Small, Old Civilizations

Since there are no signatures, at least bold, obvious ones, that there was a large, ancient civilization before our era, the possibility of a small, ancient civilization needs to be examined. When we say small, we mean one which stays below some fixed population count. The population limit is small compared to modern populations, or even ones of a century or two ago. The number might be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

Why would a civilization keep its numbers down, especially in early eras when the concept of resource exhaustion would not have been known? What motivations could there be for limiting a population? Civilizations, especially early ones, are led by some individual, or in rare cases a small group. So the question really is, why would a leader take actions to limit the population of the people he governed? The usual case, in our history, is that leaders never do such things. Perhaps they might be forced to.

Suppose a tribe lived in a river valley, and a chieftain long before had established a belief system which included the rule that anyone emigrating from the river valley was insulting the chief and betraying his tribe. It would be easy to have this incorporated into the theology that was around at the time, as theology has the knack of adapting to rulers' desires, although not in an obvious manner. So, if this one chieftain had felt insulted and started this tradition, the population outside of the river valley would stay at zero. Perhaps the tradition includes any secretive emigrants being hunted down. With this rule in place, there is no possibility other than a limit to total population.

A river valley such as the one in this example would have a certain amount of water flow, from the river and from rain, and that might be the limiting factor in how much food could be grown. Some years might be better than others, but when a bad year came, or a stretch of drought years, the limit would be unstretchable. After some decades or even centuries, it would be known just how many people could live without threat of starvation during the bad periods, and some sort of reproductive control might be needed to accomplish this. Shaman medicine might come into play here, if an herb was found which caused temporary infertility, without much else in side effects. The civilization would have to have some rules for who is allowed to have how many children, but they could be any type of rules at all, as long as the maximum was not exceeded.

Thus, it is not difficult at all to envision a civilization which had a limited population over a long period. It just needs a geographic limitation enshrined in the tradition and the religion, and a means of controlling reproduction, such as a herb or other plant product. There might be other means as well.

The implications of such a civilization are substantial. If the civilization lasted for many millennia, scientific knowledge and technology would be developed. It might take ten or a hundred times as long as if the entire world were full of people developing scientific concepts or engineering solutions to problems, but there does not seem to be a critical mass of people below which science cannot develop. Perhaps there is one, but it might be ten thousand people, and the civilization could be imagined to be larger than this. So, slowly, slowly, technology grows inside this ancient civilization. But because of the limit in population, it would not grow in a wide a domain as it could were the population a hundred times larger. Certain things would be developed, and that field might be explored, and then some time later, a different advance might be made. So, while technology was developing in the small civilization it would not be uniform.

Technology does not develop in a chaotic form, as there are certain advances which have to be made in order to enable the research needed to develop other advances. In our world, genetics had to wait because the technology of DNA analysis was needed first, and it needed computation and some materials developments. In a limited civilization, these pathways would be much more severe. If the civilization lasted only five thousand years, perhaps only some basic chemistry and physics would be accomplished, together with some engineering capability. It is quite likely that working with natural materials like rock of different types would be one that would be developed earlier in the civilization's history. Thus, finding some evidence of precision rock machining is more likely than, for example, asphalt reside from airport landing strips. Carefully thinking out what could be developed in stages might lead to some more clues as to what signatures there could be from small, ancient civilizations.

The challenge of finding such signatures is daunting. Even if someone could come up with a proposed list of them, there is the difficulty of knowing where the civilization lived. In our example, there is only one spot on planet Earth where the signatures would be found. Even if there were two or three, it is still a formidable problem to find them. One could try and figure out where the civilization would choose to be, but that makes the assumption that they searched around over some wide area and picked the best spot and settled there. Starting the settlement seems more likely to be a matter of chance. It might depend on where some proto-humans were when some critical mutation increased their intelligence or when they figured out how to grow a crop on a river delta where they could stay, without continuous migrations using slash-and-burn agriculture. Any number of unguessable things could lead to the foundation of the home valley of the civilization. Thus, it might be necessary to search all river valleys for their location.

It might not have been a river valley where they decided to stay, although that seems a likely choice. A lakeside location is possible. If agriculture was not as dominant as we might guess, a prolific forest area might be a choice. Again, some careful thought is needed to first construct a list of the types of areas that might be chosen, and then to narrow down the possibilities for each. An even greater problem is that this civilization is supposed to have existed tens of thousands of years ago, when the surface of the Earth was a bit different than it is today. So some geology would need to be done as well. This is indeed a difficult problem.

Population and Civilization Age

It seems fairly clear that if there was an ancient civilization, in the era of ten to twenty thousand years ago, it had a low population. If the population was large, of the order of billions, there should be detectable signatures that we could find and confirm. Resources would show signs of heavy use, cities would be large and numerous, transportation corridors might leave signs in mountainous areas, chemical residues, such as from asphalt runways, might exist in detectable amounts.

Another factor is the length of time the civilization existed. If it lasted a long time, the signatures might have built up and become even more recognizable by today's geologists, anthropologists, and others who search for such things.

In the absence of such signatures, it is a logical choice to assume there never has been any ancient civilization, and any structures or artifacts found today were built by known civilizations. But has there been any serious attempt to find these signatures?

