Great Children, Great Parents, Great Leaders

It may be that leaps of progress in an alien civilization are only possibly through the intervention of what might be called 'great individuals'. This theory, called Carlyle's Theory of Great Men, says that major events are originated by one of a small number of very capable people. Whether it is true or not, Earth's history is often written as the record of what a certain few individuals did. They may have been generals, monarchs, scientists, inventors, explorers, writers, or another leading role. One way or another, they managed to move history in the direction they wanted, or perhaps, history took a turn because of their actions, whether they predicted it and desired it or not. It could very well be in many situations that once the 'great man' did his specific action or actions, others responded to make the large changes that resulted. Either way, the question of great individuals being needed in an alien civilization seems like an interesting one, meaning, that if for some reason, they did not sprout up there, the civilization would reach some dead end, and never get to the stage of asymptotic technology and star travel.

It is often asked, in the generation of great individuals, is it nature or nurture? In other words, is it a marvelous combination of genes that is responsible for great individuals, or can any above-average set of genes, with the addition of quite exceptional child-rearing, training, educating, mentoring and maybe more lead to the great individual? This is a very common question and many have weighed in on it. But it seems that the question is incorrect; an incorrect question is one which makes implicit assumptions which are wrong. Nature and nurture are not independent events, meaning that any individual born on Earth goes not get to participate in a double lottery, one to get good genes and another to get a good upbringing.

Suppose we have a winner of the first lottery, an individual with great genes, all of the ones needed to become a great leader of some sort. Whoever is raising the child, assuming they are the parents and share these genes, perhaps some in one parent and some in another, would be intelligent enough to recognize the talent of the young alien and adapt their raising techniques accordingly. So, the genes themselves evoke the upbringing needed to allow them to reach their potential. Of course, it might be possible that some young alien with these qualities is brought up in a harsh environment, cruel, degrading, restrictive, or in some other way limiting, and therefore he does not reach his potential. The point is not that there are bad environments, but that good environments have a flexibility that can be used to adapt to the great capacity and potential of the child, from very young to much older, and provide the nurturing necessary to allow him to grow into a great leader.

There is more to this adaptation. Often the best learning that a child receives is that which he obtains for himself. Recall the insights of Montessori, who started off the training of children with a hands-off, rich-environment arrangement. Even without any special environment, a great child can seek out the information he needs to expand his intellect and develop his capabiities for some special vocation. This goes on, on a daily basis, while the child grows. With each addition to his capabilities, his ability to find more learning opportunities, and his capability to extract learning from opportunities that others would pass by increases.

When other aliens become involved with the exceptional alien, they might choose to devote some effort to assist the parents to raise him, or better said, to allow him to educate himself. Thus, there is a large feedback effect which continues to grow. The more exceptional the young alien, the more opportunities he will find and others will open up for him, in the area of learning or specializing in some profession or vocation which will produce something memorable and possibly history-changing. This means that some alien who is born at the top of the genetic ladder will have a good chance of grabbing the learning he needs to accomplish some great task. Thus, the division of the world into nature or nurture is hardly possible. A great child would have fairly great parents to begin with, and in the possibly more usual situation where they both are involved with the raising of the child, they would start the process of separating him from the rest of his generation in capability and ability. When he became older, he would strongly act to continue this process, and when older still, others would be impressed with his capabilities and take actions to continue it even further. Many individuals might enjoy serving as the mentor of an exceptional youngster.

Does this feedback effect happen for other individuals than only the exceptionally gifted? One way to discuss this question is to remember that different types of great individuals have different talents and abilities, and great in one field does not mean great in another field. Exceptional individuals somehow find their own direction, where their unique abilities might flower. So, exceptional individuals, capable in different ways, would still have the feedback effect happening, but they would travel different paths through their lives, leading to different categories of great individuals.

