Very Cheap Interstellar Travel

It used to be, and maybe still is, possible to see the world for almost nothing. Just go down to your nearest seaport, and get a ride on a tramp cargo steamer. Get off at whatever further port you want, stay as long as you like, and then get on another one. Conditions were not lavish, but you got to go somewhere.

It seems possible to do this for star travel. Recently, Scholz’s star was re-discovered, in 2013 to be exact, by an astronomer named Scholz as a star which had come close to us very recently. It passed through our sun’s Oort cloud at about 0.8 light years from the sun approximately 70,000 years ago. It is actually a binary star, with a brown dwarf and a red dwarf as partners. Since it was traveling almost radially away from us, it had a low proper motion and so was not noticed as a nearby star. Lesson learned.

This discovery caused a tiny flurry of activity, and it was realized that there are stellar encounters at about this distance, let’s say less than one light year, on the average every 100,000 years, in rough terms. Here’s our cargo ship.

Consider the possibilities this offers. Suppose you are a citizen of an alien civilization that wants to do some interstellar colonization. Traveling to meet a star at a distance of less than a light year, which you know is coming for thousands of years, doesn’t take much fuel or much of a starship. The major costs of starships come from the fuel, which you have to carry along with you if you want to accelerate along the way and even more important, decelerate at the destination. If you are only going a light year, you don’t need much speed, therefore not much fuel for acceleration or deceleration. With a few thousand years to get ready, you could go out into the Oort Cloud of your star, assuming your star has one, and look around for some place to wait while your star is coming in. If you are interested in an interstellar probe, you can just push one out there over a period of a century or two or five or ten, and, with the patience this takes, wait until the star arrives, and then go orbit it. Most stars have planets, according to those who know, so you might be able to set up some type of base.

Hold on! You have just done an interstellar flight and established a colony on an exo-planet. It happened to be in your backyard, but still, you have just accomplished this goal at a fraction of the cost it would normally take.

If your colony on this exo-planet can last for periods in the hundreds of thousands of years, you will be passing close to other stars of the galaxy, and can get off there and set up another colony. Soon (in an astronomical sense) you will have many colonies in your neighborhood of the galaxy. You might be colonizing some real loser planets, but with some resources, you can fix up something your civilization can tolerate for a period. Recall there are some sweet spot worlds, and you would be really lucky to find one. There are also some worlds, called penumbra worlds in this blog, which have problems in habitation, but can be converted or otherwise used. Then there are worlds where the colonization has to be done in a hermetic chamber. Toxic atmosphere, too cold, or something else seriously wrong. But at least you have a place to live while you travel further out into the galaxy.

There must be exploitable resources on the planet, as carrying around enough supplies for a hundred thousand years is likely not practical. You might get energy from the sun, or scoop deuterium from a gas giant, and power your reactors, but you will still need some basic minerals. So, perhaps every planet that drifts by your own star isn’t acceptable, but some will be. Remember that most of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, which are not very useful to begin with, but perhaps as we learn more about them, they will be found to have some advantages.

Another advantage of this idea of star-hopping, is that an alien civilization with a small population can pull it off. You don’t have to store up immense amounts of propellant and energy to get out to your own Oort Cloud. There is stuff out there anyway, and perhaps it could be used. Dropping down on an icy comet in the Oort Cloud might allow you to extract deuterium, and power something. You could use the protons you recover as propellant.

The obvious disadvantage of jumping on a cargo ship for seeing the world doesn’t allow you to pick your destination. You go where the ship is going. Same for a stellar encounter. You hop on and go where the star is going. Maybe it’s heading toward a sweet spot world next, but likely it’s just another red dwarf with some dismal planets circling it. You don’t get to do the seeding of life that your meme might be telling you to do, at least not nearly as fast as you could if you could afford to build a ship to cross a hundred or more light years in some understandable time, like a few millennia. You are also exploring and colonizing the galaxy at a pretty slow rate. Stars do move faster than orbital speeds, say something like .0003 c, but nothing like the speeds of 0.1 or 0.01 c that we have discussed in other posts.

If the worst Great Filter is the cost of interstellar travel, this is a solution to that problem. Assuredly, every alien civilization recognizes this possibility as soon as they develop a robust astronomical observation program. If it is actually the accepted way of dispersing an alien civilization through the galaxy, it means that looking for aliens needs to take a very different tack. Instead of looking for planets with biosignatures, we should be closely examining every star with us as a destination for any signs of unusual activity there. Examining stars that are within, say ten light years of us, is much easier than searching a radius of a thousand light years. It also means that learning more about the Oort Cloud and what assets it possesses might be very interesting for exploring the details of this possible cheap star travel method.