First, consider resources, such as minerals. With a large ancient civilization, resource depletion would have happened, but no survey of the Earth's surface has shown quarries, mines or other marks of resource extraction, to say nothing of resource depletion. Is there any chain of events or choices by the civilization that would lead these signatures to disappear or even never exist? Consider a large iron open-pit mine. The plan for existing mines of this sort includes rehabilitation after the mining is completed and the usable ore has all been removed. Rehabilitation is a process which takes many years, perhaps hundreds. The pit is filled with layers of natural materials, possibly materials added to neutralize any acids which might form when ground water returns to the area, layers of soil are placed over the top and some vegetation is introduced. Any tailings are treated and removed, over an extended period of time. What signatures would exist from such a rehabilitated mine? It should be kept in mind that rehabilitation by a civilization with a longer stretch of experience doing this would be better done and something closer to a natural condition would be expected. If rehabilitation is a process which typically takes a few hundred years to finalize, a civilization that lasts for thousands of years would have seen many cases of it, and would have seen what problems might arise and learned how to prepare for them and possibly prevent them.

Open-pit mining, including both ore extraction and rock quarrying, would leave areas of unconsolidated rock in the midst of a harder, more firm bed of stone. Perhaps some sort of surveying with a ground-penetrating radar might see this. Are there other sources of unconsolidated rock in the midst of a firm bed of unbroken rock? Erosion might produce this, perhaps severe earthquakes could, large avalanches or a cumulation of them might, and undoubted there are others. If this was the only signature, it appears unlikely to be a conclusive one.

Hydrocarbon resources are very plentiful, and show no signs of having been depleted. If coal or crude oil were extensively used by a civilization ten thousand years ago, there is no process known that could restore it. This means that the civilization never went through a phase of such extensive use, or if it did, it was so short that plenty of hydrocarbons were left in the ground by the time that phase ended, or alternatively when the civilization ended. There have been no discoveries of radioactive areas, which might have been formed when a nuclear reactor was decommissioned or abandoned. No features suggesting that there were dams on obvious places along large rivers. Perhaps one or some dams could disappear without a trace, but all of them? So, if there was a large ancient civilization, consuming large amounts of energy, where did it get it? The likely conclusion is either there never was any ancient civilization, or else it was very small in population.

Is it possible that a civilization could develop with a different framework than ours? We have population growth as a constant presence, from thousands of years ago until now. Could a different civilization have made an early decision to control its own population? In the early days of a population, it spreads like an invasive plant or animal. Wherever it can thrive, it migrates. How could some control be instituted that would limit spread and total population? In early days of a society, there is little knowledge, perhaps not even the concept, of population limitation or even a measure of the total world-wide population. Population limitation might develop later in a civilization, at a later stage than the one we are currently residing in, but earlier it would not have been possible, and the reasons that we think about, resource usage and the effects on the environment, are not necessarily things which crop up early in a civilization.

Consider the Mayan Civilization in central America from their earliest villages at about 3900 years ago until the Spanish Conquest five hundred years ago. They built hundreds of cities, ranging in size up to over 100,000 people, and there was no empire, only a large feuding collection of city-states. Most of these were abandoned during the collapse of the civilization about 1200 years ago, and the reason given for this is agricultural exhaustion. The Mayans were very accomplished in agriculture, but when they had deforested the entire area around their cities, a chain reaction of erosion and drought started, which resulted in the cities being abandoned. Severe malnutrition is evidenced in bones found in tombs at this time. This is not the only example of a prominent early civilization being ruined by local changes in the climate, but it is a well-known one, and so might provide some insight into the possibility of a much earlier civilization existing without leaving traces. The Mayans were excellent architects and built numerous pyramid-shaped temples of large size which survive. But they did not recognize over their entire period of existence that overpopulation or rather overuse of agricultural resources would doom city after city to collapse and doom the population to either migrate to a surviving city or return to forest life. Perhaps in Mayan culture there were those who saw the phenomena, and predicted the demise for each city, and they were not listened to or could not be followed for some societal reason. Did they have a Socrates?

Is it possible that an ancient civilization might build a city or two, fifteen thousand years ago, and recognize that their society was not viable in the long term? Could they have decided to limit population in the city to ten thousand and to prohibit the formation of any other cities? It seems like a choice that a population could make, and if it is reasonable that an ancient civilization could do this, then the signatures of such a civilization would not exist or would be renewable so that they were not obvious. Thus, if we wish to ask the question about whether an ancient civilization could have existed, and left a few ambiguous stone constructions as the only signature of their prior presence, we have to assume the population was small, and somehow controlled. Not too small to do engineering, but too small to exhaust resources in a noticeable way. Is it possible?

Ancient Civilizations with Different Cultural Bases

When we think about the existence, ten or twenty thousand years ago, of an ancient civilization and ask what signs might be left behind, we imagine our own civilization. But there is no reason that an ancient civilization could not have been built around a very different cultural basis. In other words, in the pathway from hunter-gatherer tribes to city-dwelling, tool-using, more civilized ancestors, there may have been a fork in the road. We went one way to get to where we are now, and they went another way. The possibilities need to be explored, or else we will just be out looking for signs of our own type of civilization ten thousand years before but extinct, and miss the signs of a different type of civilization, with knowledge and capabilities similar to our own, but with a different set of foundational rules.

One thing that must be the same is the science. Once a civilization has realized the periodic chart of elements, there are no more elements to be found. The exact same periodic chart will appear, given time, in all civilizations. The same holds for the laws of nature. Newton's laws would not have been named the same in ancient civilizations, but the mathematics which describes them would be the same. Telescopes are the tool of choice for observing the planets and galaxy, and optics is optics in any civilization. Combustion makes heat, which can be turned into motive power, in any civilization. So, the science and the engineering it enables would be the same. A society might be rated as to how far along the line of scientific progress they have travelled. There is some variation possible here, as biology might go a bit slower and astronomy a bit faster in one society compared to another, but there is only so much science, and a civilization which lasts long enough gets it all figured out. We are a couple of centuries from 'asymptotic technology', the point were there are only some small details left unknown, but an ancient civilization might have had cities and science study for more centuries that we have had, and have reached the culmination.

