Interstellar Nomads – Part I – The Concept

One funny thing about asymptotic technology: it opens up so many possibilities for futures. An alien civilization can choose many, many different ways of planning their own future and fulfilling it. It’s a little like a young person on Earth who was lucky enough to gain an advantaged situation and can go on to choose a career. What to choose?

We on Earth have not given much thought to really exploring how aliens might choose to live. We can extrapolate from what we have now, we can imagine things based on some particular technology, or we can come up with various catastrophes and pitfalls that could force an alien civilization into some particular choices. But this may not cover the whole gamut of options that an alien civilization might choose.

One option was mentioned before, interstellar nomads. This was seen as a last-ditch attempt to have the civilization survive. Their home planet was rendered uninhabitable, and there were no places for them to go. In this scenario, the galaxy was full of solo planets – planets which had their own origination of life, and those planets which did not had already been colonized. They were late-comers to the star travel business, and there were no vacant properties available. So they stayed in space ships, and traveled from solar system to solar system, picking up what resources they could and then moving on.

Maybe this concept should be turned on its head. What if an alien civilization had developed interplanetary travel in their own solar system, worked out the bugs in it for some centuries, figured out how to build a really large starship and to power it, and then decided they would just rather live in space instead of on some planet. They decided to let their population on the home world drop to zero, and simply turned off the gestation machines. With some small residual population on star ships, they simply took off. Is technology, even asymptotic technology, capable of supporting this?

Before investigating how it might be possible, an immediate question pokes its head into the door. Why would any alien civilization, not in dire straits on their home world, want to do this? What possible reasoning could they have gone through to make this option their preferred choice?

First of all, isn’t this risky? Putting an entire population of an alien civilization on starships and then sailing off, never to return, and never even to land on a new planet seems to be risking the survival of the civilization. If there were several ships, that would mitigate the species survival question, but not the individual survival question. Wouldn’t a starship be like an airplane on Earth? There is some small non-zero probability that something would happen and there would be a crash. Everybody in the airline industry works diligently to ensure that probability is very small indeed, but it doesn’t go to zero.

Airplanes have four sources of problems. One is the failure of some critical component, another is an external event such as a collision, a third is the exhaustion of fuel, and the last is deliberate destruction or sabotage. The same division would hold for a starship.

A starship has many more critical components, all of which are essential for the survival of the population aboard. All the functions of a small city have to be included and they all have to work for indefinitely long periods. Just like airplanes have to land to be refueled and examined for problems, a starship would have to arrive at a solar system, or possibly a rogue planet, and obtain not just fuel, but also all other resources that it needs.

Recall that recycling is never perfect. It might be expressed as some number just below 100%, and the decrement below that limit depends on the materials involved. Everything on the ship would have to be recycled. There is nothing useful that does not age. Some things age more slowly and some faster, but everything has to be recycled. Recycling takes energy, and the closer the recycling fraction is to 100%, the more energy is needed. It is not a linear relationship at all, just the opposite. Going from zero to 90% might take so much energy, but going to 99%, ten times as much, and going to 99.9%, a hundred times as much, and to 99.99%, a thousand. These numbers are simple fabrications with no purpose other than to illustrate the problem. Higher amounts of recycling demand significantly more energy. There is an obvious tradeoff between the obtaining of new fuel and the obtaining of new resources.

When a starship pulls into a solar system, and finds an asteroid for resource extraction, it is going to have to dump the residual mass of material that could not be separated and recycled. If the level of recycling of a particular item is 99.9% over the course of the typical interstellar hop from one solar system to another, at the arrival time in the new solar system, the ship will have wasted 0.1% of that material, and it must be replaced. It might be they are still carrying it in the form of highly diffuse matter, something containing all of the elements and organics and whatever that the ship runs on. This could be dumped in space as they travel, or it could be dumped at the destination solar system. Then the new 0.1% has to be found, refined and cleaned up in general, and inserted into the recycling system on the ship.

Every single thing on the ship has to go through this recycling process. The hull is included. The electronics and sensors are included. The hotel facilities are included. The power source is included. The fuel tanks are included. The propulsors are included. The recycling equipment, including material transport and chemical treatment and biological vats and whatever else is use are all included. The living organisms on the ship are included, but not in the same way.

Biological organisms are constant recyclers, in that the atoms and organic compounds and structures in the body and its fluids are replaced at varying rates, and some residual excreted, to be replaced with the various inputs the organism needs, gas, liquid and solid. The ship would have to have an ecological component to it, so that all the input needs of the organic creatures could be met and their wastes recycled. This takes energy, and hopefully it can be done with the same energy source the rest of the ship uses.

In a sense, the entire ship can be thought of as a combined organism, mechanical and biological, which takes in pristine resources and energy-rich materials, and excretes diffuse waste matter and heat. The fraction of the ship that is biological is one variable that the designers have to decide upon.

Bifurcation in Alien Civilizations

By bifurcation is meant a division in society forms and stays permanently. There is one particular one which is governed by a positive feedback loop. Recall that when there is such a loop, things grow up to some saturation point, and then stay there.

One other positive feedback loop that likely occurs in any alien civilization based on individuals is that those citizens who amass some advantage can use it to gain more advantage. Wealth, power, influence, access, communications control, and status in a hierarchy are some of the advantages with this feedback loop that we are familiar with. In an alien society, theirs may be different, but the general idea of differentiation between citizens increasing in an increasing way, because of the effects of a feedback loop, is something that might be expected, unless their society was organized in a different way. It certainly could be, for example, if they had an evolutionary background similar to what we see in ants, rather than primates.

Assuming they have a civilization in which individuals play a role and have a range of options before them, such loops would exist. When the genetic grand transformation starts to transpire, and the first steps of it, selection of genes for the next generation but still using citizens as sources of them, might be accessible first to those who have some advantages. But genetic improvement is an advantage, and insofar as it provides more intelligence and other desirable attributes which can be used to gain more advantage, it is also a component of the composite positive feedback loop which is serving to divide and separate the population.

If genetic advantage initially costs a considerable amount to obtain, availability would be limited, and those with other advantages would be able to access it, while the remainder of the population would not. If the speed of the genetic grand transformation is high enough, other steps could be taken before the first step was promulgated widely. Thus the comparative speed of discovery and implementation relative to cost reduction and widespread dissemination plays a key role in whether continued division and separation would occur, or whether a leveling of the civilization would occur. Both of these speeds, research and discovery and cost-reduction and dissemination are a result of the effort provided, which translates into the support that the civilization gives to each of them. How is the amount of support allocated? Perhaps it is controlled by those who have advantages.

If this genetic grand transition happens before the neurological grand transition, the alien civilization would still have individuals with pathological tendencies. These tendencies will be ameliorated by the neurological grand transition, but if the genetic one happens first, and can be corrupted by those with advantage, something called a bifurcation in this blog could happen first. It might be permanent and irremovable.

One of the later steps of the genetic grand transition is the availability of deliberate speciation. This is where a chromosomal realignment is done, rendering cross-mixing of chromosomes between those created with the realigned chromosomes and those with the older, evolutionary version imfrertile or even impossible. A new species is born. If those of the old species with advantage are still involved with parenting, and have some connection, real or imagined, with those young citizens created with new chromosomal alignments, they could use their advantage to restrict the dissemination of this and other genetic improvement methods.