Sequential Alien Civilizations

In several posts, it was mentioned that an alien civilization could become extinct. There were a variety of causes for this. One was simply that they did not desire to continue to exist, the category A4 civilization. This could come to pass by them simply not continuing to produce young aliens. Other reasons included running out of resources, the planet meeting some sort of peril, either planetary, stellar, or galactic, or even that they left no one behind when the migrated elsewhere. They could descend into idiocracy and not be able to maintain their civilization or even their continued existence. Certainly there could be other reasons, such as a large world-wide war with advanced weapons, or a very devastating minefield that they encountered before reaching asymptotic technology, such as terrorism with advanced capabilities for destruction.

Consider what happens afterward. Here is a planet which originated life, which then proceeded through all the evolutionary steps to reach intelligence and then developed a civilization, which for one of very many reasons, disappeared off the face of the planet. What does the rest of the life do, now that the capstone creatures are no longer there? It is back to evolution, perhaps with a far different genetic content if the alien civilization passed the genetic grand transition and modified the ecology. Since evolutionary timescales are of the order of ten thousand years to a million years, something happens fairly soon. The fauna on the planet keep changing. Sooner or later, another species develops intelligence, as the environment is suitable for it, and there is nothing left behind from the original alien civilization which lasts forever to block it. With luck, or after several tries, another alien civilization arises on the same planet. They have their chance at survival. They have their chance at building a civilization which might leave the planet and travel to other planets or to other solar systems.
Can they tell they are number two? Would there be any signs of the previous civilization that the second civilization could find?

If the first civilization disappeared, but did not really disappear, but just broke down into a repeat of the past, such as hunter-gatherers, and then recovered after ten thousand years of evolution straightening out the errors of the first civilization, there would certainly be relics remaining. Large stone structures do not disappear in that length of time, and may not be covered with airborne dust and dirt by that length of time. There might even be non-physical artifacts, such as some lingering oral tradition that talks about un-understandable events and phenomena. According to some archeologist, Earth went through something similar to that, in that there are remains of small cities from about ten thousand years ago, then a period of some millennia when there were none, and then they started again and grew larger than the maximum found in the first epoch. This may be instead an observational fillip, the result of incomplete investigations or the result of some chance finds. But on our hypothetical alien planet, something similar could be found.

If the period between civilizations was a hundred thousand years, it would be expected that even stone monuments would disappear. Archeological remains would be the only remaining memorial to the first alien civilization. In wet dirt, these would disappear over a hundred millennia, but if somehow fossil remains were created of the alien creatures themselves, with some extreme luck on the part of the second civilization’s citizens.

Recall how fossils come to exist. An animal is caught in some trap or dies in some area which is quickly covered and then covered again, until some type of rock such as sandstone is formed. The bones remain embedded and are turned into rock as well, by normal chemical processes in ground water, replacing the bony material with some sort of mineral in the shape of the bones.
Would aliens likely undergo such sudden burial, if they lived in cities? Perhaps not, but would there be other objects from an alien city which would be fossilized if buried in dust and dirt or mud? Would a gold object, if buried accidentally in a desert climate, remain that long? Gold nuggets last for very long times when formed naturally, so it is likely. Would gold objects be lost in a civilization? Certainly, assuming the planet had gold in sufficient quantities. Thus, instead of fossils remaining to be discovered, gold objects might be buried and await excavation by second civilization citizens. Other precious metals, silver, platinum, or others might also last for this period if buried in the right conditions.

Aside from precious metals, could anything else be fossilized? Could other materials, such as non-precious metals, undergo the same transformation as bones, so they would form fossil fragments? The key phenomena is that the object is buried and is not changed until some later period after the buried, during which time it does not lose its form. Some metals, such as iron, would oxidize and dissolve too fast to form a mold for the fossil mineralization to form, but perhaps if the alien civilization used other metals with a slower removal rate this could happen. Once mineralization happens, the fossil can endure for millions of years, as the migration of rock minerals is virtually non-existent. Otherwise we would not have minable veins.
It might be extremely unlikely that a fossil relic of the first civilization would be dug up by the second. Many fossils are found because some geologic process exposes one, and then archeologists dig deeper in the same areas, under the assumption that the burial site probably caught more than one animal. To find a single object, when there was no indication that something like this existed, is even more unlikely than the finding of a skeleton, unless an entire city was somehow buried, and it happened to have objects which could become fossils. At this point, nothing like this is known.

