Civilizational Collapse Prior to Asymptotic Techology

Intelligence is like a magic bullet. By intelligence, we do not mean literacy, like the familiarity with a hundred ‘classic’ works of literature. Nor is it numeracy, like knowing how to solve calculus and set theory examples. It is problem-solving ability, which is completely separate from literacy or numeracy, except that they can serve as tools for the problem-solver in his quest to overcome some difficult parts of a problem. Problem-solving takes place every day in every society, as when a person decides how to fix an appliance or substitute cooking ingredients. This is the low level of problem-solving, not involving anything new, just solving a problem that many others have solved before. The high level of problem-solving occurs when no one has solved a problem before, or at least no one in your tribe or city or wherever it is that you might learn from. It is like figuring out how to put a pointed rock on the end of a stick and reduce the threat of tigers by killing them more easily instead of running, climbing or hiding. It is like figuring out how to get somewhere faster by hanging onto the back of a horse and forcing it to go where you want instead of where it wants. It is like figuring out how to heat certain stones very hot and then use the metal that drips out of them. It is, in essence, pushing the envelope of how society used to do things into a region of more capability. It typically uses technology, in the broadest sense that includes organization, management, and delegation just as much as physics, animal husbandry and metallurgy.

If society collapses for some reason, famine, war, volcanoes, pestilence, or something else, intelligence cures the problem, sometimes only low-level and sometimes high-level, perhaps re-inventing something that was wholly or partially lost. Basically, the ability to solve problems with intelligence is an almost universal cure for civilizational collapse. It can’t cure extermination of course, but most lesser problems involving either population reduction or environmental catastrophe are eventually solvable, generations in time perhaps, or even centuries, but sometime. What can’t be solved? In other words, what problems can’t intelligence solve? This is the question that will answer the more formidable problem of “Would alien civilizations collapse prior to reaching asymptotic technology?”

Intelligence can’t solve problems that involve the destruction of the intelligence necessary for problem-solving. In other words, we have a tautology. If there is no more intelligence in a society, no more technology would get invented, some might be lost, and society can collapse. So, how could intelligence be destroyed across the board in a whole civilization? More specifically, how can the level of intelligence capable of solving higher-level problems be destroyed? If a civilization maintains lower levels of intelligence, capable of solving lots of lower level problems, it might get to statis, a fixed state of civilization, and never go forward to asymptotic technology. If something happens to an alien civilization that allows lower level intelligence to flourish, but eliminates some necessary factor for higher levels of intelligence to occur, it will hit stasis or collapse. The numbers of individuals who do higher levels of problem-solving are very few, so it is not necessary to have any widespread slaughter of anyone who can read or anything like that, it is only necessary to remove from society those mandatory, but possibly unknown, factors that allow some low level smart person to develop his mind and become a genius able to solve some hitherto impossible problem.

Intelligence comes from two factors, genetic and environmental. The highest levels of intelligence need contributions from both of them. If smart aliens stop having young aliens, in the period before the genetic grand transformation and industrial gestation is possible, then the genetics side of intelligence will fail and this particular alien society will fall into stasis, possibly never reaching the genetic revolution, or into collapse and descend into some earlier state of living at a lower technology level. If an alien civilization simply does not recognize the absolute necessity of having a requisite number of high-level problem-solvers, or does not understand the genetic lottery that produces them, they could collapse without even understanding what is happening to them. Consider an alien born into an alien civilization which is in the industrial revolution stage or perhaps in a later stage of it or beyond it. Suppose this alien is one with some portion of the genes necessary to provide a young alien with the total complement necessary to become a genius problem-solver. The alien is not a problem-solver, as he does not have the full complement, and the only way to get to a full complement is to breed with some other alien who also has a partial complement. This assumes the alien species is bisexual, which seems to be a reasonable assumption of evolutionary convergence, meaning that’s how it has to happen on any planet with evolution, and therefore Earth is a good example of it.

If either the partial complement alien decides not to have offspring or decides to breed with someone without a partial complement of genius genes, he will produce no high-level problem solvers for the next generation. So, if the alien civilization could either not reward having offspring, or need these partial complement people, who have mid-level intelligence, for other tasks, or promote breeding between partial complement people and no complement people, or in any other way interfere with the genetic lottery producing super problem-solvers, then the civilization can collapse. Maybe after it collapses, it can recover as the discouragement processes are terminated, or maybe it does not collapse that far but maintains the traditions of the former ‘golden age’, meaning no high-level intelligences or too small a number to matter.

The other side of the coin of intelligence is training and education. If training for problem solving is abandoned, such as by training everyone to only a low level and not allowing the best to fulfill their destiny, the alien civilization could just as easily sink into a slow collapse, with the collapse time measured in generations. Alternately, the alien civilization could disparage problem solving and laud such things as power over others or physical skills or humor or anything else other than problem-solving, so that those capable of this were seduced into never using their skills.