Once that single generation has passed, so that there is on the planet a mixture of those with new chromosomes and those with old ones, and the new ones have great advantages over the old ones, the division could become cemented in place. The alien civilization will have divided itself into two species, but one species is not replacing the old, simply living among it and enjoying a higher standard of living, perhaps much, much higher. There could be some geographic separation that follows, or not. The essence of the situation is that there are left-behinds, who do not get to participate in the genetic grand transition, but are still living with the old, unimproved genes that they evolved with. The new species, with more intelligence, longevity, and likely other attributes such as ambition, will in some sense be the rulers of the other one, in an obvious way or a covert way. Interactions between the two species, the old and the new, could happen in many different ways, too many to list. But the interactions would be done under the control of the new species, and so would not be usable by the left-behinds to equalize their positions.

After the bifurcation happens, the genetic grand transition can go to its conclusion, with industrial gestation, various creatures being created, and so on, but the bifurcation stands. There is an alien civilization with a mass of self-reproducing, less fit individuals and a mass of those of a new species, enjoying all the advantages of the genetic grand transition, and likely all the other grand transitions as well. The bifurcated society might be stable.

This type of happenstance is related to, but not identical with, the situation where there is no bifurcation and intellos are invented and created to perform some functions in society. Intellos are not evolved creatures, but synthetic creates grown to match a design some aliens have made. They do not reproduce among themselves, but are created in a fabrication facility as robots are. Their position in society might, however, be similar to that of the old species in the bifurcated society, which is, doing tasks for which robotics is more expensive, or less desirable by the new species.

Living arrangements might be different for the two species. The new species might live in semi-closed cities such as has been discussed elsewhere in this blog, while the old species might be relegated to living on the land, much as they did before the industrial grand transition, or even after it, at least until resource scarcity strikes. Alternatively, access to resources could be restricted by the new species so that the old species is forced to live pre-industrially. There are many arrangements that could be made, but the concept that a bifurcation occurs early in the sequence of grand transitions, and they are ordered such that it can become finalized, is one that might be common on alien planets. It is not clear that this would affect the desires or the capability of the new species to perform star travel, but the question should be explored more fully.

The Neurological Grand Transition and Psychotropic Drugs

In this blog, we have talked about how the genetics grand transition would affect alien civilizations tremendously, and possibly affect their interest in star travel, but would certainly affect how they organize themselves, how they choose their goals and implement those goals with memes, and many other effects. This effects are not as visible as some of the possible ones we on Earth have foreseen in the robotics grand transition, which we might understand a little better, as we are closer to it.

There is another grand transition embodied in the march to asymptotic technology that might have profound effects on any alien civilization. That is the neurological grand transition. There are many positive effects on an alien society of the development of nearly complete knowledge of how the their brains work. They can develop ways to cure diseases and injuries to the brain in more sophisticated and effective ways than we can. If an alien is injured in the brain, they may understand how to regrow the neurons and other cells that were damaged and had to be removed, restoring complete use to the injured alien. Cancer and other diseases are not specifically neurology problems, but the thrust forward toward understanding how the brain operates may be accompanied by other developments which can remove a cancer and restore function, and the same with the ill effects of other diseases affecting the brain.

Perhaps more consequential will be the understanding of the mechanisms by which pathological behavior develops in an alien brain and also of the means by which it can be prevented and if not prevented, removed. If their brains evolve like ours as associative neural structures, reprogramming them is difficult. That does not mean that it would be impossible for them to accomplish. But the prevention approach is probably where the greatest effect on alien civilization will happen. Alien citizens will not develop pathological behaviors, such as violent outbursts, greed or passion for power, depression and suicidal inclinations, compulsive behaviors, phobias, schizophrenia, paranoia, or others. But there is one minefield that must be crossed.

An understanding of the neurons of the brain will also provide an understanding of how to manipulate them. It will be possible for alien chemists to create a far wider array of psychotropic drugs than we have today. The side effects of the drugs will be determinable as well.

Now, we have many drugs which affect the working of the brain. Many of them have unpleasant side effects. Along with the development of more psychotropic chemicals to do different functions within the brain, it would be expected that delivery technology would improve, to eliminate some of these side effects, and so would a tailoring of the chemicals themselves to do this. It is probably a safe assumption to say that a few centuries of deep research into neurology will produce drugs that can perform any function in the brain of an alien, without side effects. What would this mean to their society?

Most likely, there is something in any alien civilization like individual happiness. Happiness is the production of reinforcement chemicals within the brain. It is a motivating force to make the brain remember how to have the needs of the body met, and then how to have the associations with needs, multiple layers deep, also satisfied, even though they no longer have anything to do with bodily needs.

To be more explicit, associations are the self-programming the brain does. In early life, these are driven by elementary bodily needs and instinctual drives. But concepts and attributes which are associated with those needs and drives often are not solidly connected with some unchanging future situations, but instead are connected with things that are transient and temporary. But the associations remain. Just as Pavlov’s dog learned that a bell meant food was coming, a neural network in a brain associates attributes with need satisfaction, and then attributes with attributes in an expanding set of layers of associations. This seems to be an easy way to evolve a powerful brain, and aliens may have the same structures.

Neurochemicals are the means by which associations are laid down and reinforced. They change the structure of the synapses of neurons. They also provide motivation for seeking out those things which are associated in some chain with needs and instincts. When satisfied, the brain produces chemicals that are interpreted as happiness.

Happiness inducing drugs bypass this whole chain and go to short-circuiting the association building process and the association satisfying process. They just produce some of the final effects of the processes, such as euphoria, stress-relief, calm, pleasure, satisfaction and so on. So, when alien neurological prowess produces drugs which can duplicate any of these effects, without nasty side effects, what happens? Aliens are programmed to seek these effects. The drugs provide them. Wouldn’t it be likely that drug use would continue to grow in an alien civilization? And then what happens?

Since motivation to perform the learned ways of becoming happy has been bypassed, the amount of motivated behavior, such as performing useful functions in the civilization or somehow doing something of some personal importance, declines. Motivated behavior goes away.

Can an alien civilization survive ever-increasing use of psychotropic drugs, even those with no side effects whatsoever? Can such a civilization maintain itself, or maintain its continued progress? If work is totally automated, in other words, if the civilization has reached a high degree of robotics already, before the drug use became so high, and the robotics is self-producing and self-maintaining, and virtually everything in the society is done without the participation of the citizens, then the civilization could maintain itself until some catastrophe happens. The other side of this coin is that if researchers in the alien civilization become tranquil from drug use, and cease to be effective, can the civilization depend on robotic investigations to continue their progress toward asymptotic technology? Or will it simply grind to a halt?

Whether or not robotics, even asymptotic robotics is up to this challenge is not clear to us on Earth. We are still fairly primitive in this regard, and do not have the basis for making any predictions or projections. However, if this doesn’t happen, for example if the robotics technology at the time when drug use expands to the whole population of aliens is not that far advanced, the civilization may well implode. Perhaps this is a common result, and explains why alien civilizations do not appear in our skies. They are all back on their home planets, getting high.