The other way to answer this question is to assess whether the feedback effect will provide better-than-average nurturing to better-than-average children, and average to average, and below-average to below average. If there is a sizable amount of correlation here, then the question of nature versus nurture is totally incorrect, not only for the exceptional but for an entire generation of children. It is quite possible that some alien civilization would have child-rearing arrangements that are different from those hypothesized above, and where, for example, specialized child-rearing agents took care of all children. Then, if they took no action to single out exceptional individuals, and possibly limited the attempts of any exceptional individual to seek out mind-expanding learning, there would be no such feedback effect. If so, this civilization would get nowhere, unless Carlyle's theory is totally wrong. This means that the feedback effect would be operating in any alien civilization that was progressing through the different phases, and so as long as the alien gene selection process allowed mostly great members of one sex to mate with mostly great members of the opposite sex, technological and social progress will continue.

Another way of looking at this is to say that alien civilizations that lose the genetic combination game, by not encouraging the intersection of good genes with other good genes, do not get to travel to the stars, and ones which win it, by whatever social customs they espouse, will at least have a chance to spread beyond their home solar system. Similarly, those alien civilizations with no way for an exceptional gifted child to get the learning he needs to become great, will flounder.

Asymptotic Medicine

Once science proceeds far enough in an alien civilization to completely understand biology, from genetics to cell protein use and formation, and all the details of molecular signaling and ontogenesis, there would have been applications to medicine all along the way, leading at the end to something that might be called 'asymptotic medicine'. This would not be restricted to simply understanding every last detail of the alien's bodies, but also would include the engineering aspects of making repairs and even modifications to them. These engineering considerations involve the action in different locations in the body of a variety of chemicals and compounds not naturally present there, as well as the use of current, temperature, strain and motion on the cells and organs of the body. The use of autonomous objects, large and microscopic, to perform various actions within the body would be understood as well. This grand body of knowledge is asymptotic medicine.

Medicine refers to doing something with an existing alien, rather than industrial gestation which is the production of one outside the normal process. It would include termination of an alien's life, for example after some aging process had run its course, or for some other reason. It would be used if there was some damage to an alien, after an accident. Regeneration of missing tissue or components would be a mainstay of asymptotic medicine, and a question for the future is how fast can regeneration be accomplished. If the details of cellular growth are totally understood, would it be possible that they could be accelerated, by a percentage, a factor of two, or even a factor of ten or a hundred. This is a feature of current medicine that is currently absent, as it has to be because our knowledge does not yet extend to cellular activity, such as what signals a cell might accept in order to replicate its nucleus or to divide its cell wall. We do not know how much acceleration a cell's protein synthesis might be able to deliver, and what might be done to slip needed precedents through the cell wall, or how to make temporary cells that gradually replace themselves with complete cells, or really anything about any possible mechanisms for medical regeneration, or even what concepts will eventually be the most relevant for that branch of technology.

Medicine also includes the preparation of all those chemical compounds needed for treatments of any sort, the construction of any tools needed to perform some actions, and the growth of cells or organs outside any body, as well as the techniques for inserting them in an alien's body. It may be simpler to accomplish damage repair by regenerating some damaged parts in place, and growing replacement parts outside and then replacing the damaged ones.

There would be the ability to detect and diagnose any cellular damage that was beyond the ability of the alien's cells or immune system to cope with. This would involve cancerous tumors or instances of poisoning. Then, in addition, the treatment of such cellular damage would be known and perfected. Whether it involves restoration of existing cells to normal activity and status, or the removal of damaged cells and replacement, either en masse with externally grown cells, or internally by normal or accelerated cell reproduction, this would be available for use.

If the alien living facilities, arcologies or whatever else was used, still had infectious agents present, then medicine would also include techniques and tools for ridding any alien of any infection. How that would be done probably depends on the infectious agent, with the options being simply enhancing the body's ability to deal with the agent, to inserting chemicals, autonomous cells, or robotic devices of small scale, locally or globally within the body, or by some external application of radiation, heat, ultrasound or something completely different.

