Colonizing Frozen Worlds

An alien civilization which has mastered the art and science of traveling between solar systems might have done something else which will surprise us. They might have decided that worlds like their origin world are fine for the origination of life and evolution and technology development, but there are better choices for an established, advanced, expanding civilization. They might like frozen worlds.

Back here on Earth, we are all excited about the developments in the detection of planets around other stars than ours, and are contemplating how we might search for life on them. The great hope is that oxygen in the atmosphere will be the clue. Oxygen is a reactive element, and would combine with exposed rock, removing it from the atmosphere. It is plant life which renews it, by taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. Before we had plant life on Earth, we had a different atmosphere. Nitrogen is not very reactive, and carbon dioxide even less; they were there. There may have been other constituents, but no matter. Oxygen was not one of them. If life all died out on Earth, the oxygen in the atmosphere would disappear. So atmospheric oxygen has been chosen as the signature of life.

This means that our search for oxygen in the atmosphere of all those exo-planets is directly solely at finding origin planets. To understand what this means, let’s consider an example. Civilization Z originated on planet A101, after a billion years or two of evolution. They used up all the resources, but being a very intelligent civilization, they developed star travel before that happened, so they could travel to other solar systems and use up the resources there, before traveling on. Maybe they had communication between the different colony worlds, and maybe not. Perhaps they always did more than one new world from each colony, after about a million years on each one. Then, to do the very simple math, after one million years there would be two colonies, plus the origin planet which can no longer support a civilization, lacking resources. After two million years there would be four colonies, plus two old colonies which had died out and old A101. After three million years, eight colonies, plus six old colony worlds, now without any civilization, and A101. Just remember, in the calendar of the galaxy, three million years is very, very short. Maybe they would run into some expansion problems at some time, as exponential growth gets large very quickly. For the sake of the example, suppose that at the time we start looking for life in the galaxy there are five thousand colony planets with life, meaning civilization Z, two or three thousand ex-colony planets, and that old origin planet.

So, if some brilliant astronomer wants to find life in the galaxy at this point, there might be five thousand planets with life and a civilization to boot, and one origin planet. Where should he look for life? Origin planets?

To try and figure out what planets might be serving as colonies for civilization Z, ask: "What are they going to need?" Resources, and principal among them, energy. If the planet being considered is not a rogue planet, floating free in interstellar space, there will be a star to orbit around, which is giving off energy in the form of photons. These might be collected. Otherwise, there is uranium and thorium to fission and deuterium and other light nuclei to fuse.

Perhaps there are two stages of resource needs. One relates to the initial time on the planet, after the alien colony ship arrives and lands. Since fission reactors are relatively simple to build, compared with fission ones, at least as far as we know, they might seek planets with lots of uranium, and uranium that is not too old so there is still lots of U-235. Old uranium has only the U-238 left, which is much harder to fission. As uranium ages, the fraction of U-235 goes down. The planet from which civilization Z is expanding might start a hundred thousand years before they need to migrate, and send out some exploration ships. A ten thousand year voyage, and they can start reporting back on what the target planet is made of. So, in this particular scenario of colonization, there is plenty of time to carefully plan their next planetary colonization.

To have uranium, which is thought to be produced in supernova explosions, there would have to have been a few in the previous billion years prior to the formation of the star they are considering. Then there would be uranium, young enough to be useful. Figuring that out might not be too difficult, by looking at the contents of the gas clouds around the solar system in question.

Do they want a larger planet, with an atmosphere, or a smaller planet, maybe Mars-sized, with almost none. This might depend on the details of how planets form crusts and how mineral deposits accumulate in the crust. We’re not too sure of these details now, but if Mars has good mineral deposits, then Mars-like planets might be just what they want. Low gravity means not so much propulsion needed to get out of the gravitational hole. Little atmosphere means no winds to worry about.

Our knowledge of exo-planets is fairly sparse at the current time, but it might be such smaller planets are typically cold. If the star is smaller, but there was a lot of residual angular momentum in the cloud it formed from, there might be many smaller planets, completely frozen, but with excellent mineral resources. Could an advanced alien civilization cope with extreme cold? Can they master insulation? Very likely. Thus, perhaps frozen smaller rocky planets are their preference. If so, even a rogue planet might be just fine. There may be huge numbers of them roaming the galaxy, largely invisible to us.

There is another follow-on conclusion from this possibility. Earth would be of no interest to an alien civilization which was colonizing all the mineral-rich, frozen, small planets in the Milky Way. Earth is too big, with too much atmosphere, too large with too much gravity, and also has the minor inconvenience of already having life on it. Perhaps we should think through the alienology of colonization a bit more to see if this option is a dominant one.