Only a mass burial of aliens, in the proper situation where fossilization can occur, is likely to exist for the second civilization to find, and such mass burials would not be likely accidentally. A mass grave or large gravesite could become fossilized. Thus, a cemetery might be the only way for the second civilization to learn there was one that came before them.
It is hard to imagine what would be the psychological effect on an alien civilization if they suddenly found out that there had been an alien civilization inhabiting the same planet long before, perhaps ten million years before or at any period long enough in the past for fossilization to occur. Finding precious metal objects from a hundred thousand years before might have the same startling effect. A civilization-wide understanding that everything they had built could simply disappear and only exist as fossils or relics changes how a civilization views itself. It might be taken as a warning, and some actions taken as a result of the realization. The fear of obliteration could actually lead to the adoption of a meme that would work to preserve the second alien civilization, perhaps even to the extent of advocating star travel as soon as possible.

Delayed Gratification and Immediate Satisfaction

An alien civilization that continues to master increasing levels of technological achievement, and implements them in an efficient manner might be called successful. If the alien civilization has made the decision, earlier in its history, that star travel is a desirable goal for it, then the success it achieves should lead to attempts at star traveling. But is there a minefield here?

Success is tantamount to meeting the desires of the citizens that constitute the society, and also in determining how to do so sustainably. The sustainability clause means that they have found a large store of energy, such as deuterium for fusion, and can build the infrastructure needed to capture this energy and bring it to the cities where the citizens will use it. The clause also means that they have discovered sufficient sources of different resources, and have furthermore instituted a strict regime of recycling, so that the resource base they discovered can be used to provide a good standard of living for a long time.

Just exactly what is included in the phrase ‘meeting the desires of the citizens’? Desires obviously include needs, and there are a wide variety of needs that individual citizens have. These are met by the alien civilization, and then it goes on to meet the less tangible needs the citizens have, such as social interaction, opportunities for contributing to the civilization, competition, cooperation, artistic expression and a whole host of others. To the degree that constraints can be met, these are to be met as well, although obviously, demands for some things can drive the total cost of meeting them too high, so there has to be some regulation as the type and amount of desires on the upper end of the scale that can be met. The citizens need to have their desires met sufficiently so that they remain content with the civilization.

As the alien civilization grows more efficient, and has more energy and resources per alien capita at its disposal, it would be able to meet a larger range of desires from this upper range. But there is another dimension to the ability of the civilization to meet the needs of the citizens. It is time, or more particularly, response time. If the society is extremely efficient, as it might be after a long time of stable conditions, in which improvements can be made in all aspects of the process of meeting desires, then goods and services might be available to the citizens in minutes to hours following their requests.

This type of responsiveness is going to have an effect. When new citizens are gestated, their training and education starts, and it is reasonable that this training and education continues to improve like every other aspect of a long-term, stable civilization. When young alien citizens finish their education, they should have, not just the factual knowledge and mental and physical skills that the society wants them to have, they should also have an understanding of what is good behavior and reasonable expectations. Good behavior and reasonable expectations would include the concept of delayed gratification, which are really code words for working and waiting for those things you desire. It is a key element of building a society, and without it the alien civilization would never have gotten started with its long line of accomplishments, back in the days before technology was so powerful and proficient. Thus, when young citizens come out of their preparatory period, they would understand the benefits of delaying gratification, so that there would be time to do whatever is necessary to earn the benefits.

After technology rolls out, work is performed by automation, by robotics, by intellos, or some other mechanism, unless alien citizens deliberately desire to become part of some work process. This is a clash with the training, if it is based on the historical needs of the society. The alien civilization through its formative years, had a strong need for citizens to produce things, physical objects and knowledge, and to perform the functions of the society in maintaining itself and satisfying its citizens. Thus, young alien citizens will be immersed in a civilization that has perfected the ability to satisfy citizen demands, quite in contrast with how demands were met in the early days of the society, and coincidentally, when the curriculum for training young citizens was being set up.

The training relating to delayed gratification will be vestigial. After some years within the alien society, young citizens would begin to forget the lessons of the early days of the civilization, and become very accustomed to simply requesting goods and services and receiving them very promptly. After more time, the training in this regard would be forgotten, or written off as irrelevant. The civilization, in going through the grand transitions, has some re-thinking to do.

