Deliberate Speciation - Part II

In Part I, the issues facing an alien civilization that was passing through the genetic grand transition regarding deliberate speciation were discussed. There is another way to look at the decision facing the civilization of whether to eliminate their own species so it could be replaced with an improved one. That is to ask what it is that they are proud of. Aliens might well experience the emotion of pride, but it could be an intellectual feeling, something they speak of as being excellent, commendable, outstanding, and so on, or it could be an emotional feeling, something they feel deeply about as being important to their own history, their own lives, and their own culture. Is the point of pride their species or their technical accomplishments? Do they think of themselves as having achieved the culmination of science and technology and created a civilization which provides so well for all its members because of their species having evolved the way it did, or because of some intellectual curiosity which drove them to the top of their accomplishments?

This is not a question of some rational thinking. It is a question of how the young aliens are taught, pre-rationality. It is a question of the meme they have chosen related to their own history. Memes are chosen early on in the development of a civilization, after they have climbed part-way up the technology ladder, when they are in the process of understanding psychology and neurology, and they come to the conclusion, collectively, that rationality has to be supplemented with something else, as there is no direction for a species that is provided by the universe. There is no hidden scientific law which finally tells an alien civilization what is the point of their existence. Instead, after they become sufficiently aware and probably more intelligent than their natural evolution provides, they realize that they have to make a decision as to what will be their direction and their credo for continuing to exist. They do so, and then they embed it in the early teaching of their young. Alien civilizations which do this might reach the stars, if such travel is possible. Ones which do not reach a peak and expire. But exactly which formulation of a meme is not deducible by us at this point. They could go the route of the A1 category and raise the flag of their species everywhere they could. Or they could promote their intellectual accomplishments and seek to spread the culture, not the species, that found everything out, correctly to boot. This is the A2 category.

Like many categories, there is some possibility of spillage between the two. The categories are devices that we on Earth are using for our own investigation into the types of alien civilizations that are possible. Parameterization, as has been pointed out before, it an intellectual tool that enables an inquirer to proceed further in investigations of the unknown than otherwise would be possible. They are not perfect divisions that something in science dictates will separate out alien civilizations.

The leakage between the two comes when the alien civilization has mastered interplanetary travel. In the situation where there are other planets in their solar system, and some of them are penumbra planets, the alien civilization is faced with a re-think of their earlier decision on speciation.

Recall that a penumbra planet is one which is not a sweet spot world, a world where the civilization can simply settle down and build a clone of the home world, but one which has some difficulties. Perhaps the gravity is too great or too little, or the atmosphere too thin or has some different mixture. Maybe it is a bit hot or cold, compared to the home world. It is somewhat different, but not a great deal. Alternatively, it could be in the third category of worlds, where life in hermetic chambers is the only way for the alien civilization to exist. Again, we are laying down a parameter to help clarify some understandings.

Faced with a world they can reach using the interplanetary travel technology their civilization has developed at this particular point in time, they will immediately realize that making genetic modifications to their own species’ genome will enable the new species to live more comfortably on this second planet in their solar system. Perhaps if gravity is greater there, they can make the structural members of their bodies harder, or reinforce them with other members. But in so doing, they are creating another species, similar to their own, but unable to be cross-bred. In short, a competitive species for life on another planet. Do they do it?

If they are already deep into category A1, they do not. They simply grin and bear the conditions on the other planet. If they have already adopted category A2, and perhaps have already done speciation on their own planet, they have not a moment’s hesitation toward designing the best species possible, using their own modified species as a template, for this planet. But if they are not deeply committed to category A1, they might have a re-think.

It could be that the decision of speciation was not forced on them on their own planet. Perhaps their own genome was sufficiently flexible so that they could make changes to maximize all the good qualities they wanted to without having to resort to speciation. If they were genetically lucky in having such a flexible genome, the decision on speciation would have been put off. It comes back strongly if they are in a solar system with another planet, habitable, but not easily. Then they are finally faced with making the speciation decision.

It is a bit different to think of creating a new species for a different planet than for your home world. You are creating competitors who are in some ways, different and distinct from your own citizens. One question would be: how would a new species sharing a solar system react to the old species? How would they establish relations? In a new world where there is no need for speciation, it is possible to send emissaries or even ordinary people back and forth. There is a communality that automatically arises. But if the new world has a new species, it might not feel the same about the old world. Governance questions arise. Which world is going to go star traveling, the old world with the original species, or the new world with the one specially created from the needs of existing on a different planet? Will the attitudes of the new species on their own planet towards star travel be different, or even towards many things? Will they adopt memes different from those of the old planet?

Perhaps when we are looking with our advanced telescopes, we should single out solar systems with two habitable planets, and see if we can detect some signs of what an alien civilization had done there. It would be most curious if the star travel meme is only adopted by new species on second planets of a solar system, and the paucity of this type of solar system has led to the rarity of star travel in our galaxy.

Deliberate Speciation – Part I

In the recent blog on the classification of alien civilizations depending on their attitude toward star travel, the first two were divided on an obscure point. The A1 category represented those who felt strongly about their species, and wanted to preserve it, and perhaps diffuse it over some part of the galaxy. The A2 category represented those who felt strongly about the accomplishments of their civilization, and wanted to preserve that, possibly diffusing it as well.

A civilization is a mass of citizens living in cities, having established a way of life and all the other factors of daily living and long-term change that are possible. A species is a group of organisms which are capable of interbreeding, and have some distinguishing features. Species are ensconced in taxonomies. Civilizations rest in histories.

The difference between these two is that the citizens of a civilization do not have to be members of one species. It may help the imagination to consider what would have happened if two different species of primates became intelligent at the same time. Suppose also that they somehow overcame the urge to kill each other, and instead, at the complete other end of the spectrum, settled into cities together. Since they could not interbreed, the division of species would be by breeding units, but there could be some of type 1 located nearby some of type 2. Alternately, there could be two sections of the town, where one was mostly type 1 and the other was mostly type 2. These two extremes could extend to interactions, where in the first example, the two species lived, worked, traded, and socialized together. If they ate the same foods, they could eat together, and even go to each other’s parties. In the second example, where maybe type 1 lives on the east side of a river and type 2 on the west side, there are places where interaction takes place, perhaps formalized or perhaps informal. Either way, we have one civilization but two species.

In a series of previous posts, the situation where there evolved two intelligent species on different continents of one planet was portrayed. There, the idea that one would exploit the other was presented. That might be a more likely situation, but since we are only imagining here, a peaceful, equitable world can be imagined easily. Perhaps the two species very early on became symbiotic, and in order for the civilization to function, both of them had to be present in all of the cities, filling the roles that they had carved out long before.

A second type of situation exists where one civilization can involve two species. That is where the division between the two is based on time, not location. Imagine instead that there is a civilization which is currently passing through the grand transition of genetics, and where they create new members of the civilization industrially, in gestation machines, with no use of the evolved methods of reproduction. This is the latter part of the genetics grand transition. Then, as the genetic engineers become more innovative and more expansive, they propose to eliminate the ability of the latest version of members of the society to breed with the previous ones. For example, they change the number of chromosomes for some intricate reason related to longevity or damage resistance or whatever. This is deliberate speciation. Before this point in time, there was one species in the civilization, the one that had founded it. Its genetics had been improved in the genetic grand transition, but at this cusp of time, the next improvements do away with the species. A new species struts onto the stage.

There might not be any visible signs of the change. If the genetic change had changed longevity, for example, this might have no external indicators. If the genetic change had reduced the rate of genetic transcription errors, this might have no external indicators as well. There are countless other changes that would have none. So looking at the cities of this civilization, there would be no visible change. It would all be down at the cellular level. It could be that type B has a better immune system than type A, and in order to make it work, it needed a major change in some chromosome. The only visible difference would be that sick wards would have less of type B’s than type A’s.