Momentum and Goals in an Advanced Alien Civilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later Stages of the Genetic Grand Transformation

In an older post, it was noted that the genetic revolution is likely to be, by a large margin, the most revolutionary of all, in the sense that an alien civilization will be wholly transformed when it happens. The different stages of this grand transformation can be laid out, as they are necessarily sequential. The knowledge gained at one stage is needed for the next stage.

The first stage is very simple, chromosomal selection for embryos. This is extremely old news here on Earth, and there has even been a movie produced about it, entitled GATTACA, from twenty years ago. A couple has twice as many of each chromosome as an embryo needs, so the best two of each type can be chosen. The second stage is what we hear in the news nowadays, which is when specific genes are chosen. Tools for that are just now being found here, and surely in any alien civilization reaching its maturity this would be as routine as antibiotics. Small amounts of changes are what we talk about now, as we don’t have confirmed technology for even that. The technology must exist, however, as inside the cell, genes are moved around during evolution all the time.

Right after that, industrial gestation would be the likely mechanism to be developed next. This particular invention will change an alien civilization more than the Internet has changed out, which is totally. No more parents and no more child-bearing, just new humans. Will parenting become a specialized business, just as has almost every other aspect of life? Why would it be any different? Parenting is extremely rewarding, perhaps more so than any other activity in life, but why not outsource the child-bearing to a machine? Yes, bonding between mother and child will be diminished, and in time, as an alien civilization ages, the role of mother might be also performed by specialists, either trained aliens or some robotics. It is almost trivial to be able to think up problems that might happen with this, but it will be just as trivial for an alien civilization to figure out how to avoid them or turn them into advantages.

Consider for a moment what this point represents. It means that any organism that can be developed in a laboratory can be put through industrial gestation and be ‘born’. This refers to things on alien planets like mammals, but similar processes would be similarly possible for things like plants and insects and whatever else evolved on the planet. In other words, life becomes something like a recipe or a cookbook. AI will undoubtedly be very powerful by the time industrial gestation is well-developed, so the concoction of forms of life which can successfully pass from the egg stage to the real world and on to an adult animal or plant will be quite possible. A huge amount of data will have to be collected, about all the molecules that operate in a living organism, but huge data stores are just the media AI likes to live in.

Now, on Earth, to come up with a new species of plant or animal takes a lot of careful breeding and selection. On a planet with technology a few centuries past ours, it will be done from scratch, without experimentation, as ontology and growth can just be simulated. There can be as many new species as anyone wants to take the time and expense to come up with.

This is by no means the end of the genetic grand transformation. Since reproduction of anything will be economically done industrially, why would there be any species at all? Species are defined as groups of individuals capable of breeding with one another. There would be no need for this, so why have species? There could be a billion clones of some plant if it were desired, or none, meaning that organism was its own species.

Is DNA sacred, or whatever form of organic molecule evolved on an alien planet to serve as the template for genetics? We on Earth are far from knowing how many kinds of molecules can do this job, and if there are more than one, is there another which is more versatile, or more reliable, or easier to work with, or anything else which might mean that the alien technologists would start switching over to it for successive generations of organisms?

And whether DNA or XYZ is used, the legacy method of ontology might be changed. We don’t understand this process very well, but we have observed it in detail. The idea is that each successively evolved species keeps most of the ontology of its predecessor, and adds a little twist to it. Perhaps an alien civilization would rewrite the book, and have a completely different order of development of organs in some new organism they created. Just because something evolved does not mean it was the best that could exist, as there is a barrier posed by the need for evolutionary change to work gradually.

One point made in that earlier post is by the time of these later stages of the genetic grand transformation, it might be reasonable for aliens to switch over from mono-genetic organisms to multi-genetic organisms. We refer to these as chimeras, but that is only a tiny little glimpse of what might be possible. Any optimized genetic package can be used for any organ or part of an organ in a designed chimera. Aliens could choose to use just two or as many as desired. This would mean that an embryo would be fashioned by amalgamating cells of different genetic varieties, all of which were tuned so they could form a cooperative package of cells that could be gestated and have different genetic codes in different parts of the organism.

All the previous stages involve organic biochemistry. At some point, there could be a closer bond between organic and inorganic components in some hybrid object. We on Earth use certain types of microbes to sort out dilute liquids containing minerals, and of course that should be expected to expand far beyond these ideas. For example, technology may well allow communication between whatever passes for neurons on an alien planet, and some semiconductor gizmos of equally small size. The neurons would be tailored genetically for this, and the gizmos specifically designed and printed to be a good substrate. Then anything is possible.

Authors and screenwriters like to play with the idea of a person from some centuries ago being brought into the modern world and being astounded by what they see. Someone from before the genetic grand transformation being brought to a time after it would be immeasurably more confounded by what is seen. We on Earth would do well to simply contemplate these potential changes to better appreciate what an alien civilization of advanced technology really looks like. Then we can better ask the question of why haven’t they visited us here.