Population Reduction in Alien Civilizations

After an alien civilization gets to the point of asymptotic technology, that is, science is over and done with, they have a number of choices to make. One of them is how much population they wish to maintain. The choice is directly related to how long their resources will last, as for a given level of recycling, twice as many aliens use twice as much resources per time period. 

One aspect of this question relates to the process for reducing population. The direct and immediate solution is to simply gestate fewer aliens and allow the population to shrink at whatever level they could choose. It could be as drastic as going from a billion to a million over a few centuries or generations of alien life. The choice of what target to use is related to their view of themselves and their role in the universe. Is it to simply go extinct, or do they plan to go to some other solar system, in one of the many ways possible? If they choose to travel, there is a minimum population necessary to build the ship or ships. If they just are content to go extinct, an unlikely alternative, they could do it quickly with lots of aliens, or slowly, with only a few. Neither is very pleasant, as resource shortages do not make for high living standards.

This question is interesting, but also interesting is the process for getting the population down. There is one question that stands out: what about all the infrastructure? They don't need all the infrastructure that a larger population needs, and they probably don't want to spend the additional energy and resources to maintain it if it is only there for a ghost population.

Consider first fungible architecture. By this time, resource pressure, or at least the knowledge that it will be happening in the future, has mandated that the aliens will live in large arcologies, where recycling is pretty much total. One arcology might be almost identical with another, so there is no reason to keep the second one going if the first one can handle the population post reduction. In an advanced alien civilization, recycling will be part of everyone's life, and everything will be recyclable, even the entire arcology. So over a period of time, the second arcology might be taken apart, and fed into the recycling system of the first one, supposing they are not too far apart so transportation costs are not a significant factor. This adds to the longevity of the resource base.

In order to make an arcology recyclable, it would have to be divisable into parts, so there would not need to be any crowding of a double population into an arcology. Time for this could be stretched out, as by this time the civilization will have figured out it might have a million years on their home planet, so there is no rush to do anything in a short time. If gestation cycles are a hundred years or so, spending a few of them combining arcologies will not affect much over the long term. Aliens in the superfluous arcology could be given the choice of moving to the remaining one, or staying in the part of it which was not yet taken down. By this time, the arcologies would be self sufficient, with their own power plants, industrial sources of nutrition, air filtration, internal transportation, and everything else necessary to have a comfortable life for the alien population. There could well be some residual agriculture, for specialty products or for the amusement of aliens who wanted to be involved with farming for a period of time, and these would simply be reduced according to the population level drop.

What about the non-fungible parts of the infrastructure? Would there be any monuments, historic places, unique but antique buildings? There might have been, but the lifetime of any of these might only be a few thousand years at the highest, and after that, deterioration unless it was periodically rebuilt. Suppose they had preserved something from their earliest eras, before technology was greatly developed, and this was a part of their culture and something they used to maintain their heritage. With a drastic population reduction, as in the example above of a billion to a million, or something proportionate to this, a few heritage sites might be maintained, but not a large number.

It might not be appreciated that heritage could be a very important part of the alien civilization. Heritage is the reason they decide, over and over again in each generation, that they think their civilization is worth preserving and should not be allowed to become extinct. Each generation would have the possibility to reverse the decisions of previous generations, and, for example, stop work on a starship and instead use the capital to change their activities, to, perhaps, have more jet aircraft and spend much more time flying over the landscape and visiting unique sites on their planet, in person. Without heritage sites, the pressure to keep on track with previous generations might grow less, and reach a tipping point.

So, perhaps there is another factor which comes into play when an alien civilization is thinking about its target population for the long, long term. Having sufficient population to build starships may be one, but another might be having enough to maintain a critical number of very important heritage sites.

Almost everything else would have been conquered by technology. There might not need to be a minimum number to maintain the automated operations which provide energy and the standard of living to the population. This particular factor is not clear, but it could very well be that star travel and heritage sites are the only things which feature in the choice of population numbers.

What this means to us is that if these two problems of minimum population result in numbers fairly small, there might only be one arcology on an alien planet. When we have our huge telescopes, able to focus in on planets in different solar systems, looking for one with a thousand dots of light, probably infrared only, this may not be the signature of an alien civilization that we can find. There might be one dot of light, where they all live, and the rest of the planet has been returned to nature. This would be the situation for almost all of the million years of existence of the alien civilization, whereas the huge populations might be only a thousand or less, meaning a tenth of a percent chance of seeing them during this phase. This is one more signature of an alien civilization that needs to be carefully thought through.

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.