The Will to Survive as a Species

The English language needs a word for this concept. There even isn't any good word for the will to survive as an individual, except perhaps self-preservation. Maybe by analogy, species-preservation is the best choice. A Latin or Greek word might be just what is needed. But there does not seem to be one. The concept of species did not exist back in ancient Greek and Latin times, so it is hard to see how such a word would come to exist. The Greeks and Romans did think of survival, but since the world was so divided into factions at that time, they would have thought of the survival of a faction of the human species, rather than the survival of any species by itself.

There is some vagueness in the concept itself. Will is something usually associated with a conscious mind, and the species doesn’t have a single mind, just a collection of them in the bodies of the members of the species. So the concept itself might mean that the individuals of the species have some determination that they will act to ensure the species survives. This type of very generalized altruism is an outgrowth of what exists as a family member who seeks the betterment and survival of those members of his family, especially the children or the potential parents; or analogously in those animals which are live in larger groups, for the survival of the whole group. Some primates have been known to sacrifice themselves when the group to which they belong is attacked by a predator; scaling up this concept to the entire species is probably where the definition of this concept should go.

This concept has been discussed before, and alien societies in which there was no desire to continue the civilization much beyond the current time were one category. They were the extreme case of the set of civilizations, ranging from one which wished to explore and colonize the galaxy to this one, which didn’t much care if they were around for long. There is no confusion between self-preservation and species-preservation, although they may be competitive goals. In self-preservation, the member of the civilization wants to live a long time, as much as possible. In species-preservation, the member of the civilization wants his species to live a long time. In situations involving deliberate speciation, a different type of confusion can arise.

When a species chooses to replace itself with a species considered to be superior in some ways, what actually is the thing that is being preserved? There is continuity in the civilization, so a companion word could be civilization-preservation. The same collection of types of alien civilizations included one which wanted to promote life on other planets, and another possible type specialized in intelligent life. Yet another wanted to make their civilization available on other planets, and there may be different forms of life which could accept it.

On this side of the genetic grand transformation, it is hard to think very deeply about these variations, although they may be one of the more common topics in an alien civilization when they are in the stage of deciding on what memes will guide their civilization through the next millennia. Thus there are five variations on this theme. The alien civilization may decide on preserving and possibly promoting elsewhere: their species, an improved species based upon theirs or perhaps several ones tailored to different planets, their civilization meaning their technology, intelligence in general, and life in general. Five choices can be made, and there are likely many variations upon these.

One way to look upon this panoply of directions an alien civilization may take is to consider it as an elimination process. Any species which does not choose species-preservation or one of its offshoots will not survive. They will eventually fall victim to some peril their own planet will face, be it planetary in origin, stellar or galactic, or arising from some Great Filter they encounter. Only those species which have the goal to avoid these things and continue to survive will.

The difference in self-preservation and species-preservation is simple. An alien civilization whose members are solely concerned with self-preservation will do fine in the very short run, as each individual member of the society seeks to pass through whatever problem the civilization encounters. But they make decisions based on their own situation, and do not concern themselves with either the initiation of future generations nor the ability of these future generations to survive and continue the species. It is short-term thinking versus long-term thinking.

In short, a civilization whose individuals are largely concerned with self-preservation will make decisions differently. In a very obvious example, why would a civilization worry about recycling materials which will not run out for ten more generations? No member of the civilization is threatened. There may even be some minor negative consequences of doing so. Exactly the opposite happens with a civilization which is based on some variant of species-preservation.

This is simply one more way of coming to appreciate the value of memes to an alien civilization. These memes can control whether the thinking of the individual members of the civilization is based on short-term, i.e., their own individual, needs and desires, or on long-term things, such as what members of the civilization will need and desire many generations hence. If the memes to develop long-term thinking are not built into the society in such a way that each generation learns them and adopts them, and ensures that the next generation receives the same treatment, the society sets itself up to become extinct, or reduced to some primitive level of living standards. Memes may not sound important when discussed in abstract, but examples show that they are critical to one thing, the long-term survival of the species, or some extracted consideration of the species such as the five possibilities listed above. If the alien civilization does not realize the need for them, expecially during the formation years around the genetic grand transition, it is on the road to extinction.

Extinction situations or reduction situations in which the alien civilization reverts to barbarity or close to it may not happen in short periods compared to the inter-generation time, but they will in short periods compared to the age of the planet or the time needed for life to evolve from chemicals. So, if we were to consider why aliens have not visited us, we might think that on most planets which have lasted for millions of years, there was plenty of time for any civilization which grew up there to become extinct, for the reason that they did not plan for the long-term survival of their own species.

Two Kinds of Scarcity

A previous post talked about a possible Great Filter from scarcity, and another about how it could deepen into exhaustion, leading to a halt to technology progress. There were several possible causes for this type of scarcity, resource scarcity, including the lack of metals on the planet, impossibility of accessing most of the surface due to ice cover, and certainly others. In a sense, you could say that planets are born with a certain amount of useful resources, some more than others, and it is a race to asymptotic technology against impending scarcity. Scarcity curtails technology’s advance, and technology’s advance is what opens up substitution and the use of other materials and fuels, which could end scarcity for some long period.

It is like a walk across a barren desert, carrying water. If there is enough water, the walker can get across the desert before it runs out, and if not, he/she never reaches the water sources on the other side. Whether the walk is successful or fatal depends on the width of the desert, the speed of the walker, the consumption rate of the water, and of course the amount of water carried. For an alien civilization, the walk is the march toward advanced technology, and failure is not necessarily immediate extinction, but a final state on a plateau planet.

This type of scarcity comes in many flavors, one for each material that is crucial to the productivity of society or the development of technology. If the society exhausts the most-critical material, its living standard plummets, and there may be no support possible for the advance of technology. If scientific research depends on some material that runs out, that area of science cannot go forward. Different areas of science affect other ones, so an early exhaustion and the termination of scientific advances in one area might mean whole areas remain unexplored and so asymptotic technology is not reached across the board, but only in certain areas. This would appear to be highly unlikely, but not impossible, as science is a tiny consumer of resources. Perhaps one example would be a planet with no uranium resources or an old planet where they have decayed before life originated. Then the nuclear branch of physics might never get going, and any power sources from it never developed. This technology barrier could clearly affect society and certainly would affect star travel. However, the civilization outside of technology development would have no need of this resource at their state of technology; other energy sources would be used. Thus, it is possible for resource scarcity to impact technology development directly, rather than through the process of the civilization growing short of some resource, losing productivity, and not providing enough support to maintain the advance of technology.

Recall that the advance of technology is predicated on many factors being available, one being individuals trained in critical and creative thinking, educated to the current level of technology, and given sufficient support to perform their investigations. As technology goes further and further, individual advances require, on the average, more support. The critical mass of individuals needed for scientific advance increases. The size of experimental setups grows, as does the need for ancillary resources, such as computation. So, when scarcity delivers a body blow to the civilization, technology and its practitioners might get cut off, so that resources can be delivered to sustaining the population at their accustomed living standards. This should be referred to as the prioritization of technology development.

The above discussion is an excellent preamble to the discussion of the second type of scarcity. This is the scarcity of produced goods, in other words, consumable goods. In a reasonably level alien civilization, this is easily explained. Technology development has a priority, and in good times, it gets the resources it needs to both maintain the subset of population involved in it, and not just maintain in the sense of providing bread and butter to them, but of maintaining the numbers and quality of researchers and engineers involved in the development of new technology. The choice of what priority to give technology development depends on many factors in the alien civilization, but there is one overriding factor that effects the immediate decision on what resources to devote to this area. That is the difficulty the society has in maintaining the living standards of the population of alien citizens.