If science and engineering are the same, what can be different? Perhaps nothing is different in civilizations which reach and pass 'asymptotic technology', and the main difference is where a civilization is on that route. This concept is called 'technological determinism' and says that technology is the driver for cultural changes, and when a society picks up some new chunk of scientific knowledge, it will inevitably be changed by it. That means that societies would converge to some final state, not too distinct.

So, we might rephrase the question and ask, where will technology take us, and assume the ancient civilization was there already. We don't know where technology will take us, but it is possible to make some guesses in this regard, as much of technology has been worked out already, and more is being done every year, showing us a direction.

Figuring out where our own society is headed is a fascinating activity, and has been done by many fiction writers, who usually don't have 'technological determinism' and 'asymptotic technology' in their vocabularies. This means they would be very lucky if they are correct, as the fundamental rules by which society develops, at least after the dawn of the scientific method, provide a great deal of information that makes a great deal of difference.

Perhaps we might just ask a more pertinent and relevant question: what would an ancient civilization be like if it left almost no records behind. The obvious answer is 'small.' If an ancient civilization existed, say fifteen thousand years ago, but had only, for example, a half million total population, it would be much more likely that there would be no evidence left behind that indicated they were here on Earth before we were. That might mean three small cities, which could easily have been wiped away by environmental factors.

Does advanced civilization mean giant population? In most science fiction, populations are large. Population has been growing exponentially for hundreds of years, so why would it not continue? The reason might be that an ancient civilization asked itself what population it wanted to have, and the population of that civilization was wise enough to adhere to the answer, and limit or reduce its population to whatever choice was made.

What possible basis could they have had for making some numerical choice as to their own population? Why not ten billion or ten thousand? What kind of reasoning could they have used to fix this target? In our society, population is determined by billions of choices, as each couple decides how many children to have. In an ancient civilization, the same might have been true, but the mode of decision-making could have been different. One factor that could have been in play was the resources on planet Earth. Ten billion people use them up a million times faster than ten thousand. In our society, few people talk about the concept of resource exhaustion or anything else in this subject area, and those who do mention it note that resources are finite and there must be some stopping point in growth, perhaps followed by decline.

One difference between our society and the ancient one could be that they had this discussion much earlier in the population growth curve, and never got up to the hundred million point. This would explain why there were so many easily accessible resources left here for us to find and exploit. If their population had maxed out at a quarter million, there could not have used up much resources by their demise, and therefore we do not see some ancient quarries or remnants of mine openings or spills of petroleum or anything else that would be a signature of a huge population, with a high standard of living but little care for resource conservation.

The next step is to ask, what would a small population do, if it anticipated some catastrophe in the near future, and wanted to leave something behind? Another question is, suppose they didn't care about leaving behind some monument, what might have lasted ten or twenty thousand years which they created and used, not for the purpose of communicating with some new civilization in the future, but just useful for their living or important for their art or whatever else they valued? Since the non-exhaustion of resources is an important clue as to the nature of their society, we can ask about what other features there would be that might have the same origin as this decision.

Of course, another question is, were they from Earth, but that one needs to be put off until later, although an alien colony might have the characteristics we have found to be likely, low population and minimal resource usage. That would mean a modification of the original premise of this blog, which was why we haven't seen any aliens to a whole host of other ones, such as why would an alien civilization form a colony on a planet that was prone to catastrophes?

Recovery from Epidemics in Alien Civilizations

If an epidemic sweeps through an alien civilization, reaching all corners of the planet, and is lethal to some percentage of the population, the main drivers of the civilization's progress are not affected. Population count is not a direct cause of technology progress, and it will continue after some delay caused by the epidemic. What is important to maintaining the progress is having a quorum of intelligent, problem-solving individuals who can organize their work to push the envelope of science forward, and then to apply it to the productive activities of the population. If there is some fraction of deaths, maybe even as high as 90%, this does not mean that the genetic resources that are needed to produce the future generations of scientists and engineers are lost, it means the numbers are reduced and progress will be slowed down, or even degraded for a period of time. But it does not mean a permanent halt, and the timeline for this society to be able to make star travel work might be delayed for a few generations. 

To kill off the civilization as far as permanently eliminating their future progress, there would have to be a lethality level near to 100%, enough to eliminate so many of the population that there was a genetic reduction in intelligence. Is such a lethality level possible? Something lower than that might render the civilization incapable of maintaining its living standards, or even to preserve the existing level of technological know-how, but physical records and memories passed on to young aliens would lead them back to the standards they once had, and allow a resumption of the progress toward star travel.

Can an epidemic kill 100% of a population? This means that the contagion spreads world-wide, and that takes time, during which awareness of what is happening would travel all over the planet. Some response would be made, and the figure would drop below 100%. In the industrial era, when epidemics are possible because there is world-wide transportation and not yet rapid genetic developments of antidotes and antigens, there are still recourses to reduce the impact of the epidemic. Furthermore, with a wide mix of genetics for the immune systems, optimality having not yet been accomplished or even understood, there might be some aliens who are naturally immune, constituting some fraction of the population. And there might also be some individuals who are mostly resistant to the infectious organism's effects, recoving from it in more or less unimpaired condition. So, the achievement of 100% or very close to it lethality is unreasonable to suppose.