An aspect of alien asymptotic medicine hardly contemplated today on Earth involves the modification of the genetics of the aliens themselves to improve some aspect of their health. The alien genome might be improvable in multiple ways, each of which is designed to improve one aspect of health. Each organ has specific genes which control its expression, and these might be tweaked to help that organ survive damage, aging, infection or any other ill effects. These genetic modifications might be limited to simply tweaking of an organ's capabilities, but might also be much more extensive. The aging process occurs by multiple means, but at the most universal level, there might be cellular aging in a particular alien species. This, if it exists, might also be slightly modified or actually replaced to allow greatly expanded lifetimes for aliens. Aging of aliens can be dealt by with palliative treatments, or by actually affecting the underlying cause of the aging. Besides generic cellular aging, there can also be some specific aging processes, each unique to a particular organ. After the approach to asymptotic medicine is completed, these would each be treated separately, leaving the alien individuals with an extended lifetime, together with excellent health and the ability to respond to injury quickly and efficiently.

These are simply the possibilities, and the important part for an alien civilization is what are the limits that will be found for each of these aspects. If an alien has a visual sensor, like our eye, the question that they will find the answer to is how fast can one be regenerated. This limit will be known, after enough investigation has occurred to find the final limit. There will be limits known for everything, including the limits to which the lifetime of an alien might be extended.

The essential concept behind asymptotic medicine is the same as behind all other branches of asymptotic science. There is only so much knowledge to be gained, and the accumulation of it is a one-way street, with continued progress, meaning that the end will be reached. Our understanding of science to date here on Earth is enough to let us know that the rate of progress is not infinitesimal, but rather enough to allow the end to be reached with some centuries of work. Perhaps it is faster on an alien planet, or perhaps it is slower, but the rate of progress is not different by more than an order of magnitude or two. Thus, within a reasonably short time compared to the duration of the species, and within a negligible amount of time compared to the duration of life itself, any alien civilization which does not crash and collapse will reach asymptotic medicine and other sciences as well.   

Why Gas Giants Have Bands and What it Means

There is hardly any need to describe the surface appearance of Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system. Everyone has already see fly-by pictures of them. They are both distinguished, not only by their huge size compared to Earth, but by the bands of color that stretch across them in longitude. The bands are fairly well confined by latitude, but there are countless large and small cyclones scattered around the planets.

Where these bands come from is fairly easy to understand. Earth has retained heat from its collapse, and it slowly seeps to the surface. We see it in geothermal power stations, and watch it in volcanos. These two gas giants are so much heavier than Earth that the heat of collapse of them would be much larger than on Earth, and because distances are longer from the core to the surface, where the heat can be radiated into space, cooling is relatively slower. That does not mean that the amount of heat seeping up from the surface is smaller than on Earth, just the opposite to orders of magnitude. How it manifests itself is quite different, spectacularly so.

The core is hotter than the surface, so heat rises up. Most of a gas giant is fluid, so the heat is convected. But it is physically impossible for a whole spherical layer to rise uniformly, just because there is nowhere for the gas above the layer to go, but mostly because this is unstable, and specifically a Raleigh-Taylor instability. This means that somewhere hotter gas is being convected upwards, and cooler gas is moving down to compensate for the mass movement. Now we note that Jupiter is spinning rapidly and Saturn as well. This means there will be Coriolis forces, and since Coriolis force is in the direction of the cross product of the rotational vector and the velocity, any vertical velocity is going to result in a longitudinal force, opposite in the two hemispheres. So, gas rises from heat, and gets pushed longitudinally, leading to a longitudinal flow. But the Coriolis force on a longitudinal flow is latitudinal, and therefore gas which goes upwards gets pushed longitudinally and then latitudinally. The latitudinal flow leads to a downward flow. It is fairly easy to see that the overall effect will be gas flowing in a toroid, confined to some range of latitudes, and moving relative to the core rotation rate.

