Can Bioterrorism End Alien Civilizations?

'Terrorism' is used here to refer to small-scale groups attempting to achieve some political ends through the use of terror attacks, which are attacks designed not necessarily to cause great destruction, but to induce terror in a significant part of the population of a target region, which will then bow to the political demands of the terrorist group. Technological determinism says that technology dominates social change, and it may also dominate terrorism, one facet of a civilization.

In the early eras of technology, where knives and poisons were the only available weapons, assassination was the only type of terrorism that could occur. Directed against leading members of the alien civilization's government or economic structure, a terrorist group could hope that concessions might be made to their cause if the leadership felt unable to protect themselves. Infiltration of the ranks of those with guardian capability might be one of the social tools such a group might use, and suicide attacks might inspire the terror they needed to accomplish their ends. 

The invention of controlled combustion might lead to projectile weapons, but these simply make assassination easier. Bombs, however, open up a new avenue for terrorism, and that is attacks on infrastructure or on the public themselves. These weapons have the most effect in crowded places, and the obvious countermeasure is control of those entering these places, with some sort of measures designed to detect such explosive packages, along with the ability to carefully search the areas, arenas or whatever places a particular alien civilization likes to attend in large numbers, to eliminate such weapons from being installed and hidden prior to the crowd's arrival, for places with sporadic use. Continuously used places would have continuous checking in place or lockdowns during non-used times of the day. 

The advent to nuclear technology, in the middle of the industrial era, does not change much for terrorism. Nuclear weapons are very difficult to design and assemble, requiring specialists of many varieties, and terrorist groups are unlikely to be able to obtain such a quorum. They also require multiple unique materials, some very difficult to make from other, more easily available ones. Since nuclear weapons contaminate great areas of any planet where they are used, all regions on any exo-planet with an advanced alien civilization would be motivated to cooperate in restricting access to these end-materials. The costs of a nuclear weapon program are great, and if terrorism is something small groups would use, they would neither have such resources nor be able to deploy them, if they found a donor. The weapons are also large and hard to move and hide, and they give off telltale radiation, which can serve as another means of detection. Thus, the advent of nuclear technology into the collection of useful technology does not make terrorism any more powerful or easy to apply, just the opposite.

The beginnings of biology, specifically the biology of infectious organisms, may be a different story. The ability to capture an existing infectious organism, and mutate it, requires little money or expertise. Even a single talented individual alien might do this as the technology is not complicated to understand or utilize, once society gets some basic knowledge into its storehouse of scientific understandings. Recall that psychology and neurology come later on, so that the ability of the society to detect some mentally disturbed alien, having such a capability, is limited. This means that an alien society in this particular phase of its industrial era can be victimized by individuals or small groups who concentrate on contagious organisms. 

This capability exists even below the level of a terrorist group. Curiosity or some sociopathic desires could motive individual aliens to explore what they could do in this area, as there may not be any knowledge yet about how to train young aliens to prevent their involving themselves and others in dangerous activities when they grow older and more informed and educated. Neither would politics be a solved science by this time, so there may be personal or political disputes that could motivate such talented individuals.  They might develop some organism, protect themselves and those they care about, and release it to see what happens. If it was based on an infectious organisms, the mutated version might be contagious as well. 

If amateur biologists can create mutated viruses, what could a terrorist group do? They might be able to operate in two stages, one: where they try all types of viruses in different locations to see which ones might serve as a terror weapon, and two:, bioweapon where they induce some cases of their chosen infectious organism into some locale that they have access to. 

A bioweapon attack, even on a small scale such as a terrorist group could manage, requires social controls to be put in place, rapidly and severely, if the contagion is to be controlled at a very low level. Those regions which can do this might be relatively immune to bioterrorism, but those which are not, for any of several reasons, could be held at risk by a bioterrorist group. After one or several bioterrorism attacks, it might be clear to all regions that they need to prepare themselves against such attacks. One way might be to scour the whole exo-planet for biology laboratories that bioterrorists might exploit, but since they can be quite small and do not need exotic unique materials, finding them all might be difficult. The other way, if the region has the resources and the governmental excellence to do this, is to organize a reaction to any attempts at bioterrorism, all the while reducing the locales at which it could be done. 