In a stable or gradually improving situation, the diversion of resources into technology development might be expected to follow the same pattern, stability or gradual increase in total amount, perhaps with the same fraction being sent that way. In a declining situation, the opposite result might happen, and depending on the rate of decline, it might happen quickly, over the period of a generation or so.

Decision-makers might well know that the productivity of the civilization depends largely on the level of technology that is available to all those involved in producing products or services for the civilization. Whether it is infrastructure for transportation or disease prevention or energy production or resource extraction, all of this is improved by technology, and decision-makers would have to be very uninformed to be unaware of this. However, they do not necessarily make decisions, and this includes the prioritization of resources for technology development, following this knowledge. It is based on many factors, of which the history of technology development and its effects on the productivity of the civilization is only one. Another one is the need to sustain the population. If something happens, not related to technology, that reduces the ability of the civilization to sustain its population, then resources might be diverted from the former path of technology development to population sustenance. Large changes in productivity might require more sudden changes in the support for technology, or there could be some finer tuning of the support, so that general advances were not supported, while those which have immediate effects on sustenance would be. This would hamper the long-term achievement of asymptotic technology, but it is a decision made on the basis of weighing current needs versus long-term goals. No requirement exists for long-term goals when sustenance problems are immediate.

There are many factors that could influence sustenance and the maintenance of existing living standards, and problems in some of these could result in the second type of scarcity situation developing. Since this would, at least temporarily, derail the progress being made toward star travel capability, they should be explored, probably on an equal footing with the other type of scarcity. There may even by a hidden Great Filter here.

The Disappearance of Demarcation in Alien Civilizations

Demarcation between what? Between aliens.

Factionalism, under certain circumstances, can be the bane of technological progress in an alien civilization. Factionalism, being the division of aliens along some dividing line, i.e., some demarcation boundary, and the devotion of effort into promoting one faction’s position relative to others, serves to slow down progress in those areas of technology progress which do not contribute to the relative advancement of a faction.

In simpler terms, if the aliens on some planet are divided into battling groups, and spend all their creative energies on figuring out how to best the other groups instead of preparing for star travel, they may never get there. They may never want to get there, as the interesting thing to them is on the home planet and it is all about how to be the superior faction.

Demarcation is the division of the alien citizen population into ‘us’ and ‘them’. It can be based on any attribute. On Earth, we have used language, race, color, ethnicity, economic status, religion, caste, and probably others. On an alien planet, they might have their own demarcations, based on left-preference or right-preference, vocal tract details affecting vowel sounds, color vision or blindness, eye color itself, feather shape, ability to jump, or many other things that would make sense to an alien, but not to us. There are some things that make more sense to draw the line on, such as those which lead to a better gene pool, such as health and immunity, intelligence in its many varieties, nerve conduction speed, temperature or altitude tolerance, and so on. These are the qualities which might be selected for after the genetic grand transition provides the technology to improve the aliens’ gene pool. The other ones, perhaps not.

Try and consider what happens to the alien society if the ability to produce better individuals in the next generation becomes widespread. Yes, it is conceivable that initially one faction would try and monopolize the genetic knowledge and technology and use it to promote their own faction. But knowledge both seeps out past barriers and can be duplicated. Once the initial use of it partially is overcome, what is the point of maintaining the former demarcation barriers?

To make the situation more transparent, consider an example. An alien society exists with several factions, geographically based initially, but more deeply based on the colors of head feathers. There is the red faction, the purple faction, the yellow faction, the brown faction and so on. Each faction, some more than others, seeks to have their faction have a larger share of the ownership of some things important, like land or possessions of some ilk. They do this for centuries and the division of ownership fluctuates, or maybe it stays in the purple faction’s hands for a century, or whatever. Along comes the genetic revolution, and the purple guys got first access to most of it and used it to ensure their citizens were the smartest and all the other good things. But then the red feather guys got it, and sooner or later, everybody has it. So the purple guys are sitting around thinking about how they still have the majority of the good things to have. Somebody asks what difference does it make now, since all citizens are pretty much optimized in all evolutionary and utilitarian attributes. Everyone’s smart and productive and healthy and attractive, except for head feather color, and strong and so on. What is left to be a big deal about purple feathers?

The purple feather guys can try and maintain their hold on ownership rights, but it is going to be harder and harder, as the competition is just as smart and everything else. So there likely will be a gradual dissolution of the ownership aspect. What is left? Head feather color has become an obsolete attribute. It is caused by a few genes on some chromosome, and anybody anywhere with access to genetic coding technology can change these genes in a fertilized egg, or whatever type of originating cell they reproduce with. So, intelligent as they are all now, they would realize the futility of maintaining demarcation boundaries, where the purple feather people try to hold onto some excessive ownership fraction.

And yes, as in all major social changes, the drift from strong demarcation boundaries to weak demarcation boundaries to only legacy demarcation boundaries to where nobody really cares anymore demarcation boundaries will take generations. But as noted elsewhere, generations aren’t long in the overall history of an alien civilization.

The purple feather citizens will, at the conclusion of this process, treat red feather citizens and yellow feather citizens just like they treat purple feather citizens, although it would have been taboo to do this ten generations ago. The demarcation boundaries would certainly have served as governance barriers, but now the gate is open to unification and more efficient control and operation of the infrastructure of the planet. Perhaps other demarcation boundaries will arise, but only in an artificial way, such as in sport or intellectual or whatever other competitions exist to amuse the population and provide them with interesting aspects for their daily lives. There might be several to which each citizen, who desires to, can be part of. Demarcation as a fundamental attribute of a citizen’s life is over and past.

As noted elsewhere in this blog, the genetic grand transition has claim to being the most profound and transforming of the grand transitions, although all of them make great changes in the alien civilizations that pass through them. This may be an overestimate from a point of view based on where we are now on Earth. Stepping back, the transformation from a hunter-gatherer society to a civilization where citizens live in cities and engage in some sort of crop raising or animal husbandry or algae farming or whatever works there for feeding the population, is also a good candidate for being the most impressive change in an alien civilization. Perhaps grounds could be made for the other ones as well.

What this means is that if we do meet any aliens, they may have different physical attributes such as head feather color, but beneath that, they will be largely identical, and have social structures based on the intrinsic equality of citizens as happens after the genetic grand transition. Making judgments on the basis of appearance of the aliens would probably be a mistake, even if they have chosen to be wildly different in appearance. Now we just have to wait.

What I Learned About Beam Riding in My Swimming Pool

The cost of propulsion for star travel largely consists of having to accelerate the unused fuel and propulsion matter. It’s bad enough to have to accelerate all the fuel and propulsion matter you are going to use for deceleration, but you also have to accelerate, at the early stage of acceleration, all the fuel and propulsion matter you are carrying that will be used in the later stages of acceleration. It is a diminishing amount, but the extra propulsion needed really adds up.

One bright idea to reduce this problem is to do beam riding. You send a beam of something and an antenna to reflect it backwards. Your momentum is mailed to you so you don’t have to carry matter along to shoot it out backwards and increase your own momentum. You still have to carry what you need to decelerate, but that can be a small fraction of what you need to accelerate, if you carry everything with you.