How deep does the flow go? Heat is convecting gas up from deep in the atmosphere, even from what might be called the mantle, where hydrogen solidifies under intense pressure. Gas rising deep in the atmosphere is subject to the same Coriolis forces, so the toroids should be quite deep, and certainly not surface features. Coriolis force depends on latitude, so the toroids would be moving with different rotation rates, leading to shear forces between them, where downgoing gas from one toroid meets upwelling gas from another. Shear forces lead to cyclones.  Cyclones are fed by heat convection and Coriolis forces as well.

Why are the bands differently colored? If they were all the same color, they would be much harder to detect and measure, and wouldn't look so spectacular in telescopic pictures. Just like the Earth, there is a mixture of different gases in the atmosphere of the gas giants, and just like the Earth, gravity separates them out, with heavier elements and molecules settling out at lower altitudes than lighter ones. We would expect to see hydrogen in the exosphere of Earth, and we do. This process, by the way, is how small planets like Venus and Mars lose components of their atmospheres. Jupiter and Saturn are large enough to be able to retain their hydrogen for very long times, compared to the age of the solar system. The composition difference at different depths means that as one layer of gas is getting mightily convected, en masse, different colored materials are being brought up for us to see. Coriolis force varies with latitude, so the depth to which the toroids extend should be different as well, meaning different compositions are at the lower edges of toroids manifesting as different bands, and therefore, different colors are at the upper surface.

What does this mean to us and to an alien civilization? It seems that gas giants act to stabilize planetary orbits, so an alien civilization on an Earth-like planet probably has a couple of gas giants in their heavens. We on Earth are hardly traveling at all through the solar system, just getting started in a small way to look closer at planets and satellites, but an alien civilization, centuries or millennia older than ours, might be traveling quite a bit in interplanetary space. What would they be doing with gas giants?

Energy is what keeps everything going. We have multiple sources, mostly now from carbon deposits, but also from uranium and solar photons. Wind and tides also play a role. Geothermal energy plays a role as well. An advanced alien civilization is going to be looking for other sources of energy, and a gas giant, rotating fast like Jupiter, has a tremendous amount of energy in its winds. Could even a millionth part of that be extracted and used for various purposes beyond the home planet?

It is almost impossible to even conceptualize something being done on a planet like Jupiter, which has storms many times the size of our entire planet, and lasting centuries. The scales of size and mass are so out-of-proportion that is is hard for an Earth person, and presumably an alien from an Earth-like planet, to think of. Even the scale of time is grandiose compared to our time scales. Maybe it takes some colony of aliens living out near their largest gas giant to be able to imagine how to do something with all that energy. Yet far out, solar power is much weaker, so a source of energy from Jupiter and Saturn, or their alien equivalents, would allow the exploration of the solar system to go much faster and be much more extensive.

Thus, we cannot visualize it now, but it might be that if energy can be harvested from a gas giant, large colonies might be possible out in the farther reaches of an alien solar system. This would change how we imagine the future of an alien civilization. It is the difference between a single-planet civilization that exploits some material resources beyond its own planet, and an interplanetary culture, with civilizations in multiple places, and where traveling for interplanetary distances becomes commonplace. The civilization that masters gas giant energy is much further and much closer to interstellar travel than one almost imprisoned on its home planet.

Will Aliens Say “Take Me to Your Leader”?

Old-time cartoons would sometimes show a flying saucer having landed on Earth and a ramp open, with an alien standing on it saying “Take me to your leader.” It seems like a reasonable thing for aliens to do, in that they might envision themselves as ambassadors to Earth. But does it make sense, or is it simply a product of our lack of questioning of our own assumptions?