Before assuring ourselves of the recovery capability of a generic alien civilization, we might ask if there are any circumstances in which such a recovery might not happen. Regrowth needs resources, and if the civilization has already harvested the easy to gather ones, the minerals near the surface for example, could there be a barrier set up so that the civilization is bound down to a lower level of technology, one not capable of difficult extraction situations for critical items? Technological progess and resource development go hand in hand, and if the latter is impaired by what happened before the epidemic, could there be a strong barrier, sufficient so that the civilization would remain at some level, industrial or agricultural, forever? 

This is a question related to the particular planet upon which the civilization resides. Does the planet have large, relative to the usage rate of the population, amounts of most necessary minerals and energy resources? Or is the planet, owing to where it developed and the history of supernova generation of heavier elements in the clouds nearby, rather short of resources? If the latter instance, could the near exhaustion of resources in the industrial era could leave the surviving civilization with only too-hard-to-obtain resources remaining? This means that, during this alien civilization's industrial era, no one noticed, or if it was noticed, no one responded to the problem, and the resources available to the civilization were rapidly diminishing and growing harder to locate and recover, and instead of the obvious solution toward reducing usage with a world-wide reuse plan, they simply continued to work toward an early resource exhaustion. 

This does not make sense to rational people, but could there be some economic system which drove resource exhaustion heedlessly and recklessly. Could such an economic system stay in place when the costs of resources mounted steadily and significantly? This is an excellent question about the unbreakability of some economic systems. Can they be so firmly embedded in the culture that they would be blindly followed to near-term self-destruction of the civilization? Economic systems are in place because those who have the power to determine the ones to be used benefit from them, and so this question is, could these leaders of an alien civilization be only concerned with their own short-term benefits, and dismissive of what will happen to the civilization as a whole in only a few generations? 

This question takes us further afield. Recall that the science of training children, which involves setting goals for them in the deep subconscious, may be completely unknown to the civilization, and child-training and goal-setting left to random choices by those responsible for that training. Thus, short-sighted goals might be preserved, generation to generation, including the goals that those who become leaders have. This particular realm of science is likely only able to arise in the later part of the industrial era, that of electonics and automation, or even in the early part of the genetics era. 

There may be other mechanisms by which an epidemic could put an end to the future of an alien civilization, barring them from space travel, but this is one. It would only occur on a planet with less abundant resources, measured by how long they last during the industrial era, and only in situations where the neurology and training area of science happens to blossom late in this era. In this particular and possibly rare situation, a world-wide epidemic could have indirect effects that could collapse the civilization unrecoverably. But not only would these two requirements have to be in place, the epidemic itself would have to be at the limits of lethality, via both the disease effects and contagion. It might be that the evolution of such an infectious organism is extremely unlikely, and only by some early efforts at genetic engineering, at the level that would be possible in the later industrial era, could it arise and be, possibly accidentally, released.

Peak Technology and Asymptotic Technology

To avoid confusion about the definition of these terms, both of which are important in alienology, it might be useful to clarify them here. Peak technology is what happens when an alien civilization runs into a problem, and is unable to sustain the growth of its scientific knowledge. Problems might be some catastrophe that causes shortages, like the alien civilization's bad luck to be on a planet with minimal resources, and try as they might to use them sparingly, they run out before they get to a complete knowledge of technology, a point which is called asymptotic technology, and their civilization begins a downturn. Science begins to be forgotten, or becomes unusable. There might be knowledge preserved in some sort of records, but there are too few people around who can learn it, so, as far as the whole society goes, it is forgotten. To use an extreme example, a planet with only agricultural villagers remaining after a golden age is one where peak technology has come and gone, no matter what type of recordings of past scientific knowledge there is locked away in some vault in a cave. 

Problems can arise from external sources, such as the famous example of an asteroid impact which is large enough to cripple the civilization and prevent it from recovering; the population is reduced below the critical mass needed to maintain technology, let alone progress in it. Problems can arise from internal sources, such as if biological terrorism leads to the extinction of a large fraction of the population. There are a host of other examples in each of these categories. An encounter with a passing star, enough to alter the orbit of the alien planet is one; the star does not have to get so close as to throw the planet out of its solar system, just close enough to make the orbit more eccentric, so that the whole land mass is covered with ice during aphelion, and it doesn't melt during perihelion. A supernova sufficiently close could do it. Basalt flooding could do it. Incessant war could do it. The desire of a ruling elite to maintain itself, coupled with a fear of social change due to more technology could do it. Even persistent, extreme affluence might do it. 

When a civilization suffers a problem such as this, not all technology is forgotten. Depending on how severe the collapse is, there might only be agricultural expertise left. Or transportation equipment at some level might be maintained, depending only on whatever original resouces are left plus renewable ones. The general idea is conceptualized as this graph:

There is no need for the curve to be smooth; it could just as well be bumpy at any section of it. The duration of time that the civilization spends near peak technology is a function of its population, the planet's natural resources, and many other factors. The slopes of the two sides might be of the same order, or they might be different: for example, the rise might be quite steep, as technology's rate of change feeds on itself, but the loss of technology can be slowed by the struggle to maintain it as long as possible.

