developed a globe-spanning empire, and which put up a chokepoint to advancement as erudition in some subject like a behavioral code and all its trappings, then any alien who might have had a possible future in advancing technology would be steered away from that into the task of passing through the chokepoint.

Technology advances when there are some precursors to it. One is the scientific method, and we have Francis Bacon to thank for kicking off the theory of how to do good science. If an alien society took its Francis Bacons, meaning those aliens who had the equivalent of his mental abilities and freedom of thought, and induced a very large majority of them to instead work on following to the last detail some behavior code, “alien Confucianism” if it needs a title, there might be no one, between the time of the foundation of the empire and its collapse due to resource shortages or something else intrinsic to a colossal government, who invents the scientific method. With that, there would be no guidelines for interested aliens to follow in order to push the civilization up the technology ladder.

The alien empire does not have to be completely globe-spanning, but it does have to be large enough to dominate the globe and to set an example to all the outlying areas, where some minor kingdoms might be set up. It would seem quite logical that these outer regimes would try to imitate the globe's largest empire, and copy their focus on erudition and on having a chokepoint to advancement being the mis-directed competition on knowledge of some body of behavioral rules or some other religious category of knowledge. It is easy to imagine many ways such a competition could be organized and many sets of knowledge domains it could cover, without there being the slightest impetus to advancing technology.

It might be thought that some upstart kingdom on the periphery would want to be an alien Kublai Khan and conquer the empire, using some new technology. But technology provides an incremental advantage, and sheer numbers provides a different one. As long as the empire paid attention to the smaller kingdoms and maintained control over them, so they could not be amalgamated under one leader, their numbers could be sufficient to overwhelm any technology advantage, or for that matter, any inspirational leader or any secret cabal or so on. The key is that the empire has to pay attention to the details of what was going on in the periphery. With that in hand, an alien empire might easily prolong its existence, and the counter-technology chokepoint, until resource shortages or environmental effects or some natural catastrophe put an end to that civilization's window of opportunity to explore interstellar space.

There have been many examples of empires here on Earth, and three stand out as examples of humongous empires. One is the Chinese Empire, already mentioned, which had the chokepoint and which serves as a good example. Another is the Incan Empire, which was huge as well. The Incan Empire did not last long enough for such effects to be manifested, as it was swallowed up by the Spanish Empire after it had existed, as an empire, for only about a hundred years. The third is the venerable Roman Empire. Each of these three had suppressed or swallowed up the nearby competition. The Incan Empire had its own belief system, but it was so short-lived that it was still in the condition of having military leaders rule over it and take positions of power within it. The Roman Empire had passed that stage, but it was so diverse that it did not have any standard belief system to use in harnessing the ambition of young potential leaders. Thus the Chinese example is the only outstanding one, but it serves as an illustration of what might happen.

Are there any features we could observe on distant planets that would have an effect on the rise of such an empire? Is there anything unique about Earth which means we don't have such features and therefore escaped from that collapse mode?

Empires grow because they have a central granary, a large area where foodstuffs can be grown and where villages and cities can be formed. Rome had the Italian peninsula, the Incans had the terraced mountains up and down the Andean mountain chain, the Chinese had central China. They also had to have transportation, and that consisted of one spine of roads plus branches for the Incas, a network of roads emanating from the capital for China, and the Mediterranean Sea plus roads for the Romans. To have a globe-spanning empire would means there would have to be a large continent, all fertile, without barriers to transportation. Alternatively, an archipelago with all the fertile land might do. There would have to be no obstacles such as mountain ranges dividing the sole continent, or multiple fertile continents at large distances. Thus, once we have constructed a telescope of kilometer size or greater, we can look at exo-planets which are otherwise likely to have originated life, and see if they might have had a civilization which collapsed early in their technological progress, owing to 'Death by Erudition'.