They call this beam-riding, which is actually an old combination of words that used to be used for a way of guiding a missile or torpedo to its target. You shine a beam on the target, and the missile sensor sees it and heads toward it. There are variations of course. But there never was a variation that involved powering a missile with a beam. That is something much newer, and obviously more exciting.

You can do it with photons or with protons. With photons, you just need a big mirror. Protons don’t reflect so well, but perhaps there is some electrostatic way to do it. If you capture the first ones you get the electrostatic charge anyway. Let’s just consider photons.

Suppose there is a big mirror on the back end of your spaceship, and your home planet has a giant laser or other photon source that it shoots at you. You reflect the photons somewhere, and lo and behold, you’re moving. Not exactly Star Trek but at least you’re moving.

You better know where you want to go, as changing your mind halfway through the travel isn’t going to happen. You brought deceleration fuel and propulsive matter, and you can’t just use it to change which star you want to head towards. This should be a solvable problem. You make your mind up once and for all before you head out from your home planet. You need to head out in the direction of the destination star, keeping yourself between the destination and the big laser at home.

I thought this was such a splendid idea that I decided to experiment with it, sort of by accident. I had a power failure at my home a little while ago, and it took hours for the power to be restored. All the clocks were off, and had to be reset. I thought I had done all of them, but I found that I had forgotten the pool pump timer. It was set to run in the dark night, so the pool would stay clean, but be available all during the day. I went to swim in the morning, and it was still running. A hah!

There are jets of water that come into the pool around the edge, with the drains elsewhere. I was floating on the top of the water, and aimed at a jet and put my hands in front of the jet. Just like a beam rider, the jet of water pushed me away. It became extremely obvious that the jet was not cooperative. It wanted to get my hands away from it, but it didn’t care about the rest of me. All the mass was on the destination side of the reflector. Mostly it rotated me, when I just stayed stiff and didn’t try to adjust my direction.

Beam riding has not one, but several instabilities that make design a little more complicated than just having a reflector. The first one happens if you are foolish enough to put the center of mass of your starship ahead of the center of thrust, which is what I am calling the average position of where the momentum gets reflected. It is somewhere inside that parabolic mirror you are using to reflect photons. If the center of mass is ahead, you have an unstable situation from the get-go, and the ship will rotate. You are no longer pointing toward your destination star.

This is obviously easy to fix, you just have to put your starship mass behind the reflector. Maybe you build it in a ring around the outside, but that means you have a very, very, very long circular spaceship space. Maybe with a huge ship you could spin the reflector and make artificial gravity. The other choice is to stick it somewhere inside the reflector, actually in the center of the photon beam. You would like to make the photon beam as intense as possible, so you get your acceleration early on, and can keep the reflector as small as possible. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be intense enough at the outset of your voyage to fry the innards of your internal space. Certainly something can be done about starting a bit farther out. There is an obvious tradeoff between momentum collected in close and momentum collected far out, but most likely it is only the very shortest distances where there might be a heating problem, if there is any at all. Suppose you solve this problem.

Now comes two other instabilities. One is reflector angle. If it tips a bit to one side, there will be a gradual effect to increase the tilt. If you have a tilted reflector, the photon beam is going to reflect to one side, and you are going to someplace other than your destination star. Not a good idea to tilt. Some sort of gyroscopic control is needed and some thrustors along the side are also needed to put that reflector back into a perfectly aligned direction. So you need to carry a smidgen of fuel and maybe four thrustors to keep you aligned. If the reflector is not too strong, you might have to spread out the thrust in more places than four, or else you could build some structure to hold them. Or you could put the thrustors on a structure connected to the internal ship space that you are hanging right there in front of the beam. By the way, that thing is going to act to tilt the reflector as well, so you need to make it nice and circular, as well as reflective.

The last instability comes at the last. If you don’t stay along the centerline of the beam, but somehow get a little bit off to one side, the gradient in photon intensity is going to push you further to the side, as well as tilt you. So you need some side thrust to put you back in the beam, or you need to send a message to the ground crew, or space station crew, manning the giant laser to redirect it a bit toward where you are. This is fine, except you were supposed to stay on the line from the giant laser to the destination star. Maybe having your own side-directed thrustors, balanced around the center of mass of the whole ship, is the better idea.

No More Rooting for the Underdog

Sympathy is very common among humans although there are many humans who lack much of it. Sympathy here is meant to mean an emotional response to the understanding of another human being’s distress or challenges. There can be a kind of pseudo-sympathy, where someone intellectually feels that he/she should assist someone, or at least be happy at their success, but there is no emotion connected to it. Emotion is an outpouring of certain neurochemicals that is triggered by associations in the brain. To be more specific, when someone notices that another person is having a difficult time, and that someone has the right association so they connect to that person, then they will also feel like helping or encouraging or doing something else to support them. There has to be an associative connection between the person feeling sympathy and the person receiving it. Associative connections come from our experience.

There is a secondary type of sympathy, which does come from associations, but via another person. If a child sees someone they are prone to imitate, unconsciously, helping another person in some particular situation, that mode of behavior becomes something they might do, given similar conditions, because the unconscious imitation of the behavior of their role model gives them pleasure. There may be some differences in exactly how the brain processes the primary and the secondary types of sympathy, but the results are the same.

There is even a tertiary kind, where someone helps another because of the expected or previously experienced praise that they received or noticed others receiving when they acted sympathetically. But the secondary and tertiary kind of sympathy depend on their having been, at some stage in the process, some primary sympathy. Where does that come from?

It comes from parental instincts. In higher animals, there are many examples of parents assisting children in different ways. This occurs without training. Even animals with such small brains as birds feed and nurture their young. It is an essential part of reproduction with the lower animals, and there is no reason to think that instinct is not present somewhere in the brain of humans, waiting to be evoked. The details of parental behavior are learned, but there is some positive feedback neurochemically that many people experience when parenting or even observing their offspring succeed in later years.

During periods when human lived, pre-civilization, in small groups, it is likely to have been evolutionarily beneficial for these types of behaviors to be administered to some others. Thus, having a loose binding between the object of the sympathy and the behavior may have been very useful, and over the tens of thousands of years that humans lived in small hunting and gathering groups, it was reinforced and coded both into genes and memes.
Thus, now we can watch a screen showing some other humans having difficulties, and some of us may respond with an emotional reaction. This is the broadening that our associative brains can provide. In fact, sympathy by humans does not have to be directed toward other humans at all; it can be directed toward other species in certain instances. In the earliest days of animal husbandry, this may have been most helpful in promoting survival both of the husbanded animals and their keepers. Again, a loose connection between the object of sympathy and the response was useful, and therefore likely coded into genes and memes.

To return to the main point, this arises because of the original sympathy or parental instinct that exists in more primitive animals and would have existed in early humans. What happens in an alien society when parenting is no longer required, and no one experiences it? Furthermore, no one sees anyone else doing it. Young aliens are cared for by robots and intellos. There may be no families in existence anywhere on the alien planet, having been replaced by other types of groups, perhaps long-lived or perhaps more transient.