If nothing goes wrong, technology just keeps accumulating until there isn't any more that isn't known. This is a very finite process. Sometimes someone makes a comment that implies that technology keeps accelerating forever, but this has no meaning whatsoever. Knowledge of details, such as how much sand is on some beach on some exo-planet, might be accumulated, but data is not science or technology. Science is a matter of understanding how the universe operates, and there is certainly some data involved in it, but it is largely a matter of theories explaining phenomena, patterns that exist, cause and effect relationships, and other things; in general it is the compaction of the ability to explain things that happen or that exist. The compaction starts with generalization which often grows into quantitative expressions describing almost anything. 

Asymptotic technology speeds up as early theories are found and validated, which allow more general questions to be asked. At some point, all the easy concepts are found, and the remaining ones grow harder and harder to develop. Thus, the curve of technology looks like an exponential during its earliest phases, and then tips over and continues to slow in its rate of progress, towards an asymptote of total understanding. This is a description of the general form of the technology-time curve, which looks like this:

The height of the asymptote is always the same, for every alien civilization. It is complete knowledge of science and technology. This simple fact is critically important for the study of alien civilization, in absentia. The coupling is done by the principle called technological determinism, which says that technology dictates the forms that a civilization can take, and since the asymptotic technology for every civilization is the same, the form of all the different alien civilizations in the galaxy will have very much in common. If we can understand how technology will progress, we will have an important tool for the study of all alien civilizations. 

One aspect of technology that assists in the understanding of its eventual progression is that technology builds upon itself. Different areas of technology do not progress at the same rate, but instead, one area will go slowly until another area has passed some threshold where the second area can facilitate progress in the first. Thus, technology evolves in stages, which means that the forms of societies will also go through stages. The most all-encompassing of these stages might be called grand transformations, and these appear to involve, in approximate sequence, fire-making, wood and stone use, agriculture and husbandry, metal use, fossil fuel use and the industrial consequents, electronics and its end-effect of artificial intelligence, genetics and psychology and then interstellar space flight, if the civilization is up to it.

Each of these stages might take different amounts of time to come to full blooming. It might be possible to understand them all separately, using the same model of asymptotic understanding. Early learning is relatively faster than late learning. This means that the middle portion of alienology, after the planet-building and origination and evolution of life and before interstellar travel, where civilization develops, has some principles that can be used to gain insights. This is one of the fundamental bases of this blog.

Population Reduction in Alien Civilizations

After an alien civilization gets to the point of asymptotic technology, that is, science is over and done with, they have a number of choices to make. One of them is how much population they wish to maintain. The choice is directly related to how long their resources will last, as for a given level of recycling, twice as many aliens use twice as much resources per time period. 

One aspect of this question relates to the process for reducing population. The direct and immediate solution is to simply gestate fewer aliens and allow the population to shrink at whatever level they could choose. It could be as drastic as going from a billion to a million over a few centuries or generations of alien life. The choice of what target to use is related to their view of themselves and their role in the universe. Is it to simply go extinct, or do they plan to go to some other solar system, in one of the many ways possible? If they choose to travel, there is a minimum population necessary to build the ship or ships. If they just are content to go extinct, an unlikely alternative, they could do it quickly with lots of aliens, or slowly, with only a few. Neither is very pleasant, as resource shortages do not make for high living standards.

This question is interesting, but also interesting is the process for getting the population down. There is one question that stands out: what about all the infrastructure? They don't need all the infrastructure that a larger population needs, and they probably don't want to spend the additional energy and resources to maintain it if it is only there for a ghost population.

Consider first fungible architecture. By this time, resource pressure, or at least the knowledge that it will be happening in the future, has mandated that the aliens will live in large arcologies, where recycling is pretty much total. One arcology might be almost identical with another, so there is no reason to keep the second one going if the first one can handle the population post reduction. In an advanced alien civilization, recycling will be part of everyone's life, and everything will be recyclable, even the entire arcology. So over a period of time, the second arcology might be taken apart, and fed into the recycling system of the first one, supposing they are not too far apart so transportation costs are not a significant factor. This adds to the longevity of the resource base.

In order to make an arcology recyclable, it would have to be divisable into parts, so there would not need to be any crowding of a double population into an arcology. Time for this could be stretched out, as by this time the civilization will have figured out it might have a million years on their home planet, so there is no rush to do anything in a short time. If gestation cycles are a hundred years or so, spending a few of them combining arcologies will not affect much over the long term. Aliens in the superfluous arcology could be given the choice of moving to the remaining one, or staying in the part of it which was not yet taken down. By this time, the arcologies would be self sufficient, with their own power plants, industrial sources of nutrition, air filtration, internal transportation, and everything else necessary to have a comfortable life for the alien population. There could well be some residual agriculture, for specialty products or for the amusement of aliens who wanted to be involved with farming for a period of time, and these would simply be reduced according to the population level drop.

What about the non-fungible parts of the infrastructure? Would there be any monuments, historic places, unique but antique buildings? There might have been, but the lifetime of any of these might only be a few thousand years at the highest, and after that, deterioration unless it was periodically rebuilt. Suppose they had preserved something from their earliest eras, before technology was greatly developed, and this was a part of their culture and something they used to maintain their heritage. With a drastic population reduction, as in the example above of a billion to a million, or something proportionate to this, a few heritage sites might be maintained, but not a large number.

It might not be appreciated that heritage could be a very important part of the alien civilization. Heritage is the reason they decide, over and over again in each generation, that they think their civilization is worth preserving and should not be allowed to become extinct. Each generation would have the possibility to reverse the decisions of previous generations, and, for example, stop work on a starship and instead use the capital to change their activities, to, perhaps, have more jet aircraft and spend much more time flying over the landscape and visiting unique sites on their planet, in person. Without heritage sites, the pressure to keep on track with previous generations might grow less, and reach a tipping point.