This type of speciation, deliberate speciation, is conditioned on the ability of the civilization to create new citizens by industrial means. If these means produced 100% of the new citizens, the change could happen over a period of time equal to the lifetime of the type A’s. At one instant in time, they stop making type A’s and switch over to type B’s. Type A’s initially represent the whole population, but after some time their numbers diminish, as the older ones decease. Little by little, the type A species becomes extinct, and to be very clear about it, voluntarily extinct. The civilization as a whole simply decided to change their species. Members of type A might have some feelings about it, but by and large, it simply happens. If there are noticeable signs of type B’s, the type A’s would notice that there were more and more of them, and less and less of their own species, type A. But would they care much at all about it, or instead, would they be happy to be replaced by something better?

It is a little hard to grasp how such a situation would affect the type A citizens. Are they thinking: “I am happy we are all dying out as we will be replaced by some creatures with better immune systems, better longevity, a better layout of internal organs, faster neurons, less likelihood of broken structural members, or something else, or all of the above. I don’t mind that my species will disappear for all eternity, because we weren’t as good as the replacements. Improvements must be made, and my species must pay the price of that.”

The change is actually happening over a generation of citizens. This might lead to a social separation between type A citizens and type B citizens. The feeling of inferiority and superiority that the two would experience might lead to a lack of desire for socialization together, or even sharing the same spaces. It is possible to imagine the city being divided into a new citizens’ quarter and an old citizens’ quarter. Type A citizens would be experiencing a transition of position, in that when they were younger, they were members of the champion species, but when they were older, they were part of a cast-off species on its way to oblivion.

It is useful to think through these feelings, as the alien civilizations in category A1 make the decision to never to do this, and to keep their species intact, even at the cost of missing out on some genetic improvements. Alien civilizations in category A2 concur with the changes, and then implement them. Since the behavior of these two categories of alien civilizations could be quite different if they successfully engage in star travel and begin to colonize exo-planets, it would be useful for us to try and understand the details of how an alien civilization might assess this very fundamental and in a sense, monumental, decision.

The Goals of an Alien Civilization

The idea that an entire civilization can have a goal may seem absurd to us on Earth. We on Earth may have individual goals, personal ones, such as getting an education, a job, a spouse, children, more income, a good retirement, entertainment of some particular type, or many others. With a little bit of deeper investigation, however, it becomes clearer that the human brain is not made for having unitary goals. A computer program may be written to accomplish some goal and if it is written correctly, it will proceed to accomplish it. If there are a thousand accounts to be totaled, it can do it. A well-written computer program is written in a fashion to accomplish a goal, and a code reader can follow the steps needed to do it.

The human brain works by associating things with one another, matching patterns, weighing influences, and so on. A human can associate the word ‘goal’ with something in particular, but the brain itself is not designed to drive the person possessing it to reach the goal. It is subject to collateral influences and distractions, competing alternative goals and needs for relaxing, sustenance and so on which are critical to the person continuing to function. At best, goal seeking in an individual is done by part of the brain, while other parts are busy doing other things, seeking other goals, or even debating whether the original goal should be done or the priority to give to it. The cognitive center in the brain assembles inputs from different parts of the brain and integrates them to decide on the next step forward. All in all, humans have goals but there is some fuzziness to any goal a human has.

Humans typically have many goals, not just one, although some may be more likely to be communicated than others. Psychologists have categorized these goals in various ways, and they range from immediate bodily needs, such as escaping from extreme cold, to interaction-related ones, such as seeking praise or comfort.

An alien civilization has many citizens, each of whom have, presumably, brains which can come up with goals for their own lives. One can also categorize them and, in civilizations which have advanced far enough technologically, one would expect to find some goals which relate to the civilization itself. We humans sometimes adopt goals for other individuals, such as members of our family, or larger groups. An advanced alien civilization would be expected to be unified much more than a primitive civilization such as we have here on Earth, with individuals much more identical to each other than humans are due to genetic engineering, and so having a common goal residing among individual goals is a reasonable thing. Perhaps the reason we Earthlings do not have such a common goal spread throughout all citizens is that we are divided into many groups, and we tend to think of goals for some of our favored groups rather than for everyone. Some people do think universally, but this type of thinking is not widespread, except in communication.

The idea of a common goal that a whole alien civilization would support derives from three things, one is the unification of the civilization, not just of governance, but across all aspects of society; a second is the lack of marked differences between citizens in capability and nature; a third is the triumph of understanding of psychology and sociology, which means that divisiveness which would prevent common goals from emerging is understood and has been dealt with. One could also add the increased average intelligence of the citizens, where all are somewhat smarter than the best we have ever evolved. Increased intelligence facilitates communication, consensus-seeking, and rationality, all of which move in the direction of common goals.

There is a dynamic here. As the alien civilization marches through that brief period when technology is being advanced, scientific theories are being developed and verified, and engineering capabilities are being expanded and deepened, one of the things which is going on is the increase in intelligence of the citizens. Genetic engineering does not spring into being fully formed, but instead it would be expected that there is a gradual process of determining how to improve the genome, and the training and education as well, in the direction of increasing intelligence. As intelligence increases, the ability to comprehend goals for society, to evaluate them, and to persuade others to support them grows. As knowledge of psychology grows, the ability of specialist citizens to make arguments that make sense to the new generations of improved aliens will grow as well. The ability to formulate goals and to communicate them grows as well.

As has been discussed before, the formulation of goals that cover the whole civilization is essentially writing the memes that will form the basis for the civilization taking on tasks. There would certainly be a wide variety of them, but the one that this blog is concerned about is the star travel meme. Some alien civilizations may not include these in their list of memes they want to become standards for their civilization; they will do no star traveling. Others might accept it, in the various guises that have been listed in this blog before.

Thus, there is a reasonable bridge between the period when a primitive civilization is divided into factions which compete in various ways between one another and the period when an advanced civilization has chosen what it wants to do, has written it into their fundamental credos, their memes, and can implement it using the power they have in their technology and their ability to plan, design, build and test. The bridge is reasonable because of the fundamental premise that has been discussed before: technological determinism. By following the pathway to more knowledge, society is modified and adapted to it, rather than the other way around. And since technology is universal, in the true sense of the word – universal – the same across the universe, it would be expected that all alien societies which do not meet an early downfall will arrive at the same place, that they will all have gone through the process of choosing memes, and will be ready to implement them.

What we don’t know is the distribution of alien civilizations, i.e., how many take interstellar travel as a goal, and how many dispense with the idea and do other things. What we can understand is that they would all make that choice, amidst a framework that is fairly comprehensible and predictable in the broadest sense.

Does Life Need a Large Moon?

A large moon has many effects on the planet it orbits. Tides are the one everyone knows about, but there are others.

The major changes in a planet’s orbit, which for fairly stable solar systems like ours, are in three parameters. One is the change in eccentricity. The length of a year of a planet is constant, but the eccentricity varies, meaning this factor which influences seasons varies periodically. Another is the change in the orientation of the major axis of the orbit, which affects when the equinoxes and solstices are. This has an effect on climate on a planet with significant axial tilt, as seasons are more extreme when the projection of the axial tilt is aligned with the semi-major axis of the orbit, and this would vary periodically. The orientation of the axial tilt is also subject to periodic change, and this change, called precession, works in combination with the change of orientation of the major axis. Together they ensure than the length and severity of the seasons changes over tens of millennia.