If these countermeasures against bioterrorism, in attacks or in threats of attacks, are quite expensive to a region, it might try to negotiate its way out of them with one or more bioterrorist groups, but since they can form easily, this might not be a long-term solution, and the expensive countermeasures are the only solution. If the costs are so large that the alien civilization suffers a reduction in affluence, in living standards, and in the means of survival, then perhaps the civilization will begin a slow collapse. 

The other solution that might be taken is technological suicide, where the alien civilization as a whole seeks to ban biological knowledge from being gathered, collected, or disseminated. This means that asymptotic technology will never be reached, the ability to diffuse bioterrorism will never be accomplished, and the civilization will go into stasis and collapse. A solution near to that is to strongly limit the knowledge of biology to tiny numbers of aliens, in the hope that this knowledge will not diffuse out to potential bioterrorist groups. This would seem to be a more rational solution, as it allows work on automatic generation of antidotes and antigens to continue. Thus, bioterrorism might certainly slow down the progress of an alien civilization, but it is unlikely to destroy it, and would therefore not be the method by which aliens are prevented from reaching Earth.

Biowarfare and Alien Civilizations

Warfare has been so common through the last several millenia on Earth that it might be thought to be inevitable that it would occur on all exo-planets with thriving alien civilizations. The killing of other individual aliens and the destruction of their property, on a large scale, can be motivated in many ways. It might be the equivalent of envy, hatred, greed, love of destruction, desire for power, wishing to spread one's world-view or religion, fear, and likely others. Since there are so many reasons for having a war, wouldn't there necessarily be some?

The antecedents of mankind's love for war might be their evolution as hunters. Killing large game and killing other aliens is not so much of a jump in direction as eating only fruits and vegetables and then starting to kill other aliens. Can only omnivores evolve intelligence and eventually a civilization, or could herbivorous creatures do so as well? 

Perhaps this question should be asked in a reverse manner. Can herbivores who develop tree-climbing ability and then grasping appendages stay herbivores, or would the ability to reach nests start them on the path to eating eggs, newborn animals, young animals, and lastly full-grown animals? Raiding nests on the ground might start them off on the same evolutionary track. Given the nutrient value of eggs and young animals, this track provides significant advantages, and therefore it is likely that such creatures would not stay herbivores, but would evolve, step-by-step, into hunting animals, and then into tool-using hunters. This is the likely step before killing one another, and then as groups form, so does the concept of warfare. Warfare is therefore likely in the history of most alien civilizations in the galaxy.

Technological determinism says that society is shaped by the level of technology it has achieved. Warfare, as one feature of society, is also determined by technology, and as technology travels from stone and wood tools, to metals of ever increasing strength-to-weight ratio, to combustion in various forms, and onward to machinery, so do the tools of war. In the later stage of the industrial era, on planets with uranium in the ground not already decayed into too much U-238, nuclear weapons should be invented, and then the society would quickly realize the disutility of weapons of so much destructive power and requiring so much expertise to use. 

There is likely an overlap between the genetic era, when biology is being understood in many of its details, a precursor to genetic technology, and the last stages of the industrial era, that of electronics, automation and robotics. Breeding of plants and animals would have been proceeding for the whole age of the society, using trial-and-error techniques, and as the understanding of disease becomes widespread, the concept of bioweapons does also. One can use trial-and-error methods to breed disease organisms as well as socially useful organisms. Initially, the analogous use of bioweapons would be tried, similar to chemical weapons, such as by explosive canisters or sprays, applied on the front lines of armies, but these methods have quickly-discovered drawbacks of self-contamination and countermeasues, such as personal protective equipment.

Contagion is a more appropriate use of spreading a bioweaponized virulent organism. If one region has a particular and unique type of crop, which provides a substantial fraction of the nutrition for this region, then an enemy region could attempt to devise infectious organisms which would spread widely through the crop, eliminating its value. If the crop was annual, the yield would plummet. If it was a perennial, the productive plants would fail to grow the product, or even die. No such type of attack would work if all regions grew the same range of crops, however. Analogous arguments would work for animal husbandry as well.