So, perhaps there is another factor which comes into play when an alien civilization is thinking about its target population for the long, long term. Having sufficient population to build starships may be one, but another might be having enough to maintain a critical number of very important heritage sites.

Almost everything else would have been conquered by technology. There might not need to be a minimum number to maintain the automated operations which provide energy and the standard of living to the population. This particular factor is not clear, but it could very well be that star travel and heritage sites are the only things which feature in the choice of population numbers.

What this means to us is that if these two problems of minimum population result in numbers fairly small, there might only be one arcology on an alien planet. When we have our huge telescopes, able to focus in on planets in different solar systems, looking for one with a thousand dots of light, probably infrared only, this may not be the signature of an alien civilization that we can find. There might be one dot of light, where they all live, and the rest of the planet has been returned to nature. This would be the situation for almost all of the million years of existence of the alien civilization, whereas the huge populations might be only a thousand or less, meaning a tenth of a percent chance of seeing them during this phase. This is one more signature of an alien civilization that needs to be carefully thought through.

BioFactories and Civilization Detection

In an advanced alien civilization which has passed through the genetic grand transformation, when all biological, neurological and psychological research is completed and accurate and consistent theories are available for everything in those fields, and in addition, all the data available about living organisms is known, there would be extensive use of this knowledge. We cannot, from the current state of our ignorance, predict there will be this or that usage, but it seems highly probable that there will be some industrial uses of genetics. Today we have some of this, and as a matter of fact, we have had such factories ever since fermenting was discovered. 

Cheese, risen bread, beer and wine, along with other fermented vegetables, fish, and some other products, are produced by the use of microorganisms here on Earth. These products represent the simplest possible biofactories, but there is no reason whatsoever to think they are the only ones which will be economically efficient once genetics becomes understood. Even if an alien world did not have yeasts which cause bread to rise, the existence of extensive genetic knowledge would allow such a microorganism to be invented, and then the alien civilization would have risen bread, if they wanted it.

These products involve using whole cells, in an agglomeration, to produce chemical changes in other foodstuffs, producing carbon dioxide, alcohol and lactic acid. There is a natural inefficiency in using whole cells for this, as the cell walls slow down the throughput of the chemicals used for input and output by the microbes. If there was a way to have this reaction without cell walls, the biological factories could be more dense, and possibly more efficient and better controlled. Thus, in an advanced alien civilization, we might see biological factories, producing a great many useful materials, without cells. Instead, a vat would serve as a giant cell wall, while the contents were chosen as only those minimally necessary for the biochemical production.

This advance, assuming it is possible, seems to tear down the wall between biology and organic chemistry. Inside the vat there might be no mitochondria, but instead industrially produced ATP was added as fuel for the reaction. Then the proteins that microbes normally use to catalyze and power the transition would consume the ATP fuel and create the right output. Inside a typical cell there are thousands of proteins with different functions, and only those few necessary to synthesize the desired product would be necessary. If the output molecules were smaller than the proteins needed to make them, a filter would be all that was necessary to extract the output. Likewise, input chemicals might be small enough to pass through a filter which blocked the factory proteins.

The pre-genetics method of making medium weight complex organic molecules can be quite tedious using solely the methods of organic chemistry. A tailored genetic process could be more efficient and more productive, based on resource and energy consumption.

As part of the genetics revolution, the biochemistry of nutritional needs will surely be understood. Once that is done, agriculture might be relegated to specialty production, and the majority of food production will take place on these biological factories. There could be no need for sunlight for these factories, although certainly some development of chloroplast-like nodules might happen and vats could be provided with energy in the form of photons, rather than by fuel in the form of ATP.  If this happens, food would be produced by combining nutritional inputs produced separately, and an entirely new food industry would be born. There would be no need for the biofactories to be located outside the arcologies, or wherever the aliens chose to live, but they could be positioned nearby residential areas, to minimize transportation costs and delays.

If agriculture is slated to disappear after the genetics grand transformation, this means that a huge telescope, large enough to image distant exo-planets, would not see huge parts of the dry land of an exo-planet with an advanced alien civilization turned over to monocropping. In fact, there might be very little visible from agricultural uses, as specialty crops could also be produced in biofactories as well. Freshness is not an issue if the fruit or vegetable is grown a kilometer from your residence.

As noted elsewhere, advanced methods of resource usage reduction will be used to prolong the time that the civilization can depend on buried resources. Recycling of resources would be used as well, so there might not be huge quarries that could be visible from space. Energy supplies, whether that would be uranium and thorium or low atomic weight fusion ingredients, would also be preserved by minimizing the losses of energy, such as for heating residential and industrial areas. Insulation would have been perfected. This implies that there would be no giant infrared signature from the arcologies.

In short, three of the main observational items that we on Earth, in later centuries, might have thought to use to detect alien civilizations with a giant space-based telescope would very well not exist. The biggest detectable would have been agriculture, but that disappears with the genetic revolution. Mining sites, such as huge open-air quarries formed by scraping off the top layer of dirt to gain access to shallow buried resources, would not necessarily still be in use. An example of these would be the tar sands region in Canada. Lastly, the habitations themselves would not be emitting light or infrared in massive amounts, such as our Earth cities do today, instead, there would be only minimal energy being spread out and leaking upwards towards space.

