Recently, a well-known blogger facetiously proposed a possible solution to the question of missing aliens: could epidemics have killed them off? This deserves some detailed examination. This post and the next four all attempt to dig deeper and to provide some overview of the possibility.
Would there be infectious organisms on exo-planets harboring advanced alien civilizations? What helps us answer this is one of the main principles of alienology: convergent evolution. This principle says that the number of mutations that happens on a planet is much, much larger than the number of possible mutations; in other words, every mutation is tried out many times. Since evolution favors the more efficient at survival and reprodution, we would see on each exo-planet that has originated life and undergone billions of years of evolution, all the same niches of life filled. There might not be, at any instant in time, rose bushes on Planet X, but there would be flowers, thorns, pollination in different ways, fragrances emitted, and so on. Everything that works here would have been found and worked there, subject to lots of randomization. The principle works the other way as well, as anything that evolution could have come up with on Planet X, it could have come up with on Earth. The details are all scrambled, but the niches are occupied, the various functions are all there, and so on.
That means that multi-cellular organisms on Planet X, where “multi” means billions, would be good homes for both infectious single-celled organisms and semi-alive RNA/DNA/protein globs which we call viruses. This has to be tempered with the realization that immune systems would have evolved in the organisms on Planet X as well, and that means that each organism there is actually a battleground between cells and viruses that would like to colonize it, and the organism's immune system cells, which are bent on getting rid of these things. The immune cells have to be able to communicate with whatever organ makes them, so they can call up large numbers when a virulent invasion hits, and so they are unable to go everywhere in the body of the organism, particularly not in the digestive system and the outside of the envelope or “skin” of the organism, plus a few other places. So infections would hit the organism in the digestive tract or on the skin of the organism. The oxygen supply system would also be an area where the immune system cannot easily patrol in large enough numbers to repel a large invasion.
Another principle of alienology is asymptotic technology, which says that technology is an accumulation of scientific knowledge and engineering principles which builds on itself over time in a society of intelligent organisms, and has to follow some fairly well-developed paths based on how knowledge fits together and how engineering of various tools allows the next stage of technology to be developed. Iron tools allow deep mining to be accomplished; computers allow DNA to be investigated; and on it goes in a reasonably coordinated way. This way comes to an end when all technology is understood, and that does not take very many generations of aliens, perhaps something of the order of a hundred. The final stage is called asymptotic technology, meaning it is the final end or asymptote of technological progress.
Genetics is one of the last pieces of technology to be brought under complete control of an alien civilization, as it depends on the pre-existence of much other technology to enable all the experiments that have to be done. An alien civilization which has reached asymptotic technology does not have any worries about epidemics of single-celled organisms or viruses. Any individual who become infected can be examined and equipment used to determine exactly what is the infectious agent and what does the technology library say about how to get rid of it quickly. We are not at the stage yet of knowing how to do this, but we can imagine some possibilities, none of which have to be discussed here. What is important, is that there is no mysterious illnesses possible with a sufficiently advanced alien civilization, meaning no epidemics, even locally. All bets are off on an exo-planet which has had its civilization collapse for other reasons, but one which is in the golden age of its existence will have no problems.
This means that epidemics occur only with younger alien civilizations, ones which have not yet passed the genetic grand transformation, after which genetics is wholly understood, and the technology for dealing with it developed and deployed. An alien civilization in the electronics era, the one prior to the genetics revolution, does not have the ability to analyze almost instantaneously genetic blueprints and fabricate antidotes. Instead, such a more primitive alien society must grope around, using trial and error, in the hope of finding a cure for any widespread infection or a vaccine to prevent it by giving the immune system a head start. However, if infections can produce a sufficiently widespread and catastrophic effect on such a early civilization, it would not have a chance to reach the genetic grand transformation, and would relapse into some earlier stage.
Could an epidemic occur in an alien civilization which has not even reached the electronics or industrial age? This would be a civilization in the agricultural era, where there are few small cities, and the population is spread out over the planet in regions where agriculture is efficient and seasonality not too severe. There might be a slowly moving infection, but with very limited numbers of individuals moving from one area to another, there would not be anything to produce a catastrophe. If the infection was highly lethal, news of it would spread faster than the infection itself. If it were rarely lethal, it would simply become part of the arsenal of the resident aliens' immune system. Thus, epidemics occur in industrial civilizations that have mastered transportation to some degree, not in earlier or later ones.
So the question resolves to: can an alien civilization which falls victim, over the whole planet, to a single type of novel infection, recover from it and with some delay, return to its progress toward the further stages of technology? If the infection is sufficiently lethal, its spread is inhibited. If the infection is not very lethal, it becomes part of the immune system's library of known invasive organisms. Exactly what lethality is needed for a collapse after which there is no recovery, even after a century? If it is too high when it arrives, carriers do not carry it far before expiring. However, if there is no immune system response possible, in other words, if the attacking organism can defeat the immune system of the individual aliens so they do not develop immunity to it, and can then invade and re-invade and re-invade until lethality results, but with plenty of transmission between individuals during the intermission between successive invasions, this might do it. So, an epidemic which attacks the immune system or which is 'immune' to the immune system, which damages individuals on the first attack instead of killing them leaving them more vulnerable to future infections, and which is easily contagious, might eliminate the alien civilization, and prevent it from ever building starships and coming to Earth. Such an infective organisms, a triple-headed threat, might be stopped with social measures in an alien civilization in the industrial era, but that is another question to be answered later.
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