Friday, May 17, 2019

Imagining the Goals of an Alien Civilization


It is much easier to imagine some aspects of alien society, such as their energy sources, than other aspects, such as their goals, because we have on Earth made some progress in understanding the possible sources of energy and can make some good guesses as to what might exist in a more advanced society. But with respect to social goals, our technology is very primitive. We hardly understand anything about societies and their goals; even the basis for this technology or scientific knowledge is vague and undeveloped. We have some observations, but nothing equivalent of Newton's law has been figured out yet. Just to appreciate the difficulty involved, think of asking someone in Columbus' time about energy, after explaining the concept to him. He might answer there was wind power, and that's about all. A person who had some education involving ancient Greek science and who had heard of Hero of Alexandria's aeolipile might add steam power, which comes from fire. There would be no way that such a person could estimate what energy usage would look like five hundred years later, or a thousand.

On the other hand, we have some confidence now in understanding electromagnetic energy, kinetic energy, chemical energy, equation of state energy such as compression, and nuclear energy, along with the many ways they exist in nature and how they can be harnessed and converted. A person on Earth today might be able to do a good job in describing the use of energy, and might even be able to imagine how energy might be used in the far future. And if we subscribe to the concept of societal convergence, meaning technology drives society and since technology is the same no matter what planet you live on, all sufficiently advanced societies will have similar features, and therefore what this person imagines for Earth five hunderd years from now would be quite insightful as to what a similarly advanced alien civilization might be doing.

We are in the Columbus era stage of understanding neurology, politics, governance, societal arrangements and whatever else relate to the goals of an alien civilization. We would make grave mis-assumptions to try and use what we think are the goals of Earth's various societies, current and historical, as possible goals of an alien civilization.

Some goals that might pop up from the study of Earth societies' history include empire expansion, maintenance of the existing power structure and factionalization, development of profitable trade connections and routes, collection of items of universal value such as gold, the pursuit of scientific progress and technology, revenge or hatred directed toward some group, usage of a particular economic system, the spread of medical technology to various factions, and so on. These are goals which are appropriate, if at all, for a single planet. Ones which relate to multiple planets might be the expansion of life to dead planets, resettling on other planets as an insurance policy against catastrophes or other events which eliminate life on the home world, and a few others.

Our knowledge of energy and astronomy enable us to realize that some of the one-world goals are ineffectual for a multi-solar system civilization. Each planet of the civilization is almost totally isolated with respect to transportation and communication, not absolutely, but almost totally, by the distances between different solar systems and the huge amounts of energy needed to move anything from one civilization to another. Some minimal communication might be attempted between two solar systems which are not too far from one another, but little can be done with simple information transfer with no transport to implement any agreements, requests, or orders from one planet to another.

An alien civilization which is somehow frozen in its level of technology at something like what Earth has now might also have its goals be chosen from the ones listed above, but technology does not plateau easily. It proceeds forward to the asymptotic conclusion or the society degenerates. So at the very least, we can say that multi-planet civilizations do not have empire-building as their goal, nor the development of trade routes, collection of items to be brought from one solar system to another, and perhaps more.

After an alien civilization moves through its technological development of electronics, robotics, and artificial intelligence, the next area it encounters is genetics. The genetic revolution will overwhelm the electronics revolution, and the concept of factionalization, based on legacy concepts of genetics, local origins, language preferences and so on, will drift away as good genes are made available to all members of future generations beyond some point in time. Technology has shown cost reductions in the electronics phase of development, and when this wave passes genetics, there will be little reason to suspect that good genes would not be universally available.

The same wave of technology would also pass through the quasi-sciences of politics and economics, transforming them into fact-based sciences and enabling an alien society to have wise political structures and economic arrangements. The idea of an alien society having a goal of enforcing some legacy economic system on its members seems a little ridiculous; the optimal system would be known and used everywhere. Why would any region or goup want to use antiquated systems when better ones were instantly available?

For one-planet goals, the one which passes through the filter of advanced society might be the preservation of the civilization via wise use of resources, and the expansion of it to other appropriate planets. The other one is the preservation of life in general on the planet, but more importantly of spreading it to other planets. These are quite dissimilar goals in their effect on the civilization, even though they both originate from the abstraction of the goals of life across all species. There is no reason that both of them could not be accepted and acted upon by any particular alien civilization, except for the cost in resources they both have. If it is true that civilization can establish itself on a much different class of planets that life can evolve upon, it is fair to say that they operate almost independently.

It does not seem possible to extrapolate from goals of Earth societies, current and recent, to goals of a civilization with more advanced technology, by a few centuries of progress. The only way forward is to look for the simplest possible ones, those which derive from the nature of life. Perhaps some others can be found with a different approach, and that is certainly an interesting avenue to follow.

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