In short, it is certainly possible to devise ways in which the magic bullet of high-level problem-solving is never fired, or fired such a few times that the noise of society eliminates any benefits of some problems being solved. Known solutions could be forgotten, or even worse, disparaged for some reason or another, and then even stasis would not be possible, only collapse. If it is a real possibility that any alien civilization will run into this morass, and sink below the sea of mediocracy, then this is a potential answer to the question of why they never came here. The reason is they foundered in idiocracy, but of a peculiar type: they only got rid of the few who could carry their civilization to higher levels.

Invasive Species on Alien Worlds

Invasive species are simply those species that are transported from one region to another region with a similar environment, where they can out-compete the native species. This usually means they can eat what is available if it is an animal, but there are no predators for them among the native species. They have free rein to survive and multiply fast, and even to drive some native species into extinction. Plants colonize some areas, spread rapidly, and choke out native plants.

Since it takes a long time for a predator for these plants and animals to evolve from native species, or for the prey to develop means of surviving them, there is often a large overshoot of population, which is what leads to the extinction of the prey species, or the pushing out of native plant species from whichever type of habitat the invasive plant can occupy. This invasion of non-local species has probably been going on for billions of years, but recently mankind became involved, by being the vector by which the animals or plants travel to their new location. They might go on ships or airplanes, or be brought as decorative plants or pets, or via many other human interactions.

Humanity’s response to noticing this is to sometimes try to eliminate the invasive species, which rarely but occasionally works or at least serves to keep down the population of invaders. Mostly it is simply given up as a hopeless problem. Maybe someday there will be some robotic or genetic technology to restore an ecology to the way it was before mankind introduced the invasive species, but for now, there is none. People just see it as a sad situation.

Invasion can also occur at the microbe level, but that would be mostly invisible to humans. The exception is when the bacteria or virus involved preys on humans. The “Black Death” in Europe, killing off a large fraction of the population, was an invasive bacteria transported by trade from Asia, where it was endemic. Similar die-offs happened when diseases common in Europe arrived in the Americas. We also see these invasions in our food crops, where some monoculture is affected by a fungus or a virus or something else microscopic that lived in some wild area, but found the monocultured crop to its liking. Because of the immense investment in food crops, these invasions are often met by the best killing techniques technology can offer, or alternatively genetic alteration of the monocultured crop to resist the invader.

On any alien world where tectonics has divided up the land mass into regions, or climate has, there is the same possibility. An alien civilization would seem to be likely to make the same introduction of non-local species and see the same result. If the civilization had passed the agricultural grand transition, their food crops might be affected, leading to occasional widespread famines. If, later on, they were interested in preserving natural areas, with native plants and animals, they could easily find themselves victimized by some invasive species from another part of their world. Perhaps they would have found some solution in a bit higher technology that we possess or perhaps they would be forced to regard the problem as much too expensive to cure. Being able to build robots that can hunt down some invasive predator and kill it might mean too much expense on these robots, or side effects might happen. They might just have the same response that we do: sadness and resignation, and a set of techniques or preventive methods to minimize the number of occurrences.

When an alien species becomes intelligent and climbs the mountain to asymptotic technology, the ultimate stage of technological capability and knowledge, and generates for itself the ability to travel to other solar systems, will this experience affect their thinking? Will they ask themselves: Do we want to make ourselves into an invasive species? This is the exact opposite viewpoint that nations have used when exploring other parts of our world. "We are bringing our culture to new regions." Is that what the alien civilization would want to do, or would it instead just stay at home, trying among myriad other projects, to keep some of its remaining natural areas undespoiled by either its own intrusions or by invasive species from wild areas in other parts of the globe?

Recall that, if technology becomes available to travel to other stars and start a civilization on other planets, exo-planets (to the aliens – it might be Earth to us), the question as to where to go and if they should go becomes one of culture-wide philosophy or psychology. We on Earth can’t easily deduce what answer they will come up with, as we have stalled in our search for asymptotic philosophy, the end-all answer to philosophical questions. We are still circling around trying to figure out what philosophy is and what questions it should answer and how to integrate our knowledge of the universe into it, and many, many other aspects which we haven’t elucidated yet. It seems weird to say that we should be studying philosophy in conjunction with harder technologies if we want to coherently answer the questions of alienology, which is figuring out in the abstract what an alien civilization would do, as well as how it would develop.

The question that would face a potent alien civilization of whether they want to become a conquering people or an invasive species, which is exactly the same thing just with different points of view, or they want to stay home until something happens to exterminate them, is an essential one. We already have deduced that this question would be asked and answered in an alien civilization around the time it was passing through the genetic grand transition, because in conjunction with that would be a set of breakthroughs in neurology and training. These breakthroughs would enable those having the most influence on the alien civilization’s path forward to cast their opinions into the repetitive training that new generations would receive, and have these teachings, which we call memes here, preserved for very long periods into the era of asymptotic technology.