If there was some unique genetic characteristic that most of the inhabitants of one region possessed, and it were possible to breed an infectious organism that would only attack those inhabitants with the particular feature in their genes, an analogous attack could be made. However, if this genetic dissimilarity is not wide-spread, or no organisms can be made to focus on one that exists, biowarfare can only be accomplished through a more organized and insidious means. If contagion is the means by which the infectious organism spreads, then the attacking society must somehow have some characteristics that allow it to be only slightly affected, which the opponent must have the opposite characteristics. If the disease is mediated by insects which live in unhygienic environments, a hygienic region could attack a unhygienic one. The reverse is obviously not true, but if there is any infection-carrying options, such as pets of some particular type, these might serve as the vectors for the disease contagion. 

If the disease spreads only from dead bodies of victims, then burial details might make one region more susceptible to being the target of a biowarfare attack. However, this is something that could quickly be recognized and altered, so such an attack is problematic at best.

If the disease spreads only through direct sharing of bodily fluids, such as blood to blood, it is not likely that it could be transformed into a bioweapon. There might be the equivalent of Earth's mosquitos on some particular exoplanet, but insect control is not difficult in an industrial civilization. Thus these diseases also would not serve well as bioweapon candiates. But if the disease could spread through indirect sharing of bodily fluids, or even without bodily fluids being used on the whole transmission path, then there might be a possibility of a bioweapon. If the infectious organism can spread through touch, or live on any kind of common surface for a period of time long enough for mutiple aliens to touch it, or travel on dust particles or water micro-bubbles, then the disease could act to have a large degree of contagion. 

If the attacking region has a way to prevent such sharing because of social customs or other social controls, and the target region has different customs or no ability to install social controls, then the opportunity for a bioweapon war might be possible. It would not look like any other type of war, as there would be no battleground or front lines, no armies involved in mass attacks, no industrial war machines being used, and perhaps even no declaration of war. The only thing that would happen would be one region would succumb to a high level of fatality, while another would not. Then economics would finish off the struggle between these two regions.

Could one or more biowarfare wars doom an alien civilization to collapse and never reaching star travel? This is not likely to happen, as social controls can defeat a bioweapon attack or serve as a protection of an attacker, so society might have some economic disruption during the period of the attack, but the attacker would not lose their grip on technology, nor suffer a great deal of economic disruption, and would be able to control the other region or regions and continue to pursue technology and eventually get to asymptotic technology. After this point, infectious organisms are easily controlled and no biowarfare would make sense, as antidotes and antigens could easily be generated as soon as the infection was noticed.

Can Epidemics End an Alien Civilization?

Recently, a well-known blogger facetiously proposed a possible solution to the question of missing aliens: could epidemics have killed them off? This deserves some detailed examination.  This post and the next four all attempt to dig deeper and to provide some overview of the possibility.

Would there be infectious organisms on exo-planets harboring advanced alien civilizations? What helps us answer this is one of the main principles of alienology: convergent evolution. This principle says that the number of mutations that happens on a planet is much, much larger than the number of possible mutations; in other words, every mutation is tried out many times. Since evolution favors the more efficient at survival and reprodution, we would see on each exo-planet that has originated life and undergone billions of years of evolution, all the same niches of life filled. There might not be, at any instant in time, rose bushes on Planet X, but there would be flowers, thorns, pollination in different ways, fragrances emitted, and so on. Everything that works here would have been found and worked there, subject to lots of randomization. The principle works the other way as well, as anything that evolution could have come up with on Planet X, it could have come up with on Earth. The details are all scrambled, but the niches are occupied, the various functions are all there, and so on. 