One of the climate effects of the first two orbital changes are ice ages, and they have been found to be correlated, but not wholly determined, by these effects. Ice ages certainly would affect the evolution of life, and possibly the origination of it. A planet which was on the outside of the temperature-based habitable zone might have the non-frozen area of the planet fluctuating, and the mean temperature of the oceans fluctuating as well. If the origination of life takes a long period of stable conditions, this would interfere with it. Don’t forget that some evolutionary changes come from mutations which only bestow a small change in reproductive rate, and in order for a small effect to overcome the noise of the processes of life, it has to last a long time. If it only provides reproductive success under some conditions, and perhaps negative effects under others, having a fluctuation in the conditions will derail the success of the change. If that evolutionary change is critical to follow-on changes, we have a dead-stop for evolution. Life might get to some early stage, but no further. This is a very early type of plateau world, one which stops at some level in the path to intelligent aliens who can travel to other stars.

The third orbital change is the change in axial tilt. In an earlier post, axial tilt was discussed as a factor in the origination of life, but there it was treated as a constant. Even on Earth it is not a constant, but it varies by a couple of degrees up and down from its average. This variation is not much for changing climate, but it does induce some effects on top of those caused by the first two changes. The interesting thing is that the axial tilt variation of the Earth is affected by the moon. The moon has more angular momentum that the spinning Earth, and tends to prevent the axial tilt from varying much. On planets without large moons, they are more like near-spherical balls, with little resistance to changes in axial tilt from gravitational effects on the non-spherical components their shape by the star of the solar system and the largest planets in the system. We have not yet found the ability to detect axial tilt on exo-planets, and of course not to detect changes in it, but other planets in our solar system exhibit larger changes in axial tilt.

As noted in that earlier post, there is a large difference between the climate and geographic variation of climate on planets which have their rotational axes aligned with their orbital axis and those which have it tilted at right angles to it. The one with an alignment has no seasons. The one with a right angle has extreme seasons. If we concur with the idea that many evolutionary changes require long periods of constant conditions to occur, in order to accumulate effects from a small benefit, the aligned one would be better at evolving life that the tilted one. But if the axial tilt were a varying parameter, and a planet with an aligned axial tilt would be tipped over short periods of evolutionary time into a severely tipped one, the slow selection processes would be short-circuited and we would once again have a plateau planet.

The time scales for changes in orbital parameters are of the order of tens of millennia. Evolutionary changes might take longer than that. There certainly could be evolutionary changes which have instantaneous effects, in that there is a marked difference in reproduction rate in the very first generation to receive the mutation. This type of sudden changes would not be stopped by changes in orbital parameter, or much else, for that matter. But these types of evolutionary mutations might be only a few out of the millions that have to take place.

The slow type of evolutionary change would happen if their were gene combination effects, such as the posts on genius genes discussed. If a significant evolutionary advantage were only realizable if some collection of changes were possible, and the individual changes were neutral in effect, constant conditions would be necessary for a long time until all the changes became common in the gene pool, and then a combination of the right ones happened. Significant evolutionary changes such as the development of new energy sources, new sensors, new skeleton shapes, new chemistry of some cell components, or new organs might all need the fortuitous combination of several otherwise neutral mutations. This would mean that constant conditions were needed for a long time, to allow all the changes to accumulate.

Each mutation in a gene is a random process, caused by some mutagen like a cosmic ray or a transcription error or other source. They might actually have a very slight negative effect on reproductive success, and only if they combined would they give a significant positive effect. This means there would be mutations of each of the required set happening, and then the mutation disappearing. Only after a long period would the probability of all of them having being present at one time be high. Thus it is certainly possible that variations in climate would interfere with the process.

In short, looking for intelligent life may require the ability to detect large moons circling planets in the habitable zone. If only we had better information on the origination and evolution of life, we could decide better on whether even larger telescopes are needed.

The Genius Gene Great Filter – a Reprise

In a previous post, it was speculated that a high level of intelligence had to be present in a small fraction of an alien civilization population in order for the various discoveries and inventions that lay along the pathway to asymptotic technology to be accomplished. In other words, if there is no or insufficient genius genes in the gene pool, the alien civilization cannot progress far in technology, and perhaps in other areas such as calmness. This hypothesis was why it was termed a potential Great Filter, something that would prevent most alien civilizations from achieving star travel.

As noted elsewhere, sometimes an earlier cause or even a root cause can be found, and a Great Filter can be translated into something more fundamental. So the question underlying this is: how do genius genes originate and propagate? In that earlier post, social situations that can de-select genius genes were discussed. Social situations that promote genius genes may be more elusive to find.

The type of genius genes referred to are those which are useful in solving technology development problems. They are certainly not the genes which are useful in achieving social success. Technology development problems require the solver to be able to think abstractly, in some way, and to separate out the technology problem from all the connections it might have with individuals who have worked on it previously, those who favor different ways of solving the problem, previous attempts at both formulating the problem and resolving it, and many, many other factors which would tend to complicate the problem and interfere with understanding it from a viewpoint which allows the solution to be envisioned. In other words, the operation of genius genes involves an ability to withdraw from the world into a mental world in which the specific features of the technology problem are included, and other features are excluded. In this abstract framework, the brain with the genius genes can see a solution and translate it back to the real world where it can be implemented.

This ability to abstract and streamline features of the real world is critical to solving more intricate and complex problems and to formulate theories and relationships which are more general and more useful than simple correlations. But this same way of looking at the world does not necessarily assist the holder of these genes to be successful in society, and especially in propagating his/her/its genes. In other words, the evolution of genius genes takes place only in special situations, not in the common milieu of society. So, in order for there to be enough genius genes in the gene pool of a subset of the population, a geographically isolated subset, there has to be some selection process that favors genius genes.

Selection processes for evolution can be critical items, where the survival rate is different for the mutations, or gradual items that accumulate a differential reproduction rate over many generations. The first one might occur if the population was entering a new environment, perhaps having been expelled from their earlier environment by predation, food shortages, competition with larger or otherwise more threatening groups, or anything else. If there was a need to solve problems that were complex in order to survive, this would be the case.

It may be that genius genes on a typical alien planet are only selected for during some sort of catastrophe, such as large amounts of volcanism, an asteroid strike, the appearance of some virulent infection, or plant diseases or insect infestations rendering large areas barren of food sources. This would mean that the mutations which fostered genius would be selected for, but after the catastrophe had passed, they would slip back into routine reproduction rates, and simply exist in the gene pool at some percentage rate. Then, when technology climbs to the level where severe problems requiring genius genes exist, the use of them would re-emerge. If this scenario is the one which produces genius genes, then a necessary pre-condition for stellar adventures is a planet which is prone or was prone to some sort of catastrophe.

Maybe all planets which have life are prone to catastrophes of one sort or another. We have so little information about other planets that this possibility will remain unknown for a long period here on Earth. Our planet has had multiple situations, ice ages, asteroid strikes, and the like, but they occurred during periods prior to the evolution of a species that could evolve genius genes. There is only a short window here on Earth when these things could happen. Our prehistoric records, out to perhaps a hundred thousand years, are incomplete, and there may have been some catastrophe in some area of the planet that led to the sudden evolution, or sudden selection, of genius genes.

The other scenario is the gradual selection of genius genes. We have postulated that there are several genes that must combine in order to produce a genius of the level needed for the final stages of technology evolution. The obvious picture is that each of these genes individually is selected for, by having some benefit that arises, but combinations of them are not. The only time combinations of them would play a role is in the final rise of technology.

If each of the contributory genes that are needed for a technological genius are positive in selection effects, at least in some time period and in some geographic area with some travel barriers to gene mixing, then the gene pool in this area would accumulate them. And as long as they do not somehow become a liability, with a negative selection effect, they would remain in this gene pool subset, waiting for the moment of need to emerge.