Finding something to search for is quite a challenge. Recall that there are only a few millennia between the emergence of the civilization from the primitive hunter-gatherer level up to the asymptotic technology level, and it would be incredibly coincidental if we happened to turn our telescopes on during that interval. If an advanced alien civilization can last a million years, order of magnitude, it is totally likely that we would observe their planet after they had made all the changes needed to last that long, including agriculture replacement, recycling and waste reduction, and resource use minimization. They would essentially be hiding in plain sight.

Hunting for Life in the Milky Way

In earlier posts, there was some discussion of what would be the goals of an advanced alien civilization, assuming they had come together to choose one and then to work on it. In a different blog, some more thinking on this matter indicated that the most reasonable and likely goal of the civilization is that of life itself, which is best broken down into five separate goals, survival, reproduction, adaptation, evolution and dispersion. These goals imply many choices that the alien civilization would make, in order to further their alignment with these life goals. The last goal is dispersion, and that means first expansion all over the planet, then the solar system, and then outwards into the galaxy. Just think for a minute what this implies: all or most advanced alien civilizations are going to attempt colonization and seeding, both of which support the dispersion of life.

Neither of these tasks are easy, as has been noted in all the posts in this blog on these topics. Colonization means setting up some replica of the alien civilization on an exoplanet ,while seeding means starting out life with the alien version of DNA on some planet which doesn’t have the prerequisites to become an origin planet on its own, but can support life, being in the habitable zone plus all the other conditions. Current theory here on Earth indicate the cells that did that were cyanobacteria.

Looking for seeded planets would likely be the same as looking for origin planets. Seeding might put photosynthetic organisms into a planetary ocean, and then, after a few hundreds of millions of years, an oxygen atmosphere might exist, which is a tremendous benefit for evolution, allowing life to expand beyond chemotrophs and cyanobacteria cells to a food chain. The oxygen in a seeded planet’s atmosphere would look the same as in an origin planet’s atmosphere.

So, assuming most of the alien civilizations do both seeding of potential life-supporting planets and colonization of others, which are not able to support life, but which provide the resources necessary for the alien civilization to sustain itself for a long time. Which ones should be looked for?

Seeding a planet gets over the hump of life origination, which might be tremendously difficult, rare and improbable, at least according to one theory, mine. Is evolution fairly certain after that, or are there more highly improbable-to-overcome barriers along the way to intelligence? Suppose there aren’t. Suppose evolution is as easy as rolling down a hill. However, it takes a long time. Earth is our only example here, and life took about two and a half billion years after the atmosphere changed to partially oxygen to evolve to intelligence. This means that any alien civilization which evolved in the last two to three billion years has not had enough time yet for their first example of seeding to have led to a new alien civilization, evolved from cyanobacteria to tool-using creatures of one form or another.

This raises the obvious question of when, in the history of the galaxy, was life likely to originate? There are stars around which are ten or so billion years old. Could these have had planets soon after they formed, and perhaps one which met the prerequisites for life to originate? Unfortunately, current astronomical tools do not allow us to figure out much of the history of the galaxy. It likely started out as a gas blob, and condensed irregularly, with stars forming all over it, but more in the denser region in the center. Gas was more dense that now, as by now much has been consumed in star formation, and that implies that stars which formed early would be larger. Large stars live short lives, and end in a supernova explosion. There would not have been the neat division of the galaxy into the disk and the central bulge, so star motion would have been more random and Boltzmann-like. Neither of these two things bode well for planets. Supernovas going off near a planetary system sterilize it, but may also disturb planetary orbits, causing them to be ejected or rarely crash into the star. The passage of a nearby star does the same thing, pulling planets out of their orbit, leading to a planet-planet interaction where the smaller ones get ejected. So, while little definitive is known, it would seem likely that planetary formation in a system which perseveres long enough to originate and evolve life is more likely in the later stages of the galaxy and out in the disk. Finding planets to seed would also be more likely in these conditions.

Putting this together means that seeded planets might be around, but life on them is too young to have evolved into an advanced civilization. There really is a double time here. For life to originate and produce an alien civilization, capable of star travel, might take four billion years since the planet formed into a habitable world, with the right temperatures and everything else needed for life. Then if that civilization seeds another planet, we have another three billion years or so to wait. That is seven total, and seven billion years ago, there might have been so much turmoil in the galaxy that life couldn’t originate and evolve. So, planets which have been seeded might be common, and even many which have had the few hundred million years to produce an oxygen atmosphere. But if we are hunting for alien civilizations, seeded planets are not worth the effort. That leaves origin planets and colonized planets.

The previous post, on frozen worlds, indicates that colonized worlds, if the aliens choose worlds which are the easiest to colonize and which will sustain them for a long time, might look absolutely different from origin worlds. It also indicated, because of the very different time scales involved, that there could be very many of them all over the Milky Way, or at least out in the disk. The idea was simple: if there are sufficient resources on the planet, fusible and fissionable elements, plus all the other minerals necessary to supply the civilization with its raw materials, buried in the ground, they can simply build their civilization under the surface, on a frozen world and maybe some not so frozen. The ratio between colonized worlds and origin worlds might be a thousand to one. There would also be much larger numbers of previously colonized worlds where the alien civilization has used up the minerals and life on the planet was no longer sustainable for them.