Non-gaussian Bell Curves in Alien Civilizations

Numerate people are familiar with the bell curve. It is a simple result that crops up in elementary probability and in the translation of its results to some simplified genetics. If you have some quantitative attribute, like height, and have a number of genes that contribute to it, each with their own amount, and then you have a gene lottery in which these genes are selected randomly, the population will have a distribution of heights that looks like a bell. There will be a median height, and heights above and below it will drop off according to the gaussian curve. This has its limitations, as obviously there would be no aliens with heights ten times the median, but it is a good approximation.

If aliens on some planet reproduce bisexually, as do all higher organisms here on Earth, then there may be a complication which arises if there are genes which both affect the external quality, such as height, and also the success of a haploid cell in the fertilization process. If there is a positive correlation, such as between height and haploid success, then there will be more embryos with genes that contribute to more height, and the resulting bell curve will bend toward taller individuals. The opposite result happens if there is a negative correlation between the attribute and haploid success of cells containing genes which increase that attribute. If there has been convergent evolution between the alien planet and Earth so that the alien species there reproduce with sperm-egg meiosis, any genes which contribute to the viability and fusion success of either the sperm or the egg will have some evolutionary advantage, and also those related to motility of the sperm. If these genes also affect an attribute, such as height, there might not be a gaussian bell curve, but instead a bell curve following a different formula.

These results are an effect of a double function of a particular gene, and double functioning genes that affect two attributes can also result in a distorted bell curve. Thus, even before environmental effects are considered, there can be non-gaussian bell curves for some attributes.

The external environment can have an early or late effect on the success of a particular gene or combination of genes. These effects are part and parcel of the fitness tests that evolution provides to each planet to improve its gene pools, or better said, to adapt its gene pool to a particular local environment on the planet where some species inhabits. The attribute distribution curve after each particular test will be affected by the results of test on survival. If height improves survival of infants and toddlers, it will be selected early, and after this test there will no longer be a bell curve of the exact gaussian variety, but a distorted one. For example, if very short individuals do not survive the litter of a species which produces large litters at each birth, the curve of heights will be clipped at the bottom. Similarly, if height is a disadvantage, for example because of increased caloric requirements, the curve will be clipped at the top.

The more interesting phenomena is when an attribute, in an individual’s interaction with the environment, affects itself in a kind of feedback loop. Consider height of juveniles of a species on some alien planet, where there is competition for food, and consider that height assists in the competition for food. But also consider that an increase in food intake in a juvenile individual results in more growth. Then what we have is the upper tail of the bell curve stretching itself out toward even taller individuals. If an infant of the species has won the genetic height lottery, it is then more capable of out-competing others who did not, and it becomes even taller because it has obtained more food, which in turn has increased height all the way to adulthood.

There cannot be too many examples of attributes which can interact with the environment to increase themselves, but perhaps there are some important ones. Consider an alien immune system which becomes capable of resisting more infectious organisms by some means if it is successful in doing so. To be more clear, consider an alien species which has several immune responses to infections. One of them grows more capable each time it conquers an infection, but the others do not. An individual with a better set of genes for the first type of immune system will conquer more infections with it, and that system will grow stronger and more capable each time. If it were possible to measure immune system overall capability, the distribution curve would be stretched out on the high side because of this feedback effect.

What might make a tremendous effect on whether an alien civilization climbs to the pinnacle of technology, giving it interstellar interests and possibly capability, is the attribute of intelligence, specifically not literacy or numeracy but problem-solving. This variety of intelligence is what drives a civilization toward heights of technology, while the others play a supporting role. Suppose that the environment of an alien civilization, in its primitive stage, is such that intelligent individuals with higher problem-solving skills can be trained or can train themselves to have even greater problem-solving skills. One might imagine a civilization in which bright individuals, meaning ones which solve problems in a displayable manner in front of their parents or mentors or whatever they use, and is therefore rewarded by being given the opportunity to learn more tricks and techniques for solving problems. Alternatively, just imagine that doing problem-solving is a inherent learned skill in the higher levels, but is genetically based at the lower levels, and an individual with a high lottery score in the genetic basis of problem-solving has opportunities to learn and improve on his or her or its own. Then, with this feedback loop in place, the civilization will have a continual supply of individuals who can advance technology at different eras in the civilization’s history.

This concept, of environment providing positive feedback to intelligence genes, may be a deciding factor in whether a civilization progresses continually or does not. For example, it will be worth considering if a society at different stages of its progress will support such feedback actions or will dissuade them, perhaps totally inadvertently, before it understands the importance of what it is doing. In other words, can a civilization kill its own progress before it understands the requirements for continued progress?