Selection effects could arise in the pre-city time period, and would provide some advantage in hunting or otherwise surviving in a hunter-gatherer era. They could also have arisen in the early stages of city life, but only if there was a means for the holders of these genes to use them to an advantage in the new specializations of labor that the onset of city life entails. This might mean that certain professions originated with the onset of city life that required more intelligence. Leadership positions, technical trades, governance positions of any type, or traders could fulfill this requirement.

If, for example, early technical trades such as stone-working or metal-working or clay-working or others required some more intelligence than the large mass of citizens possessed, who engaged in agriculture, and the trades also allowed some increase in reproductive rate, then these genes could become more prevalent. In the majority of the population, it might not be the case, and so only those who occupied specialized positions would bring these genes to the gene pool. Over a long period of time, the genes might diffuse out, but have little effect in the more usual professions.

To summarize, there are several possible scenarios that account for the insertion into the gene pool of those genes which, when they occur together, give rise to the technical genius that will allow technology to reach its culmination. There does not seem to be any reason to suspect they do not commonly occur in an alien civilization, and so a genius gene great filter might only occur from the negative aspects discussed in the earlier post.

The End of Exploitation

One concern that people have in thinking about alien contact is that there might be exploitation. The history of Columbus and his immediate followers coming to the Americas comes to mind. There are other examples that could be used, but the general idea is that the new arrivals, with higher technology, perhaps better command and control, more secrecy of motivation, and so on, were able to convert some of the older inhabitants to serfs, servants, or slaves. There was a desire to use the New World as a source of resources to benefit the originating area in the Old World. At that time, the types of resources that were valued or were useful were precious metals and foodstuffs. Obtaining both of these at the time was labor-intensive, and the new arrivals used forcible means or other types of coercion to induce the older inhabitants to provide the labor for less cost than the value of what they produced.

Could such a phenomena occur between two different civilizations when one, the more technologically advanced one, arrives in star ships from their originating world and begins to interact with the second one? There are two things to consider: one is the possibility that it could happen, and the other is the reasonableness of it happening.

It is not feasible to transport a large number of individual citizens in a star ship. This means that any exploitation that would occur must be mediated by some form of technology. This in turns means that there would have to be a technological disparity between the two civilizations. Since the transition from the onset of civilization, which is the settling into cities of the alien population, to the achievement of asymptotic technology is a short time compared to almost everything else, such as evolution, stellar lifetimes, gaps between ice ages or other catastrophic phenomena on the planet, and much else, the timing of the initial visit of the more advanced aliens would have to be very fortuitous, if the second civilization had not committed some sociological blunder that put them on a plateau. For example, if the second civilization had allowed themselves to descend into idiocracy, this window of opportunity would enlarge greatly. If factionalism was predominant, and had diverted technological advances from the broad scope of possibilities to those wholly concerned with factional competition, the window would be stretched. If there had been planet-wide warring going on, with no sanctuaries existing where technology could be preserved, protected, and advanced, the window would be wide.

In a sense, if the second civilization does not adopt some long-term view of their own that promotes unification, technology, and calmness, they are making themselves into potential victims of another civilization, if indeed it is possible for such a phenomena to ever occur. The range of expansion of the window is large. If technology advancement to the end-state of asymptotic technology might take a few millennia, something like idiocracy or factionalism could last ten or a hundred times as long, if the civilization descended back to a simple sustenance-only standard of living.

Another aspect of the possibility of exploitation concerns the mechanisms by which it could be in place. With a severe technological advantage, the arriving civilization would have to be able to constrain the indigent population from simply migrating away from the sites where they were being exploited. Human history has examples of this could be effected, by dividing the population into castes, and using the mechanism of personal benefit to the higher castes to induce them to be the force that maintains the population in place. Other, more technological means could be employed, such as securing some monitoring equipment onto the citizens of the second civilization.

Here on Earth we have already explored many ways to force individuals or groups to comply with demands they would otherwise ignore, and it could easily be assumed, that, if the first alien civilization had a desire to do the same, they could, and would be able to do them even more effectively, given their improved knowledge of psychology, neurology, learning, and so on. Organizing the exploitation could be simply done by a junior version of the master computer that would likely be maintaining the infrastructure on the home world or home worlds of the first civilization.

Thus it is possible, if an advanced technology civilization could get to the planet of another alien civilization, especially one that had parked itself on a lower technology plateau, it could arrange for some forms of exploitation to occur. The more telling question is, would they?

Recall that an alien civilization that had reached asymptotic technology would be making decisions using an evaluation of the costs and benefits involved with any project of large scale that they were contemplating. There is no way that the costs of transporting any materials back to their home world could be covered by the value of the transported materials. Star travel is simply too expensive. So any benefits of the exploitation would have to be obtained on the visited world. Cost-benefit analysis indicates that the only likely benefit that an alien civilization could have for undertaking star travel would be colonization, either in extremis because their home world was facing a peril or resource exhaustion, or because they were in category A1 with respect to memes, those civilizations who have made the decision to propagate their species, original or modified, to other planets.

So the make-or-break question, under the assumption that star travel is feasible, is whether the exploitation of a resident alien civilization could be used to make colonization by another one easier, i.e., less demanding of transport weight. If resource gathering, such as by mining, was one of the major tasks needed for colonization, using a population to do it is remarkably inefficient, compared with doing robotic mining, in the eyes of an advanced category A1 civilization. Perhaps in the very first period there would be some advantage, but as soon as the capability to manufacture robots was established on the surface of the planet, the utility of the second population would cease.

Thus, exploitation is possible if the second civilization puts itself in a low-technology plateau, but not likely for reasons of inefficiency. This means that instead of exploitation, the first civilization would likely simply eliminate the second one as an obstacle to colonization.

Solar Systems with Two Alien Civilizations Part III

In two previous posts, there was some speculation about what might be the appropriate top level factors that would dictate the type of behavior that two alien civilizations that found themselves inhabiting the same solar system would adopt. Two of these factors are the mutual habitability of the two planets, in other words, can aliens from one planet go and live comfortably on the other, and the dominance or lack of it among factions on the first planet, the one which discovers the other. Lack of mutual habitability reduces or slows certain options, such as colonization by the older civilization, and the existence of a high degree of competition among factions dividing up the control of the first world would pressure the top factions to compete in finding ways to take advantage of the second world in any way possible.

The second class of situations is when the two alien civilizations inhabit the same planet, but it is conveniently divided into two small continents, on the opposite sides of the planet, with some barriers to too early trans-ocean passage. We are assuming divergent evolution has happened on the two continents so that the two alien species are not simply branches of the same earlier-evolved intelligent species, but two separate species. The two species can be quite distinct, perhaps more distinct that the variety of human species that Earth archeologists have dug up. They could be different in size, appendages, head shape, eye and other sensor sensitivities, food selections both mandatory and by choice, habitat, resistance to disease and vulnerabilities to the same, weather preferences, and about anything else one can get from a taxonomy chart. As with the two planet case, it would be expected that the level of technology is different on the two continents.

Since sailing an ocean is easier, technology speaking, than building telescopes or interplanetary probes, it would be natural to assume that the initial contact would be made when the more advanced species was at an even earlier and more primitive level of development, socially and technologically, than the inhabitants of the first planet in the other example. On this planet, on the first continent, there may have been a long history of different groups living in different parts of the continent, and then later as there was more migration and more population growth, they came into contact. The history of this contact is the only basis that the first continent’s aliens have for judging how to interact with a radically different species of aliens. The options are bivariate: either there is slaughter and conquest, or there is peaceful interaction. Since the aliens probably evolved in an environment where there was inter-group competition, the first is not strange to them. Peaceful interaction is a more recent development, when demarcated areas are established and there is no impetus for one group to take over another’s territory. Most likely the history of the first species of aliens has both of these options in their history, and they would need to make a choice.