For the first few generations after the shift away from the traditional, for aliens, form of rearing young, there may be some preservation of the feeling of sympathy, coming from secondary and tertiary sources. But as more generations come into existence, that would erode and there would be nothing to replace it. Alien civilizations well past the genetic grand transition would not have sympathy in their repertoire of emotions. It would have become obsolete, like child-rearing.

Perhaps there would initially still be some instinctual remnants of parental feelings, which might somehow be translated into sympathy. It is hard to imagine how, because aliens do not go through any experiences which would tie some associations with the portions of their brains where these instincts lie. The alien society could invent some aspect to their training so that young aliens would see and learn about sympathy, and then it might be preserved. So the resulting question is: would they bother? Does this give any benefit to the alien civilization?

One can conceive of some Good Samaritan actions, in which one alien comes upon another who is injured, and provides initial first aid. This could be part of a young alien’s training, but it doesn’t need any evocation of instinctual sympathy feelings for it to be done. Instead, it could be taught as an expected behavior for aliens. Other situations, such as charity, would not exist in an alien civilization. When all aliens are genetically optimal, capable of doing any task in the society, well-motivated by their training, able to learn skills upon demand, communicative, and all other ideal aspects of designer citizens, why would there need to be something like charity?

Support for young aliens in their role as learners would not need any sympathy to have it be done. It would be a well-organized portion of their civilization, and well-understood. There would be methods created to teach, and it could be done by some artificial intelligent remotely, or by robots or intellos on the spot, or by volunteer aliens wishing to spend some time in this activity. They would not be doing this because of some inner drive to help young aliens, but for reasons of personal fulfillment. Yes, the alien society could make it part of their training to have adult aliens all participate at some time in the educational process of the youth, but this is not done for emotional reasons. They would be superfluous.

Sympathy as an emotional reaction, such as we experience as humans, might also have been experienced, and in fact likely was, by aliens in the pre-civilization and pre-grand-transition periods. But after that, and especially after the genetic grand transition, it would exist only in the alien civilization can come up with some reason to preserve it, and none appear obvious at this point.

In fact, sympathy could interfere with the normal course of business in dealing with robots or intellos or intelligent pets or designer animals in a professionally created ecology, or other situations. Because it was traditionally loosely coupled with parenting, this type of mis-direction, in the view of the overall civilization, would be aberrant and likely designed out of the alien civilization. Thus there is at least one good reason to expect it would not exist.

Would Aliens Have Families?

After an alien civilization passes the genetic grand transition, there is a cornucopia of choices the aliens can make about how they want to organize their society. As noted previously, they can opt for more infrastructure to be grown biologically as opposed to mechanically, which is the way we build it. It is the only way we can build it as we do not have the knowledge or technology for designing organisms and then creating them. They do.

There are other choices they have to make which have nothing to do with physical infrastructure. They have to do with social organization. The bottom rung of social organization has to do with families. By a family we mean a breeding pair, or single organism if the aliens bud instead of breed, or a trio if there is something that could evolve this way, or whatever. This relates to the provision of a genetic code to the next generation. After the genetic grand transition, genetic codes for the next generation are developed by technology to be the best possible, or taken from a set of the near-optimal if they decide not to have a civilization of identical citizens, different only in the experiences they have.

Perhaps some people’s idea of the genetic revolution is embodied in the movie GATTACA. There, each generation's genetic code was chosen from the parents’ genes, most likely the best combination that could be found. This is only the first, somewhat small, step of the genetic revolution. The next step is the use of optimal genetic codes for the next generation. At this point, inheritance of genes stops. One of the cornerstones of families disappears.

Another step in the genetic revolution, or grand transformation, is the introduction of optimal gestation, done either biologically or mechanically in specifically designed equipment. This is another cornerstone of families. Instead of giving birth, or budding or whatever, the next generation of aliens would be picked up at a facility, or perhaps just delivered to the home of whoever was to be responsible for them.

As noted elsewhere, optimal training and education would be provided to each member of the newer generations. This might be provided at home, but more likely, much would be provided elsewhere, just as we have centralized schools for convenience and uniformity, although there may be other reasons as well. This is another cornerstone of family life. There is almost nothing left, except socializing together, having experiences together, perhaps having some coordination of daily schedules. At this point, or even long before, the alien civilization faces the decision as to whether to maintain family units, or come up with something totally different. Like all major social decisions, it would be decided over generations, and probably implemented as well. But recall that generations are short compared to the life of the civilization. For us, a generation is about twenty-five years, and our civilization, from the first known cities to now, is about ten thousand years, or 400 generations.

It would be possible to explore whether or not families would disappear by discussing the pros and cons, from an alien citizen’s point of view, as to whether or not they should be preserved, or allowed to erode away, or simply abolished at one date in time. But an overview that bypasses that exploration is possible. The family’s essential roles are supplanted by something external, controlled and organized by the civilization itself. That may mean some master computer or distributed computer network, or something else able to compute well makes the decisions from a cost-benefit analysis, or from some other methodology for making decisions in the alien civilization.

Alien citizens would likely have the same type of evolved neural structure for controlling their actions and decisions as we do, as anything else is not likely to work as well. The associative structure we have is good for virtually anything, better for some things like recognizing things and recalling how to behave, and poorer for others such as massive computation and logic. Clearly we can develop and train ourselves to do anything, but it is not always very fast or error-free. The point to be made here is that associative neural structures provide rapid answers to situations, and also often block alternatives, which we know as stubbornness. Stubbornness is a useful trait, or it wouldn’t have evolved, and if it evolved here, it may just as well have evolved on alien planets. This means that the various steps of the genetic revolution may run into stubbornness and downright refusal to make changes, even though the large majority if not all citizens would benefit from them. Thus, like other major social changes, these changes would take generations to complete.

So the bottom line is, would aliens find any benefits to having social organizations like families. Our brains work better in small groups like this, but not necessarily families, and certainly not nuclear families. Since we are comfortable with small group interaction, and if we assume this is because of the way that brains have to evolve in pre-civilization times, perhaps one social arrangement that alien civilizations will adopt, in lieu of families, is small group living. This means that some number of aliens live together, probably with different ages and experiences, but no genetic or gestation connection. No aliens would have genetic connections or gestation connections after the later stages of the genetic grand transition play out.

This means that, for convenience and comfort, there is a quasi-permanent group of alien citizens who share an area and interact with each other more than they do with those outside the group. Perhaps there is a hierarchy. Perhaps the groups survive generations, with members who decease being replaced with new members, provided externally by the civilization. Alternatively as noted in the post on biological factories, there could be biological gestation within the living area, provided space was not too limited. This would add to the continuity of the group.

Another alternative is that the genetic grand transformation takes aim at the alien brain, as well as the other parts of their bodies, and improves it. This could mean minor improvements, say in the flow of nutrients to the neural cells, or it could mean major improvements, such as the addition of new lobes, with new functions. Redesigning the alien brain from scratch might also be a possible option. If that was done, one design criteria might be for independent living, with no need or desire for group living. This is an aspect of the genetic grand transition that has not been thought about much at all. Perhaps it should be considered in depth.

