When alien species
initially evolve intelligence, the use of the intelligence is to deal
with problems in the present. Food, predators, reproduction,
competition all require an intelligent response to maximize success.
This predilection for immediate gain or benefits lasts for a long
time, as there is nothing in the society to change that. Achieving
some short-term benefit brings physical and social rewards, which
means that sort of thinking, that time horizon, will be
psychologically rewarding. It will stick around.
The long term
thinking that might occur during this period is that of leaders or
other important people, who want to see their offspring do well, and
plan for the early portions of the lives of their offspring, so as to
provide them opportunities. If the civilization is divided into
warring factions, some long term thinking might go into strategizing
how to best secure a good position, or any of a number of other
options that arise in warfare scenarios. But there is little
thinking about their own species in the long term, as a whole. One
faction may be thinking about immediate steps to assure a good future
of their faction, but the time scale is likely to be a generation or
so.
This type of
thinking will lead to the near-total exhaustion of their planet’s resources,
or if they are fortunate enough to have a solar system where
resources are economically obtainable from one or more other planets,
asteroids or satellites, of the whole solar system’s resources.
However, if the thinking in the civilization was centered about how
to have their species exist for as long as possible, at a high
technological level, they would have to have a very different
attitude, that of conservation, recycling, reliability and reuse.
The switch to this type of long-term thinking, which might have a
span of many thousands or even a million years, is an important event
in the history of the civilization. The switch over is such an
important event in the history of an alien civilization, it should be
given a name. Let it be the Horizon Transition.
If the Horizon
Transition occurs late in the history of the civilization, when
resources have already become scarce and substitutions are occurring
to cope with shortages, the result of it will be to prolong the life
of the civilization somewhat. If it occurs early, the civilization
will have many more resources at its disposal for the later millennia
of its existence. Since space travel is a powerful consumer of
resources, this means that an alien civilization which is, for some
reason, asleep to the important considerations of resource scarcity
until very late in their domain of existence, it will not be nearly
as likely to be able to travel to other stars, seed life, establish
colonies, or any other tasks as one which was very early astute
enough to recognize the peril that scarcity is.
Thus, if we find
ourselves in a galaxy with many civilizations on other planets, but
only a few have even traveled to the nearest solar system to their
own, we might attribute that to the blindness that a civilization,
coming from an evolutionary past, has toward the Horizon Transition.
That means that the question of how a civilization stumbles on this
important problem and figures out how to deal with it is an important
one for alienology.
It is already clear
that all alien civilizations are forced by their evolutionary past to
be short-term thinkers when they enter the technology climb. Intelligence gets better and better, and it
makes their short-term thinking more and more efficient and pointed.
When does the leadership of the civilization state that it is no
longer enough for the aliens to worry about what will happen next year or
next two years, but instead, they need to consider what will happen in the next five thousand years?
Why would they? It represents a tremendous value shift. They would
have grown up worrying about their own wealth or status or power or
security or something else, or that of people related to them or
somehow connected to them, not imagined people of some large number
of generations in the future. Why would a leader give up a concern
for those whose interests he works for and replace it with a concern
for those who will live long, long after all the current aliens have died?
It makes almost no sense to think they would.
Instead, resource
exhaustion will cause some effects, regulated by whose short-term
gain can best be improved by the use of some of the tools to conserve
or reuse resources. This means that it will be a piecemeal effort,
resource by resource, as they each grow more and more scarce. This
type of effort will not result in the substantial prolongation of the
civilization’s future. Only a massive switch, the Horizon
Transition, can do that, and there are powerful forces that must
exist, in every alien civilization, that will prevent one.
How might such a
transition occur? If resources are still abundant when living
standards reach a high enough level, there will be a diminution of
interest in short-term gains. In the spectrum of individuals in an
alien civilization, there will be those who can never have enough
material goods to satisfy their psychological needs, but the large
majority can be satisfied. At this point, if there is some
influence, some leader, some call for a Horizon Transition, it might
be possible that one could be effected. Thus, if the population of
the civilization does not grow as fast as the growth in living standards, as
generated by the various technological innovations and revolutions,
then living standards on the average can increase. If the
alternative is true, population growth, in response to living
standards rising, stays high, then this situation cannot arise, and a
Horizon Transition cannot happen. This means that, unless population
numbers are somehow restricted, it would be much less likely that an
alien civilization would be able to afford a major project to travel
to another solar system. Thus, the Horizon Transition question leads
to a population growth question, specifically, what influences the
growth of a population. In other posts, the problem of idiocracy was
discussed, and that might be the deciding influence. This is again a
topic for further thought.