Does the first continent’s alien faction that discovered the other continent’s different aliens classify the second continent’s alien inhabitants as aminals or aliens like themselves? In other words, what makes the difference in how one alien civilization treats a newly discovered one: species or intelligence.

Perhaps there is one way to characterize the debate that would go on in the ruling circles about how to interact with the second continent’s aliens: does fear dominate their view of the new aliens, perhaps translated from the threat they may feel relative to other factions on the same continent, or is it a lack of fear and instead a feeling of hospitality. Here we have a species that may attack us and take over our territory or here we have a species we can invite to visit us and show them the greatness of our accomplishments. These are the two top-level choices that a species has for other species that are accorded some feeling of equality or equivalence. The other top-level choice, treat the other species as animals, leads to nothing but a set of options for exploiting them.

Perhaps the most important factor would be the level of technology that the second continent’s aliens had developed. If they were in the stage of only using simple tools, living in hunting groups, and performing principally as animals, despite using tools and communicating in a language, they could be classed as animals and given no quarter. If instead they were in the stage of living in cities of some magnitude, conducting trade between different parts of a single city and between different cities, possessing more than simple hunting and cooking tools but also some tools for agriculture, the use of easily obtained natural resources, recording history or other information, and so on, they might be classified by the first continent’s aliens as their own equivalents and not just some more clever-than-usual animals.

Some other factors that would play a significant role in the choices made by the first continent’s aliens in their behavior toward the second continent’s aliens include the events of the first contact. If the second continent’s aliens acted in a hostile way, this would push the decision toward either ranking them as animals or regarding them with fear. If they had instead acted as they would have to visit by aliens of their own species, others living on their continent, in a hospitable way, the first continent’s visitors may take back the impression that they were just equivalent aliens, who had very dissimilar appearances. The size of the population of aliens on the second continent would also figure into this decision. If the second continent were larger and densely populated, this would be more likely to have them classified as equivalent aliens, but regarded with fear. Numbers have a way of translating into quantitative capability to pose a threat, and it would likely be obvious that there is a possibility that with some passage of time, the ability to navigate the seas would pass to the second continent’s aliens and they could visit the first continent. Would it be seen as an insuperable problem to deal with a large number of these alternate aliens? Numbers may also have a protective role.

Aliens from the first continent may be of an analytic bent, and want to know more of the second continent’s aliens before establishing any policy for dealing with them. This would be setting up further voyages, perhaps a mission, perhaps exploration of other areas of the continent’s coastline, perhaps inviting others with different perspectives to meet the new species of aliens, and perhaps something else.

Note one thing. Precedent can play an important role in deciding the memes for inter-alien contact. A civilization which has had no such contact, and is not lucky enough to have had a second intelligent species within their own solar system will have to reach back into their history, very far indeed, to think through options for inter-alien contact protocols. And it is a meme which will be developed, rather than something based on reason or rationality, as the universe does not provide any alien species with a reason for doing things. They have to choose it.

One last point. If there were two planets, each orbiting a different star in a binary or multiple system, and both of them evolved intelligent life-forms, there could be an intermediate stage between interplanetary inter-alien contact and interstellar inter-alien contact. The distances involved would be more than interplanetary transits, but nothing like average interstellar separations. In the best case situation, the two alien species would regard their contact as mutually beneficial, and seek more. This might influence the star travel memes that each of them develops.

Solar Systems with Two Alien Civilizations Part II

In the previous post on this topic, we considered a thought experiment of a solar system with two alien civilizations developing at approximately the same time. The first part of it was about a solar system with two planets, which somehow developed intelligent life within a million years of each other, or even less. Very, very unlikely, but that’s no reason not to do the experiment. Thought experiments are for gaining insights, not for only modeling the most likely form of reality.

In the situation where the two alien civilizations developed on different planets, and one faction on one world discovered unmistakable signs of civilization on the second world, either with a large telescope or in the case of cloud cover, with an interplanetary probe, the result would likely result in turmoil on the first planet, as the discovery has potential impacts on much of the existing physical and mental structures that had been built up. Determining some insights as to how the initial discovery would play out is much harder with primitive civilizations than with ones which had reached asymptotic technology. In the case of asymptotic technology, there are some basic principles which can be used, such as Technological Determinism, to determine their possible interactions with other alien species. Not so with a primitive civilization, as there could be many different pathways to asymptotic technology, depending on what was discovered or invented first, and how the civilization gradually changed to accommodate the technology and the various necessities that go along with it.

Large enough telescopes to see a city on the nearest planet are just a matter of careful engineering, and do not require any political or sociological state to be reached before they can be built and utilized. A small city, of perhaps a thousand aliens, on the second planet, might elude discovery until the first probe arrived, or some space-borne optics were flown. Either way, there are only a few basic policies that could be adopted. This adaptation would be by the first faction to develop the capability of contact, and the choice of policy could certainly be affected by whether a second faction was attempted to leapfrog the first faction with regard to alien contact. Two examples come to mind. If the faction making contact is far further along in technology or economic power than any other, it could adopt a benevolent position toward the alien civilization on the second planet, provided that it had some experience with it on its own planet. The other example is when there was severe competition between two or more factions, and each one is seeking something else to improve their faction’s position. The first case, single power supremacy, means that the discovering faction has an open choice of what they want to do. The second case, multi-power competition, means that no faction has any option of doing anything other than seeking to obtain some advantage over the other factions during the initial or subsequent contacts.

Would there be contact in the near term after the discovery of the civilization on the second planet? In the single power supremacy situation, that faction could seek to isolate the second civilization if it chose to do so, especially if it immediately recognized that there was little to gain from the contact. Continuing to observe, without any attempt at contact, could be the mode chosen by the ruling members of the hierarchy which makes policy for the dominant power. This would mean larger telescopes and more orbiting probes, or perhaps something to get down under any cloud cover than enveloped the second planet, like an atmospheric vehicle. Lengthy observations might confirm the initial conclusion that there was nothing to be gained from contact.

If the second planet had only an alien civilization that was much more primitive than that on the first planet, this conclusion might be correctly drawn and allowed to stay in place for a long period, perhaps centuries. But there is always the possibility that some powerful member of the leading faction’s hierarchy could have a different idea and bring it to fruition.

The other alternative is for the single power dominating the first planet to set about to send representatives there, perhaps because that was how it interacted in the distant past with other factions on the first planet. In that case, there would be a technology push to develop space flight for aliens. This would doubtlessly open up questions about star travel, so that the dual civilization solar system might be more speedy in seeking star travel, if things worked out well in contacting the second planet’s civilization.

Questions of habitability arise here. Can an alien from the first planet live outside a hermetically sealed suit or habitat on the second planet, and vice versa? Since we do not know the limits of life origination, nor of the evolution of intelligent life, it is not possible to say that both planets would have to have around the same temperature, or radiation levels, or atmospheric constituents, or gravity, or anything else. At this point in Earth knowledge, they could be totally incompatible. If so, it would be likely that the single power faction on the first planet would adopt the observation only strategy. The implications of the mutual habitability question are much larger than arranging for an initial contact. There is the question of colonization. With mutual habitability, the first planet could seek to have its own type of aliens establish some sort of outpost on the second planet. Without it, it might as well be ignored.

In the competitive faction situation on the first planet, each faction’s strategists would be thinking about how to use this new discovery to their own advantage. It is unlikely that a no-contact policy would be the choice adopted, as there is no chance of exploiting the second planet’s civilization or resources if there is no ground presence there. If the planets were mutually inhabitable, it would be likely that the first step would be for the factions to compete in arriving there and establishing a presence. Doing so first would make a political statement as to which faction was the more technologically capable, or willing to undertake risks, or something else.