Avoiding the Invocation of Magic

‘Magic’ means making assumptions about some technology that have no basis in what we know. No basis includes that it violates something we think we know now, or an inconsistency, or a lack of a pathway to get to that technology, or a failure to include some important aspect such as inordinate size, cost, duration, or some other attribute. It is meant to denote wishful thinking that has no basis in any knowledge we have.
There are at least two ways in which some authors invoke magic in a repeatable way. One is the assumption that future technology will include some sort of faster-than-light (FTL) drive, which will be not too large for a space ship, not require too much power, and be usable anywhere. Sometimes there are words invoked to introduce the magic, like ‘worm-holes’ or ‘XYZ drive’ or something else, but nothing is done to show that these are any basis whatsoever for the magic, or that they have the properties that allow the magic to be used for whatever speculative purposes the author is involved with. This blog assume there is no magic FTL.

The other way that magic is assumed is to state that thinking machines will be able to think millions of times better that we can. This particular piece of magic confuses computational power, such as processing some stream of data, with the thinking that comprises intelligence, which is the ability to solve problems with creative or critical thinking or both. Build enough cores, and any level of computational power can be achieved, provided all the conditions such a construction needs are done. But the ability to be creative is limited. It is again a question of finiteness versus infinity. You cannot invoke appeals to infinity, or use large numbers like a million to mean virtual infinity, in finite situations. Aliens are not going to discover millions more elements for a gigantic periodic chart. Neither are they going to discover millions more isotopes, or carbon compounds, or coding schemes, or states of matter, or physical laws, or means of doing anything. Creativity is finite, because it depends on the re-combination of existing things. Virtual infinities come from replication and re-division of the continuum. You can have infinite numbers by adding more decimal places and you can have more grains of sand by finding more beaches. But you can’t have too much more thinking ability or technology. There are very finite limits, and that is one of the fundamental premises of this blog.

In some sense, a lot of the preparatory thinking that goes into this blog is to prevent the invocation of magic. Practical speculation requires inquiring into details. You can speculate about aliens living on Venus under the cloud cover, but the details of the temperatures there, combined with the ability of carbon bonds to survive such temperatures and the lack of other elements with the combinatory ability of carbon means this speculation is magical. You can write anything you want to, as language has not limits on veracity or even much indication of it, and say there are some carbon compounds that can endure at 400°C or whatever the current assessment is, and aliens evolved to use these. This would be false and magical.

Science can be looked upon as dispelling magic. It is so easy to speculate about anything under the sun, or under somebody else’s sun, or between all these suns, and make up possibilities, but only by digging into the details that must exist under the speculation, and asking if they contradict what we know so far can we reduce the amount of magic that exists in speculative writing. To do this digging, it is most useful to have a good grasp of science, not the literary distillation of it, but actual dirty hands science, in just about every field of science that exists. You can never know what limits are going to pop up in the midst of investigating some speculation.

It is also useful to be able to be creative and try and give the speculation a fair chance. Simply criticality will likely eliminate some possibilities that might exist, so the exorcism of magic means taking two steps: one is the creation of ways in which the speculative idea could actually be implemented and exist, and then the second is the analysis of those ways to see if all of them have a bar in front of them put up by either some physical law or scientific finding, or by some other attribute such as those listed above, size, cost and so on.

People who don’t have the background to do such an investigation, or who don’t have the time to do so, often just recite that they don’t believe in some speculation, perhaps adding in a phrase or two indicating why. What they are doing is drawing some preliminary associations out of their experience, and allowing this association to dictate their opinion on a particular speculation. For example, a response to the speculation that aliens would do recycling on a massive scale might include the statement that it is too hard to organize such a regimen, and, typically not included, this assertion comes from some experience with people complaining about how it doesn’t work or that behind the recycling façade the collectors are just throwing most of the material into the landfills or that it became frustrating to remember to separate things when it used to be easier to just combine everything in one trash container, or whatever their experience was that led to the possibly unconscious feeling that recycling at the 99.9% level cannot work.

Hidden associations, felt strongly but not recognized for what they are, are the bane of social change and thinking about how to improve some aspect of society. People are wont to just let their brains associate something unpleasant or unsuccessful in the past with some new idea, and declare they don’t like it or don’t think it will work. This is nothing more than an unconscious remembering of their experience or what they were told or witnessed. It says nothing about the validity of a speculation.

Speculation can be done simply and usually poorly, or it can be done in a detailed and complicated way, when it has a chance of striking gold. Much of the rambling in this blog is the real-time recital of attempts to dig into the details of speculations, often in an iterative and self-correcting fashion. That’s just the way thinking goes.

Biological Factories

In order to understand what type of alien ship might show up on our doorstep, and even what might show up in lieu of aliens themselves, it is important to try and understand what their civilization might look like. As noted elsewhere, we are in the midst of some robotic developments, and that takes our attention. But the genetics grand transition is likely to be much more revolutionary and much more transformative of an alien society.

One aspect of the possible use of biologics instead of robotics concerns available energy. Biological organisms occurring via evolution are autotrophs, consuming either available chemical energy in solutions or on surfaces or solar photons, or heterotrophs, consuming other organisms. Energy generation in our society, and probably in an alien civilization, is done in large central plants producing electricity, or in small local electricity producing equipment. Other energy sources are mined fossil fuels, and to a very small extent, gravitation via tides, which might not even exist on an alien planet.

Is it possible to grow a biological organism that consumes electricity directly? If so, then the doors are wide open for doing many things biologically. If not, there would have to be an intermediate step, perhaps something like a digestive organ for some organic liquid fuel that is made biologically or industrially, out of precursors that might be obtained from recycled materials plus the usual carbon dioxide and water. With the power source established, genetic engineering can be used to produce almost anything conceivable.

Animal organs might be used in combination with stable plant structures to produce a chemical processing facility. For the production of nutritional substances, organs could be designed to secrete a combination of substances, perhaps a complete nutritional mixture. A chemical production facility of the industrial type would take separate chemical lines for each substance, but an organ can be as versatile as necessary.

Why manufacturer a pump and piping when you can code in a heart and arteries and veins, along with a means for powering it? These biological items might be largely self-repairing, with little or no wear. The aliens would need a surgeon for major repairs, instead of mechanical technicians, but this might be completely facilitated by the analogy of asymptotic medical technology, applied to biological factories and other facilities.

Biological facilities and factories might have certain advantages, but they would also have certain disadvantages. High through-put for the footprint used is one where they might not be the best. This would imply that small volume production was needed, biological solutions might be better, in some overall metric, than mechanical ones. But it is not necessary that the alien civilization will centralize things such as we do, especially after the genetic grand transition. If the aliens have individual living quarters, or live in small groups instead of in larger dormitories, each of the living quarters might have many functions that are centralized here on Earth. Could some large fraction of recycling be in these homes? Could the equivalent of plant generation of oxygen be done locally, using electricity provided by a central source? Could food generation, perhaps excluding specialty items, be done in the home, again using electrical sources, or their surrogate, some fuel chemical as discussed above. With a pipe running the fuel source into all homes, some amount of wiring in the city could be eliminated. The pipe might even be biological, capable of growing to match the demand it sensed.

Perhaps hygiene and routine medical care would be done in the home. The aliens might have scales or claws or teeth or skin or joints or muscles that improved with some treatments that could be done in the home. A chair, if they sit, or a bed, if they lay down, might have some displacement ability, and some orifices to excrete whatever was the best lotion or polish or cleaning substance or whatever.