From the dawn of recorded history there has been somebody in charge of each group of humans. Back when humans lived in clans, there was a boss of the clan, the big guy, who made decisions and enforced whatever rules they had. When clans merged into tribes, there was a tribal leader, and when settlements became permanent, every settlement had somebody to be the top person, except in rare anarchic situations, like after a death, or a loss in battle, or some natural disaster. When some settlements got large enough to have warrior classes, and one settlement conquered another, leading to small states or regions, there was a king or some other titled person who was on top. When we graduated to large nations, there had to be some emperor or prime minister or president or someone else at the top of the ladder.

Doesn't this mean, that since it has always been that way in human societies, that it will always be, and in alien civilizations as well? To answer this, there needs to be an accounting of what alternatives there might be. One possibility is that there is nobody in charge of any large region, or the whole planet, or pretty much everything. Decisions have to be made, and disputes settled, but that might have been automated in an advanced alien civilization. After the civilization reaches asymptotic technology, and changes from that source aren't happening any more, and politics and sociology and everything else is understood, completely and absolutely, why couldn't decisions simply be made by some intelligent automaton. There wouldn't be any new items coming up for decisions, as everything has been stabilized and just goes on, century after century after millennium, and any disputes would have as precedents identical ones already decided long ago, and decisions would be abstracted rather than being unique. There would simply be no need for any individual to concern themselves with making decisions or judgments or influential choices. It would all have been done so many times before, and would be so organized and simplified and logical and reasonable that no subjective human or alien intervention would be necessary. There wouldn't be any place in the society for that.

This does not mean that individuals would be pets or vegetables, just the opposite. They would be able to engage in decision-making regarding their own lives, to advise friends, to make whatever subjective judgments still existed, such as possibly meal quality, living space arrangements, clothing, and so on. There would however be no options for changing the system of laws, however, as that would be worked out and optimized as part of the diffusion of science thinking into all realms of life.

Since space travel between solar systems is a very large endeavor, time-consuming both in preparation and execution, it would be expected that asymptotic technology would be achieved long before any aliens left their home solar system to come to Earth. Thus, they may have lived for centuries without any 'leader' existing, and it could be many thousands of years since there was any such position or even concept in their civilization. So, when they get here, they might just start interacting with whoever they meet, oblivious to the idea that we Earthlings might still arrange ourselves in hierarchies.

No one on their flying saucer, or whatever craft they have built, is in charge of anything, and no one needs to be. There is no Captain, no First Mate, no anything. Everyone knows what has to be done and what is the logical way of getting it done and if there are tasks still done by aliens, which one is to do each one. They know this, and if they forget, their AI box will help them remember.

Consider another aspect. What would the aliens expect to do here, if they did come to Earth from some solar system tens of light years away or even further? If they did look up their own history, or used their own branch of science which predicts how primitive societies organize themselves, they might know that there would be leaders and hierarchies on any planet they managed to get to. But why would they want to meet them? They aren't there to set up diplomatic relations, as the interstellar distances are so large no reasonable communications could be carried on, and it would make no difference anyway.

Maybe they came to simply start a colony here. Their idea is to get off the ship, and start to build some dwellings, set up some food supply, and do the other various things that someone arriving on a new planet might do. They would be not so naive as to assume that there would be no reaction by the population, so they would not have chosen a planet with civilization on it, unless they could deal with it. No alien civilization which goes to the immense effort of building a ship capable of transporting something of their culture to another solar system is not going to be prepared for any contingency, and certainly with multiple options. Surprises do not happen to advanced civilizations, as they would be able to predict potential scenarios without any difficulty.

Science fiction writers like to reduce the difficulty of interstellar travel in order to make a good story, and so there are stories of aliens who are the last of their species coming, or renegades escaping from some expanding empire, or various other options. These stories all ignore the progress of technology, except in the area we are familiar with or at least have imagined the most, such as starships. Technology will cover all aspects of life and physical existence, and this will happen in a quite short time compared to the lifetime of an alien civilization. Aliens that do come to this planet will not be suitable for being the heroes or villains of a science fiction story, but instead will be completely prepared to do whatever it is that was accepted as the mission of their civilization, vis-a-vis interstellar travel.