Consider the other side of one of the contact scenarios. On the surface of the second planet, the aliens in the civilization there would be struggling to comprehend what was happening in the skies above their planet, and how to interact with the unusual creatures which had arrived. There would be a similar set of approaches they might adopt, but modified by the lack of understanding of what was the basis for the contact. Without a near-equivalent level of science and technology, what the first world aliens could do would be like magic, and there would be no framework in the second world’s language or knowledge for interpreting it. Perhaps one of the strongest impulses would be to learn about the first world and all the knowledge it had accumulated that the second world had not. Individuals might seek advantage by trying to obtain this knowledge in different ways. There would certainly be an upset to the existing hierarchy on the second planet, as the aliens from the first planet would dwarf the competitive advantages that those in the second planet’s hierarchy might display. Thus, with contact would come an upending of the second world’s hierarchies and perhaps an abandonment of policies that had been created by them. In short, the second world would be headed for a chaotic period in which they adapted to the existence of the first world, and struggled to establish some sort of new identity that incorporated this new knowledge. Whether the chaos would lead to major disruption and devastation of the civilization is hard to say, but the possibility is certainly there.

Solar Systems with Two Alien Civilizations Part I

Solo planets is the term used in this blog for planets that can originate life without being seeded or transformed in any way. They have all the conditions for life origination, whatever they wind up being. We have some hypotheses which have solo planets requiring an ocean with a source of chemical energy and with a stew of complex organic compounds such as amino acids. These planets do not necessarily originate intelligent life, as there could well be some conditions, either preexisting or having to come into being after the origination of the simplest life, which determine if a successful solo planet will complete its run of life and get to the first intelligent creatures. Examples of the Great Filters that halt the evolution of life at an early plateau are the lack of the right photon spectrum for photosynthesis to take place, or the lack of land surface not covered with ice, and many others.

These planets, solo planets which originate life and then evolve it to some sort of intelligent organism, may be fairly rare. Since we don’t yet fully understand the origination of life process, or processes if there are multiple ways in which life can start, it is hard to figure out how many planets there are which can do it. Despite this knowledge gap, here we look at solar systems in which there is not one but two originations of life, and at about the same time. Just square the probability that it happens once and you have the probability that it happens twice, and then multiply by a small number that represents how hard it is to get simultaneity. Fairly small, for sure.

There are two obviously different situations possible. One is that there are two planets in the right zone, with all the right conditions, and they both originate life. Perhaps the life is very different, even with a different DNA coding, or if life is sufficiently ingenious, one or both with something other than DNA as the coding template. There are orbital stability questions, if the origination zone is very narrow, but it might be wider if one of the planets, the one with the larger star-planet radius, is a bit bigger and has retained greenhouse gases in its atmosphere, which bring it to the right temperature. The other might be smaller, and retains enough atmosphere for life origination, but does not have the increased heat retention and therefore, although closer to the star, is still in the right temperature band.

If one possibility is two separate planets, the other has to be one planet with two life-forms evolving intelligence. Two separate continents might do the trick, with microbial life, and perhaps many stages of early life evolving when there was a land bridge, but then when continents do what continents do, and split apart and drift to the opposite side of the globe, individual evolution can take place. On Earth, we are still in that primitive stage of science where we don’t know all the routes that the origination of intelligent life can take, and in fact, we are not too sure about the one that we took. Thus, we can legitimately speculate that these two life-forms might be rather similar, maybe they look like us or maybe not or they could be very distinct. What is important is that they do not develop trans-oceanic transportation too early so that one doesn’t exterminate the other. Perhaps the continents are smallish, and there aren’t any others, so any early explorers of the ocean from either continent would come back empty-handed, and discourage further exploration.

Now what happens? We have set the stage for an alien encounter right in one solar system, or maybe even on one single planet. This is like a thought laboratory for considering the various options, and perhaps seeing a way to understand interstellar encounters, if there have ever been any, in the light of interplanetary or intercontinental ones.

What might happen? In the interplanetary situation, there is no meeting until one develops space flight to the level necessary to send a probe to another planet. However, it is likely that the ability to observe other planets accurately might have developed before the ability of rocket flight. Alien-made evidence of civilization might not be visible in the earliest telescopes, and if one planet was just barely civilized, with small cities and agriculture, it might not be clear until better telescopes were invented. This took us many decades. Going from Galileo’s small telescope to something like Sir Percy Lovell’s larger one may be the necessary step to the realization that the other planet is inhabited as well. If there were clouds constantly on one or the other, there would be no possibility of interplanetary observation of the artifacts of civilization, it might be that there is no knowledge of the other civilization until a probe gets there, and perhaps sends down a lander into somebody’s backyard. All the science fiction writers on both planets get to sing out a chorus of “I told you so” while the discovering planet begin to take stock of what it means to them to have near neighbors. The second, observed, planet may figure this out soon afterwards.

It is likely that the more advanced civilization, the one which has mastered interplanetary probes, is nowhere near asymptotic technology, and has not benefited from all the sociological calming that it provides. It is likely, in this early stage, that there would be factions on the sending planet, as well as hierarchies of power and wealth. Individuals on the sending planet would not necessarily be totally rational, and the ability to collectively think through the situation would likely be drowned in factional and hierarchical thinking, in which individuals and groups think through how to use this new situation for their own advantage. To restate that, individuals, both those in power and those with some opportunistic possibilities, would think through how to interact with the second planet so that their own position on the first planet would be improved or perhaps only consolidated. Others, those who have higher positions in the hierarchy of one of the factions on the first planet, would be thinking how to further their faction's position and also their assumed goals. If the faction sending the probe is the only one on the planet at that instant capable of doing so, their memes for interaction with others might be called upon, or created on the spot. They would have nothing to build these memes on other than their interaction with the aliens in other factions, on their own planet. If the world had progressed to a peaceful place prior to the interplanetary probe, then the general idea of peaceful interaction with aliens on the second planet would likely be one of the strong contenders for a policy. If instead, the factions were still sparring with one another, even involving war or economic exploitation, it would serve as a paradigm for the interaction with alien on another planet.

So, to summarize the observation, the first planet’s level of social evolution will likely be used to govern the interaction with the second planet, or more specifically, the level of social evolution of the faction than first invented interplanetary probes would provide the pattern of interaction.

These modes of interaction would be terribly limited by the inability of the leading faction of the first planet to do much interaction immediately following the discovery of civilization on the second planet. An interplanetary probe would likely be a strain for the technology of the first planet, and so sending a delegation there would take many years of planning, designing, building and testing a larger craft. Simultaneously, other factions, if there were any comparable to the one that built the first probe, would be undertaking crash programs to copy that capability so that the leading faction would not gain even more ascendancy from the results of their interplanetary interactions with aliens from another planet.

There would likely be a maelstrom of discussion of what to do about the discovery and how to interact with the aliens. Without asymptotic technology in any of the fields that would help, such as sociology, the inhabitants of the first world would have to try and figure out how to interact, and with little other than their own history to base this plan on, they would have to try and sort out some principles or some policies and gain acceptance of them.

On the other side, the inhabitants of the second planet would be forced into interacting with the coming probes and populated vessels based on even less experience. They could be anywhere on the technological pathway from the first grand transition, agriculture, or even before it, all the way up to a level not much below that of the first planet, although this would be a coincidence even more unlikely than all the others we have postulated for this thought experiment. Recall that the transition from basic tool-using and communication, which is the criteria for calling a civilization intelligent, up to the first cities took homo sapiens something like a million years, while the citification took only ten thousand. So, the likelihood of similar levels is a one in a hundred chance.

Since this is an interesting topic, let’s discuss it in another post.

Is Advanced Intelligence a False Panacea?

The grand transition discussed for alien civilizations relating to advanced intelligence has been regarded as a kind of watershed. The basic idea is that bringing the intelligence of all citizens up to its genetic potential maximum and providing all of them with optimized education will eliminate all sociological problems.