Wiring in the city might be non-existent. If transportable biological nutrients were used to power the home devices, power wires might not be needed. With optical cable, perhaps even grown, providing all the communication and information services, mechanical items would not be needed, except perhaps for displays or camera, and even these might be done biologically. The eye is an analog of a camera, but no creature has evolved anything that might be adapted for use as a display. This does not mean it is impossible.

In doing some figuring in a previous blog about the use of resources for an alien civilization, it was noted that a high degree of recycling would have to be used in order to extend the life of a high-living-standard, high-population alien civilization for long periods, more than millennia. We recycle on Earth through facilities which serve areas the size of cities, tens to hundreds of thousands of humans. But aliens might have something completely different, which enables them to recycle to a high degree without all this transport one way and then another way. Local biological units to reprocess biological materials might be possible, and if almost everything was biological, this might work to the high degree required. Central facilities might still exist, but only for the service of some centralized production or manufacturing facilities, such as gestation.

Even gestation might be done in the home, if it was done by a grown biological organism. This would restore the concept of family units, although with some very different aspects compared to what evolved. Perhaps aliens on some planets would spend most of their time in their homes, and only come out on special occasions, or to transfer homes, or for serious medical requirements, or some small number of other unique requirements. Or perhaps they would spend much time out of the home, but stay involved with their homes for some functions we have there and some we do not. Perhaps information and communication services would be largely in the home; perhaps they would be centralized.

In short, the genetics grand transition opens up so many possibilities for how aliens arrange their lives that we would fall short if we try to imaging all of them. For us on Earth, the mechanical revolution we have, when engines were invented and electricity became common, was totally transformative of society. Very likely, the genetics revolution will do the same for those alien civilizations which reach it.

Two questions are raised by these insights that affect the goal of the blog, which is to explore why aliens are not visiting Earth. One is that the genetics revolution, or grand transformation, may affect their motivation to travel through interstellar space, but how? The other is that any ship they build might have interesting mixtures of biological and mechanical devices, but how? Would that affect their ability to travel for long periods in isolation? Would it reduce the energy costs of such a trip? Undoubtedly, there are even more interesting questions.

The Myth of Cyber Life Extension

The concept of cyber life extension is best expressed in simple words. At the end of some being’s life, his brain is uploaded into a computer and he/she/it lives permanently as a cyber being. This concept has serious problems which are revealed by inquiring into the details.

The most glaring problem is the definition of the he/she/it that is being uploaded. As long as the organic, biological being is a living organism, one can draw a line around it and say that the definition of the organism is the material inside this boundary. Of course, the organism does not exist inside an impermeable envelope, but constant exchanges solids, liquids, and gases, which together include energy sources, with the exterior of the hypothetical envelope. The envelope exerts forces externally and internally. This is how organisms survive and perform functions.

The cyber life extension concepts says that somewhere inside this envelope is a smaller envelope, or rather some information and procedures, that can be packaged and labeled as the organism, or some abstraction of it. For someone who thinks only in words, not abstract concepts, and lives in a world of feelings, this might be fine. Instead of dying, you go and live forever in a plastic box. If such a person is told this, they might lose the fear of dying and live happier. This is about all the concept is good for, false feelings of security. The organism will still go through the process of dying, suddenly or gradually, painfully or unconscious, from one of the many causes that exist.

The program in the box could be designed to imitate some external signatures of that person. There could be a screen or a hologram of the person that the box could project, and it could be animated. Alternatively, there could be a molded part of the box that matched the shape of some distinctive part of the organism, which for humans would be the head. This molded part could be colored to match, or made of material which felt the same or which had the same flexibility. It could be the whole body was the template, and something with robotic motion capability could be created. We are talking about an alien world here in which robotics is already past the asymptotic process.

Voice could be modeled, and if there was a robotic body, the person’s gestures, taken from when they were younger and fully mobile, could be integrated in. Other organisms of the same species could look at the facsimile and say it reminded them of the original, now deceased, organism.

The problem lies in the software. It might be possible with advanced robotics, to made something that simulates an alien organism, but the brain is another problem. The alien species evolved on their home planet, which means they would have brains suitable for that process, in other words, associative neural structures of some kind. It is not possible to upload the information in that structure, as it is not accessible. It is possible to create a processor which can imitate some behaviors, and can memorize the answers to questions that the original organism answered while alive, so there would be some form of simulacrum that imitated some aspects of the organism, but it would be far short of what the organism held in its equivalent of a brain.

If an alternative concept of growing some neural structure and building the support equipment inside the robot or inside the plastic box, or inside whatever the imitation organism was, there is still no way to transfer the processing capability. One could say that much of the neural structure is used to process external and internal signals, such as for body monitoring, using external sensors including chemical, optical and audial, internal ones for balance or proprioception, or producing audible signals of some sort for communication, and these would not have to be structured the same way to produce a good imitation of what the original organism did. The remainder of the brain is a problem.

If asymptotic computing was able to produce associative processors, and the size could be accommodated, the same number of switches or data points could be made, hypothetically, as in the organism’s synapses. But an associative processor is trained bit by bit, by building up the data in layer after layer of the network. There is simply no way for the associative processor to be filled with the same quantity of information as the organism’s brain equivalent.

This means that some sufficing would have to be done. If there was universally present monitoring of the organism for a long enough time, communication patterns, including audio, gesture, expression or whatever the organism uses for communication, even color patterns like chameleons, might be approximated so that the organism’s external signatures could be recreated, perhaps in the holographic equivalent of animation. Here on Earth, some initial attempts have been made in this area, using computer graphic animation. With enough processing, this might be done in real time.

So, an organism might be imitated in so that some or all external signatures would approximate those of the organism. The responses would not be identical, but what is the point of this exercise. The organism itself deceased, and other organisms of the alien species can interact with it until they are bored with its limited capabilities, and then it can be run when anyone wants to use it. If it is a mobile robot, it can be allowed to run around in the environment there.

What has actually been accomplished by this exercise of technology? The organism is still dead, but before it died, it might have felt less fearful of death, if aliens still had a fear of death at that time. There have been many means by which this fear of death has been alleviated, some of which involve imagining some simulation or approximation of the organism coming into existence somewhere else, wholly imaginary. The grief of other organisms which had interacted with the dead organism might be somewhat mitigated by their use of the simulated being for some time. Again, this cyber life extension is simply something to mitigate bad feelings, and undoubtedly on the alien planet there were other attempts at grief mitigation, some involving imagining the same non-cyber life extension as was used for the dying organism.

If there was, on the alien planet, still a lack of means to alleviate both the fear of dying and the immediate grief of those who interacted with a deceased organism, this imitation in one way or another might be useful. It is likely that the alien society would learn much earlier on, how to deal with these two emotions in a much more efficient and effective way. If it was used for some reason, the design of the methods for imitation could be optimized so that just enough was done to alleviate the feelings, but not any more expense than that.

To return to the original point, one can bend the definition of an alien so that some simulation of it is called the same label as the alien carried. But aliens are fungible. There is no reason why the civilization would want to have an imitation of a deceased one performing any important functions instead of having a living organism do this. Most likely, the alien civilization, after the transition to advanced intelligence universally, will not use this method of imitation, and will instead keep clear what an organism is and what a robotic imitation is not.