That means that multi-cellular organisms on Planet X, where “multi” means billions, would be good homes for both infectious single-celled organisms and semi-alive RNA/DNA/protein globs which we call viruses. This has to be tempered with the realization that immune systems would have evolved in the organisms on Planet X as well, and that means that each organism there is actually a battleground between cells and viruses that would like to colonize it, and the organism's immune system cells, which are bent on getting rid of these things. The immune cells have to be able to communicate with whatever organ makes them, so they can call up large numbers when a virulent invasion hits, and so they are unable to go everywhere in the body of the organism, particularly not in the digestive system and the outside of the envelope or “skin” of the organism, plus a few other places. So infections would hit the organism in the digestive tract or on the skin of the organism. The oxygen supply system would also be an area where the immune system cannot easily patrol in large enough numbers to repel a large invasion. 

Another principle of alienology is asymptotic technology, which says that technology is an accumulation of scientific knowledge and engineering principles which builds on itself over time in a society of intelligent organisms, and has to follow some fairly well-developed paths based on how knowledge fits together and how engineering of various tools allows the next stage of technology to be developed. Iron tools allow deep mining to be accomplished; computers allow DNA to be investigated; and on it goes in a reasonably coordinated way. This way comes to an end when all technology is understood, and that does not take very many generations of aliens, perhaps something of the order of a hundred. The final stage is called asymptotic technology, meaning it is the final end or asymptote of technological progress. 

Genetics is one of the last pieces of technology to be brought under complete control of an alien civilization, as it depends on the pre-existence of much other technology to enable all the experiments that have to be done. An alien civilization which has reached asymptotic technology does not have any worries about epidemics of single-celled organisms or viruses. Any individual who become infected can be examined and equipment used to determine exactly what is the infectious agent and what does the technology library say about how to get rid of it quickly. We are not at the stage yet of knowing how to do this, but we can imagine some possibilities, none of which have to be discussed here. What is important, is that there is no mysterious illnesses possible with a sufficiently advanced alien civilization, meaning no epidemics, even locally. All bets are off on an exo-planet which has had its civilization collapse for other reasons, but one which is in the golden age of its existence will have no problems.

This means that epidemics occur only with younger alien civilizations, ones which have not yet passed the genetic grand transformation, after which genetics is wholly understood, and the technology for dealing with it developed and deployed. An alien civilization in the electronics era, the one prior to the genetics revolution, does not have the ability to analyze almost instantaneously genetic blueprints and fabricate antidotes. Instead, such a more primitive alien society must grope around, using trial and error, in the hope of finding a cure for any widespread infection or a vaccine to prevent it by giving the immune system a head start. However, if infections can produce a sufficiently widespread and catastrophic effect on such a early civilization, it would not have a chance to reach the genetic grand transformation, and would relapse into some earlier stage. 

Could an epidemic occur in an alien civilization which has not even reached the electronics or industrial age? This would be a civilization in the agricultural era, where there are few small cities, and the population is spread out over the planet in regions where agriculture is efficient and seasonality not too severe. There might be a slowly moving infection, but with very limited numbers of individuals moving from one area to another, there would not be anything to produce a catastrophe. If the infection was highly lethal, news of it would spread faster than the infection itself. If it were rarely lethal, it would simply become part of the arsenal of the resident aliens' immune system. Thus, epidemics occur in industrial civilizations that have mastered transportation to some degree, not in earlier or later ones.

So the question resolves to: can an alien civilization which falls victim, over the whole planet, to a single type of novel infection, recover from it and with some delay, return to its progress toward the further stages of technology? If the infection is sufficiently lethal, its spread is inhibited. If the infection is not very lethal, it becomes part of the immune system's library of known invasive organisms. Exactly what lethality is needed for a collapse after which there is no recovery, even after a century? If it is too high when it arrives, carriers do not carry it far before expiring. However, if there is no immune system response possible, in other words, if the attacking organism can defeat the immune system of the individual aliens so they do not develop immunity to it, and can then invade and re-invade and re-invade until lethality results, but with plenty of transmission between individuals during the intermission between successive invasions, this might do it. So, an epidemic which attacks the immune system or which is 'immune' to the immune system, which damages individuals on the first attack instead of killing them leaving them more vulnerable to future infections, and which is easily contagious, might eliminate the alien civilization, and prevent it from ever building starships and coming to Earth. Such an infective organisms, a triple-headed threat, might be stopped with social measures in an alien civilization in the industrial era, but that is another question to be answered later.