The reasoning behind the basic idea is that people with this much intelligence would not tolerate any behavior by an individual that was designed to injure others, to exploit others, to deprive others, or to take any action that was pathological. It should be clear that any attempt at fraud would be met with questioning. There would be no possibility of some citizen not understanding the implications of any agreement they were asked to make. They would each have the inherent ability to understand their own budgets and to be able to manage their expenditures and income. Thus, financial deception would be virtually impossible.

Neither would it be possible for crimes to go undetected if every citizen was as good a detective as our Sherlock Holmes. The other side of this coin is that any citizen would understand the implications of any act they were thinking of doing, so that criminal behavior would be avoided as well as being detectable.

With every citizen of high intelligence, there would be no premium positions for anyone that could not be filled by anyone. If anyone could qualify to perform any vocation, there would be no need for any differences in remuneration, if indeed the alien civilization remunerated its citizens for taking on a vocation for some period. Thus the achievement of advanced intelligence does seem to eliminate almost any opportunity or motivation for any individual citizen or any group of citizens to amass wealth, and therefore power within the civilization, that was markedly different from the average. Having no vantage point of wealth and power from which to force others to take actions they might not otherwise choose to means one major difference exists between the pre-transition times and the post-transition times.

Wealth and power provide a positive feedback effect for its own increase, and would in practically any alien civilization, no matter how structured. The feedback operation is fairly obvious. Having more wealth and power allows an individual to have this wealth and power to use to gain even more wealth and power for himself. Funding necessary expenses does not rise proportionally with wealth, and this means that funds available to induce more wealth and power grow even faster than proportionally with wealth. Thus the feedback loop gets ever stronger as the differences in wealth grow larger.

This feedback loop explains why, on any alien civilization, before the central grand transitions take place, there is likely to be a diversity of social status and economic advantage, and after those transitions take place, it will diminish and gradually disappear.

The has two implications. One is that for the reasons cited above, the advanced intelligence grand transition, above others, will serve as a panacea for sociological ills which might inhibit the civilization’s advance to asymptotic technology. In other words, once an alien civilization figures out how to encode intelligence in the genome of their own species, and uses that knowledge to upgrade everyone’s intelligence, the other problems of the civilization will be easier to deal with and will disappear in time.

It also means that any individuals or groups who for some pathological reason, wish to freeze the civilization at the early stage it is in, perhaps to fix their own position and their own descendants’ positions at a level much higher than the average, may seek to delay or obstruct the provision of advanced intelligence to everyone. This grand transition is the make-or-break one for hierarchical structures within the civilization. It is the advantage that must be denied to the generic citizen if the hierarchical structure is to be preserved for more generations.

There are many means by which an existent hierarchy could attempt to halt genetic understanding of intelligence or to ensure it was never made available to the average citizen. To the extent that the hierarchy controls the means of education and communication, these could be used to spread fears of the changes that would happen when intelligence improved across the whole body of citizenry. Since prior to the grand transition happening, the average citizen may not have the intelligence to realize the advantages that future generations were being denied for the sole purpose of freezing in place some type of hierarchical structure.

Recall also that the timing of this transition is fairly synchronous with the timing of the gestation grand transition, which allows population to be adjusted to match some resource consumption rate. This grand transition has a secondary effect on hierarchies in the alien civilization as well. If inheritance disappears as new aliens are created industrially rather than biologically, one of the two motivations for maintaining a hierarchy disappears. The first and most prominent reason, that of achieving some psychological state within an individual citizen, does not go away, but the second one, of passing on what one has amassed in power and wealth to one’s genetic descendants, does.

These goals are simply the translation into a societal framework of the motivations that evolution has to provide individuals of all species. One is the furtherance of their own ability to survive, and the other is the ability to produce larger numbers of gene copies. Although both can be distorted into almost non-existence by some types of environments, they do lie deeply within the nervous system of all creatures that have a complex nervous system, and we would assume any alien civilization would have citizens that are so equipped.

Another means that an existing hierarchy could use to abort genetic understanding of intelligence would be via the control of funding for scientific research in these areas. Most likely, the hierarchy is not going to proclaim that, in order to maintain their own psychological state of mind as achieved by being a member of the higher ranks of the hierarchy, they are going to deprive the entire future civilization of the benefits of more genetic research. Instead, they are going to make statements indicating that there would be some dangers to such research or that it would lead to problems the society is not equipped to deal with. Some explanations will be provided, and then funding would be denied.

Whether or not a society that is victimized by such hierarchies, and there is no reason to think that all alien civilizations will not have them, can overcome such obstacles and fly forward into the genetic future depends on how much intelligence the average citizen possesses prior to the question being raised of going forward with the requisite genetic research. On less fortunate worlds, that level of intelligence will not be able to overcome the obstacles set up by an existing hierarchy, at least until there is some social catastrophe that returns the civilization to an earlier level, with some advanced knowledge, when it can manage to get to the genetic transition that it needs to in order to become star traveling.

War and the Defeat of Progress on Alien Worlds

On Earth, it is common knowledge that war leads to technological innovation, and therefore technological innovation is accelerated by there being geographic divisions and battles between them. We have few examples to base this on. War in which there is one side that has virtual immunity from destruction might lead to technological innovation in the sanctuary that this one side possesses, but on an alien planet, this type of sanctuary might not exist in all cases. In the alternative case, where two factions battle, and the battles waste both of the sides’ territories, any advance in technology would be counterbalanced by the destruction of the means of economic survival, and possibly lead to a slowdown of progress. If the destruction was large enough and wide-spread enough, there might not be the possibility of recovery. Too much loss would do this. War like this, in which devastation was universal, might also cause a very negative reaction to technology, and its progress would be halted by common consensus among the survivors. This means no advance of technology, and possibly an abandonment of the technology developed for weapons purposes, or even related technology.

More common knowledge here on Earth is that the preparation for war, especially if it never comes, leads to technological innovation. This may also be true, in that technology suitable for weaponry is developed under the fear of war, and that technology remains around after the fear subsides, and is spread to other applications. Another point of view is that under the fear of war, technology development is directed away from most areas into those that might be used for war or defense against attack. The effect of this diversion could mean that technology development is done in such a one-sided way that the factionalism that led to the fear of war is exacerbated. The focus of the alien civilization doing this development might be solely concentrated on these avenues, and others neglected. This neglect can slow down the approach to the heights of asymptotic technology, but they can also lead to the civilization being wrapped up in war-like thinking, or security thinking, or defense thinking, and therefore ways in which the factionalism could be abated are missed. Those parts of technology development, such as psychology, neurology, economics, anthropology, sociology, education, genetics, and certainly others, which could lead to a unification of opposite cultures are instead diverted to those narrow applications which could contribute to war and its cousins.

To be more explicit, factionalism has a positive feedback loop that causes efforts spent on it to lead to greater factionalism and the ignoring of those aspects of technology that could ameliorate or mitigate it, or even eliminate it. Positive feedback loops have a way of running themselves into destruction, and the equivalent of this is that the alien civilization would so concentrate on factional topics and efforts to promote the ascendance of one faction that anything that might reduce it is neglected or actually banned. Aliens who are intelligent have a tendency to want to solve problems, but the problems need to be enunciated or somehow made visible. If the factionalism captures this process, so that problems listed or collected or more specifically, funded by the different factions, are solely for the purpose of either increasing the factionalism or in making one faction more successful than another, these will be the problems the more intelligent aliens will concentrate on. Of course, there will be some dissenting minorities, who will be forced to stand on the sidelines, while the factionalism grows and grows, until it reaches its natural limit and some catastrophe, like a major war or economic debacle, ensues.