How do you detect a mine shaft and a starship landing zone? Maybe there would have to be some surface transportation, if they needed to have mines in multiple locations. It might be possible, with a kilometer sized telescope, to see large oceans on an exoplanet in our vicinity, but even one ten times larger than that could not detect something as small as tens of meters or even a kilometer in size. Looking for a tiny heat source is conceivable, but unlikely as the resolution at deep infrared wavelengths is so much less than in the visible. If the concepts trotted out here and in the last post are viable, it means that alien civilizations are not detectable, and they would have no interest in coming to Earth, either for seeding as we are way past that, or colonizing as there are too many potential difficulties. It wouldn’t align with their goal of dispersing life at all to visit Earth. So the only thing we have any hope of doing is detecting an origin world, but if there is only a few of them,they might be on the other side of the Milky Way or in a different spiral arm. Perhaps a double hope of there being easy ways to originate life and our detecting oxygen in exo-planet atmospheres is the only possible salvation for the quest to find aliens.

Momentum and Goals in an Advanced Alien Civilization

In this blog, the various eras of an alien civilization are described by the technology that is possessed. There is the early fire and stone era, then comes the age of metal, followed by the age of mechanical industry, followed by the age of electronics, then the age of genetics. It was convenient to divide these eras up by naming transition periods, 'grand transformations', when the knowledge and capability in one of these areas of technology was changing fast and leading the civilization into new directions and plateaus. All of the areas of technology continue changing at once, so there is necessarily overlapping of inventions in different fields, but the effect on society would seem to have peaks and valleys. In the peak, society is reorganizing itself to take advantage of the new technology. In the valleys, the reorganization is diffusing out but the main changes have passed in the part of the civilization that is at the forefront of technology change.

There are several possible catastrophes that could end an alien civilization and prevent it from ever traveling in space to visit Earth. Most of these are physical, such as a nearby supernova or a basalt flood or an asteroid impact. Some are social, such as idiocracy, which is the failure of the society to generate enough intelligent people to keep it running, or factionalism, where the civilization devotes itself to strife between factions, which again prevents it from pursuing higher technology or maintaining what has been achieved. A third one is resource exhaustion, where the cost of obtaining mineral or energy resources gets too high to maintain the standard of living necessary to keep technology going forward, and incidentally doing anything sufficient to prevent resource exhaustion. As noted in the posts on idiocracy, this happens when the culture ceases to value reproduction of intelligence, on the average, and might best be referred to as a situation of social momentum.

One way to think of social momentum is to think of a herd of herbivores outrunning some predators. They have no plan to follow, just speed to use to their advantage. So they run without thinking, most times to a successful escape, but sometimes into a cul-de-sac or over a cliff. The essence of social momentum is that the civilization has not reached the point where the goals of the civilization as a whole are discussed and clarified, but instead, they have not crystallized into any usable form. Goals are all personal and do not align. During a special period like a war, there will be a goal of at least a faction of the civilization, but other times, none exists.

For idiocracy, the social momentum is in the direction of differential breeding, with lower intelligence individuals breeding at a higher rate. For factionalism, there is a goal for each different faction, but they are opposite and pertain to the destruction of the other faction or factions. The social momentum is toward destruction of assets. For resource exhaustion, the social momentum is in the direction of individual consumption, and resources are not thought of as being needed for the successive generations, but only for the current one; otherwise they are thought of as being so huge that infinite is a good approximation in economic thinking.

Where does social momentum, in self-annihilating directions, arise? The nature of individual decision-making, in overview, is quite simple. Individuals make decisions for themselves or they copy the decisions made by others, which they obtain through individual contact or via media. Those controlling the media can filter such decisions, leading to a limited scope of choices for those individuals who prefer to copy the selections of others. Some number of individuals will make their own choices, depending on their feelings or using some amount of reasoning. If those who control the media make their choices in such as way as to have them fulfilled by spreading some particular set of goals, then the direction of the social momentum of society is determined by them. If in a particular alien civilization, there are divisions in choice among the media-controlling elements, then social goals will be diffuse, otherwise they might be more aligned.

Some economic systems have strong feedback loops which tend to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals. Other systems might not have these loops. So one question to ask is, if factionalism is part of the social momentum of a particular alien civilization, will the economic system present on the planet allow power, in particular media control, to be concentrated. Technology might also push toward concentration, or rather, work via economics to do this.

Does technology and its understandable stages and steps tend to have economic changes along with the other social changes that it brings, and do those economic changes favor economic systems which concentrate power? One aspect of technology is a kind of communication range that individuals have. In the fire and stone era, there were only a small number of others who could communicate with any particular individual, maybe only one or a few families. In the metal era, there was surplus food at times, which allowed individuals to be used as travelers bearing communications. In the industrial era, communications begins to open up so that an individual might be in contact with thousands, via printing. Then electronics opens the gate even further, perhaps to the maximum possible, where any individual on an alien planet could without great difficulty communicate with any other one.

Is concentration of power also a social momentum artefact, so that if there at one time a high degree of it, does that continue for a long period, through technology changes? The feedback loop which promotes this might be the default condition of the civilization, and only by some unusual circumstances would there be a smaller concentration. The feedback loop works very simply. Someone with a large amount of power can use some of that to increase the amount of power he possesses, leading to a greater concentration. In the later stages of technology, transportation and communication are no longer hindrances to such concentration. So, the three social catastrophes, idiocracy, factionalism, and resource exhaustion might well be in the cards for many alien civilizations, as they will allow power to be concentrated to the point where the feedback loop begins to function, leaving the concentration to increase inevitably. The three catastrophes are not sudden, but very gradual, and the concentration of power effects will continue to push towards their final state, while power continues to concentrate even more.