Recovery from Epidemics in Alien Civilizations

If an epidemic sweeps through an alien civilization, reaching all corners of the planet, and is lethal to some percentage of the population, the main drivers of the civilization's progress are not affected. Population count is not a direct cause of technology progress, and it will continue after some delay caused by the epidemic. What is important to maintaining the progress is having a quorum of intelligent, problem-solving individuals who can organize their work to push the envelope of science forward, and then to apply it to the productive activities of the population. If there is some fraction of deaths, maybe even as high as 90%, this does not mean that the genetic resources that are needed to produce the future generations of scientists and engineers are lost, it means the numbers are reduced and progress will be slowed down, or even degraded for a period of time. But it does not mean a permanent halt, and the timeline for this society to be able to make star travel work might be delayed for a few generations. 

To kill off the civilization as far as permanently eliminating their future progress, there would have to be a lethality level near to 100%, enough to eliminate so many of the population that there was a genetic reduction in intelligence. Is such a lethality level possible? Something lower than that might render the civilization incapable of maintaining its living standards, or even to preserve the existing level of technological know-how, but physical records and memories passed on to young aliens would lead them back to the standards they once had, and allow a resumption of the progress toward star travel.

Can an epidemic kill 100% of a population? This means that the contagion spreads world-wide, and that takes time, during which awareness of what is happening would travel all over the planet. Some response would be made, and the figure would drop below 100%. In the industrial era, when epidemics are possible because there is world-wide transportation and not yet rapid genetic developments of antidotes and antigens, there are still recourses to reduce the impact of the epidemic. Furthermore, with a wide mix of genetics for the immune systems, optimality having not yet been accomplished or even understood, there might be some aliens who are naturally immune, constituting some fraction of the population. And there might also be some individuals who are mostly resistant to the infectious organism's effects, recoving from it in more or less unimpaired condition. So, the achievement of 100% or very close to it lethality is unreasonable to suppose.

Before assuring ourselves of the recovery capability of a generic alien civilization, we might ask if there are any circumstances in which such a recovery might not happen. Regrowth needs resources, and if the civilization has already harvested the easy to gather ones, the minerals near the surface for example, could there be a barrier set up so that the civilization is bound down to a lower level of technology, one not capable of difficult extraction situations for critical items? Technological progess and resource development go hand in hand, and if the latter is impaired by what happened before the epidemic, could there be a strong barrier, sufficient so that the civilization would remain at some level, industrial or agricultural, forever? 

This is a question related to the particular planet upon which the civilization resides. Does the planet have large, relative to the usage rate of the population, amounts of most necessary minerals and energy resources? Or is the planet, owing to where it developed and the history of supernova generation of heavier elements in the clouds nearby, rather short of resources? If the latter instance, could the near exhaustion of resources in the industrial era could leave the surviving civilization with only too-hard-to-obtain resources remaining? This means that, during this alien civilization's industrial era, no one noticed, or if it was noticed, no one responded to the problem, and the resources available to the civilization were rapidly diminishing and growing harder to locate and recover, and instead of the obvious solution toward reducing usage with a world-wide reuse plan, they simply continued to work toward an early resource exhaustion. 

This does not make sense to rational people, but could there be some economic system which drove resource exhaustion heedlessly and recklessly. Could such an economic system stay in place when the costs of resources mounted steadily and significantly? This is an excellent question about the unbreakability of some economic systems. Can they be so firmly embedded in the culture that they would be blindly followed to near-term self-destruction of the civilization? Economic systems are in place because those who have the power to determine the ones to be used benefit from them, and so this question is, could these leaders of an alien civilization be only concerned with their own short-term benefits, and dismissive of what will happen to the civilization as a whole in only a few generations? 

This question takes us further afield. Recall that the science of training children, which involves setting goals for them in the deep subconscious, may be completely unknown to the civilization, and child-training and goal-setting left to random choices by those responsible for that training. Thus, short-sighted goals might be preserved, generation to generation, including the goals that those who become leaders have. This particular realm of science is likely only able to arise in the later part of the industrial era, that of electonics and automation, or even in the early part of the genetics era. 

There may be other mechanisms by which an epidemic could put an end to the future of an alien civilization, barring them from space travel, but this is one. It would only occur on a planet with less abundant resources, measured by how long they last during the industrial era, and only in situations where the neurology and training area of science happens to blossom late in this era. In this particular and possibly rare situation, a world-wide epidemic could have indirect effects that could collapse the civilization unrecoverably. But not only would these two requirements have to be in place, the epidemic itself would have to be at the limits of lethality, via both the disease effects and contagion. It might be that the evolution of such an infectious organism is extremely unlikely, and only by some early efforts at genetic engineering, at the level that would be possible in the later industrial era, could it arise and be, possibly accidentally, released.

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.

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.