This pathway might be common among alien societies. In a previous post, several grand transitions that an alien society would have to pass through were pointed out, and later ordered. Missing from that list was unification. Unification is the opposite of factionalism, and if unification is never achieved, but the alien civilization continues to expend resources on factional pursuits, the other grand transitions would be delayed and even never achieved. In other words, factionalism can gain such a foothold as to derail progress toward asymptotic technology by diverting efforts into only those areas of technology that can be used for war or defense purposes.

Star voyaging is not a vocation that contributes to war or defense or factionalism. Instead, it is a drain on resources that could otherwise be used by one side to seek dominance over the other or to seek independence from the domination by another. Alien civilizations which become trapped in the positive feedback loop of factionalism will not develop the technologies for star travel except in those instances in which they could principally contribute to the security efforts of the two or more factions. Star travel technologies include the genetics necessary to send seed packages to solar systems with Great Filters blocking their progress to asymptotic technology or even to intelligence at all. They include the biology of hibernation, of artificial gravity, of long gradual propulsion, of power sources with hundred or thousand year reliability, of dust protection, of astronomical observations of exo-planets remotely and from a probe. They might also include various robotic abilities, sociology of small groups quartered together for very long times, feedback ecologies in as many components of life as possible, radiation protection over the long term, radiation effect mitigation in the aliens themselves, and many more which have little or no connection with weaponry.

Factionalism is also a means for subverting the goal-seeking behavior of an alien civilization from a species-wide venture into the interstellar arena into little goals of how to promote one faction over the other. It is a means of distraction, and may also be a complete distraction from the task that an alien civilization has of deciding on its own future. If the means of education and communication are taken over by the factions, ordinary citizens will think little of devoting their efforts to improving the relative standing of their own faction, rather than more global, abstract tasks such as advancing technology across the entire spectrum of scientific areas or in specifically solving the problems posed by the initial interstellar probes.

Factionalism would certainly be cured and overcome by the development of sufficient general intelligence among the citizens of the alien world, but to do this, efforts would have to be devoted to genetics, and quite substantial efforts. Thus, if factionalism turns funding away from solving the problem of increasing intelligence universally to more mundane tasks such as faster weapons or more powerful bombs or some such, it will be securing inadvertently its own continuance. Factionalism would have to also drive the alien civilization toward resource depletion, as solving the tasks of factionalism involves short-term thinking, and taking account of resource shortage issues is a long-term problem.

As noted in an earlier post, some of the most substantial Great Filters may be sociological, and alien civilizations who have not visited us, because they never built star ships, may have simply done something as ordinary as preserved their battling over long periods, while they neglected all the things that such a civilization has to do to last a long time. It would seem that unification is a grand transition as important as the ones listed previously.

Self-heated Planets

A recent discovery by those scientists who capture neutrinos led to a surprising announcement. The amount of heat generated by radioactive decay in the Earth was much larger than had been expected and it was a significant contributor to the heat content and therefore the temperature of the planet. This is just an initial uncorroborated result, but it raises a few questions, some of which are difficult and some of which are amusing.

If the Earth has so much radioactivity, how can the outer planets in our solar system, and the satellites around them, be so different? They are remarkably cold, as would be expected from the lack of solar thermal flux they receive. If the rocky materials that make up the Earth are the same as that inside these planets, they should be warmer. If they are not the same, how exactly was there a differentiation in the primordial dust disk that surrounded our sun and eventually congealed into the planets? One suggestion might be that the early disk was much more compact, but as the sun turned on and started blasting out solar wind and photons, mostly the lighter elements were thrust further outward, and the heavier ones, not so much. Then when the aggregation started, heavier stuff was around closer into the sun, and lighter stuff, perhaps silicate materials and lighter, was out farther. Something to calculate, perhaps.

Different classes of supernova do different things to the materials from their outer layers and any materials in space near them. Higher fluxes of protons and neutrons would lead to a higher percentage of heavier elements around larger supernovas. Heavier elements form as part of the probabilistic distribution of elements in the different layers of any star, but the sudden explosion leads to a shower of nucleons which can transmute lower elements into higher ones, although the opposite may happen as well. Suffice it to say, it is not obvious that different regions of star forming clouds have identical distributions of heavier elements, and therefore one can ask the question of whether there are planets around some star which have more radioactive elements than the Earth does. One can even ask if there are some planets which have sufficient radioactive elements so that they can be self-heating, and remain warm, even in a far orbit.

The extreme case is of a rogue planet, one which has been cast free of its connection with the originating solar system or even one formed on its own. This process can take place via the interaction of planets in an early solar system, when one quickly or slowly drives another out so far that random gravitational forces can drag it loose from its solar system. Alternatively, a stellar encounter can cast planets into the wild beyond like billiard balls flying from a good break shot. Some astronomers have estimated that there are as many rogue planets as there are orbiting planets. But, can there be warm rogue planets?

What exactly would it mean to have this alternate source of thermal energy for the origination of life? Consider as an extreme example, a rogue planet which stayed as warm as Earth, not because it was near a star, but because it was being heated from within. The source of heat means that the magma inside the planet is relatively warmer than the magma inside the Earth. This has implications for geological activity. There should be more. Over the history of the Earth, there has been many instances where major eruptions have occurred, leaving behind on the surface of this planet something referred to as basalt floods. This is a large area where magma has escaped to the surface. On an internally heated planet, this might occur more frequently and over larger areas. There might also be less thickness in the crust, with the molten lava buried less deeply. This would lead to more eruptions of individual volcanoes, and more magma bubbles near the surface, leading to more vents, both on land and under the sea.

It should be obvious that this type of planet would be more likely to originate the simplest form of life, if the hypothesized conditions for this origination were both met, and one was more energy-rich mineral flows coming into the oceans. The other condition was a soup of amino acids, and these might be formed by volcanic action, possibly. So, it is at least a novel speculation that life could emerge on a warm rogue planet. However, with no solar photons, chlorophyll would play no role, and chemotrophs would be the limit of life’s evolutionary options. How far can chemotrophs evolve?

Chemoautotrophs can propagate in numbers in accordance with the availability of chemical nutrients, their energy source. In a self-warmed planet, there should be much larger supplies of this chemical energy than on a planet with more ordinary constituents, i.e. less radioactivity. It would be expected that chemoheterotrophs would arise in greater numbers to dine on the chemoautotrophs. And it would be expected that evolution would do what evolution does, and try out every variety of mutation that it could devise. In a rich field of chemical nutrients, and a plethora of other lifeforms to feed on, chemoheterotrophs might develop in ways that parallel sea life on Earth. The whole point is that more efficient ways of collecting food organisms will win out, and then other niches will be found and filled, until a whole ecology exists.

One difference exists, and that is without any photons at all, all creatures will be blind. All sensing will be by the detection of vibration, touch, chemical sensing, or thermal effects. Sound might be adopted as a communication means, but with limitations due to the difference between sound generation we see in land animals and in oceanic animals. Perhaps long tentacles will become the standard appendage. Perhaps means of fastening oneself onto surfaces will become very diverse. And even perhaps some creatures will develop light sources, and ways to exploit self-generated light. Obviously, the ocean on a self-heated planet which has a hundred million years to experiment with lifeforms will be very different from what we see here on Earth.

It is not clear that evolution could devise any lifeform that would emerge onto any continents that exist on such a self-heated planet. Unless there was a chemical energy source that could be absorbed by a land creature, anything emerging from the shallows would expire from lack of nutrients. In another blog, it was noted that in some extreme situation, intelligence just might develop underwater. One requirement was a lack of a moon and a lack of tides. A rogue planet certainly meets that criteria. So, at the fringe of speculation, it is possible that a self-heated rogue planet could have some lifeform that mastered the basics of intelligence, which is tool-using and communication, while remaining underwater. Exactly how far this could go is anybody’s guess.