There is one thing left in the society that requires an inordinate degree of appreciation for delayed gratification. That is star travel. Seriously preparing for it would start after the grand transitions were over, and the civilization had transitioned to its long-term stable state. There is an immense amount of work necessary to prepare for a interstellar probe, ranging from the astronomical observations needed to choose a destination, to designing the ship, to building it, and figuring out how to stretch reliability capability to the long periods of the mission. There are many details to the design, and not just of the ship, but also of the whole mission itself. All of these hark back to the old way of working with no immediate reward. Perhaps all the construction work would be done robotically, but since this is a task of importance to the citizens, as encapsulated in the fundamental memes of their civilization, they would likely be involved. Tradeoffs between maximum speed and flight time have to be made.

The point to be extracted here is that if the alien civilization allows one of its main goals, satisfaction of citizens’ desires, to be organized in a way which gradually reduces the ability and interest of the citizens in working on or being involved with star travel, except as entertainment, it will be undermining the ability to accomplish the task. It may even undermine the support for it, meme or no meme. There is a distinction between a civilization which puts meeting citizen desires as its top priority, and a civilization which understands the effects of meeting citizen desires in certain ways on the mass psychology of the citizen population, and therefore tempers the methods by which desires are satisfied. In simple terms, citizens who get used to a daily diet of needs being satisfied without delay and without anything more than a request would not likely care about a star travel venture. This may seem like a fine line, but in looking for Great Filters that occur in the final phases of an alien civilizations pre-star travel period, it is necessary to try and understand the psychology of the average citizen. They are the ones who will support or abandon the goals of the star travel meme.

This problem of the psychology of the average citizen is related to and analogous to the Happy Life Great Filter, but they are not one and the same. In this situation, the citizens do not become totally absorbed in their own enjoyable lives, as in the Happy Life scenario, but instead, they are shaped by the procedures of their own society to not want to do anything that has a long period of delay in it. Either way, no star travel and no aliens visiting Earth capitals.

The Hidden Dilemma of Deliberate Speciation

The choice of an alien civilization to create a new species to replace itself was discussed in previous posts. It is obviously a monumental decision, and forms the basis for the differentiation of the two main categories of alien civilization that might be colonizing other solar systems than their home one. One maintains their own species and colonizes to spread this species elsewhere; the other colonizes to spread civilization there, and may engage in speciation either for their home world, if it produces better aliens according to a wide range of metrics, or for other planets they colonize, either in their own solar system or in other ones.

There is even another dilemma hidden within the choice of speciation. It relates to intellos. Intellos are the biological equivalent of robots; essentially animals of any sort designed to perform certain tasks within the alien civilization. Once genetics becomes as powerful and well understood as mechanics, this will be an option for performing tasks within the civilization. Since the alien civilization will understand what genes can be used for intelligence, they would be able to give any particular intello design whatever level of intelligence would be appropriate for the designated tasks it would perform.

Step back and ask about the regulation of behavior between aliens and between aliens and any organization, such as an agency of government. There must be some codes recorded so that aliens know the proper behavior, or the limits of proper behavior, and also so that any agency will have directions as to what they should do for, and may not do to an alien citizen. There are countless possibilities, and some obvious ones are what communication content is prohibited, to whom and under which conditions; what repairs will be done by whom for an alien who is injured, or damaged by other means if any still remain, including damage caused by aging; what ownership is permitted and what is required; what nutrition is provided by the government; how employment is to be divided up when more than one alien wants to take some position; what level of expense is allowed by an alien citizen; and so on. They may relate to what genetics an alien citizen will receive and what training.

Now leap forward to the time after the genetics grand transition, which occurs very early in the history of the alien civilization. They decide to deliberately speciate, and design a new species to replace their own. Do they apply the same regulations to the new species? Does the old species lose out on any privileges? This is a fairly easy question to ponder, as we have the old species of aliens being replaced by the new one. Does it depend on how dissimilar the new species is?

At about the same time, the aliens are busy creating intellos to perform certain functions within their society. They go through the costs and expenses having them will be and compare them to robots. Whatever is more efficient, when looked at from a total picture, will likely be used, unless the preferences of the aliens overrides efficiency. They might like to have something that looks like a very cute animal answering their questions and carrying their umbrellas.

Since the aliens are so intelligent, sooner or later one of them will ask why the civilization’s regulations that apply to the old species, and which have been transferred over to the new species, do not also apply to the intellos, or some of them. What is the basis for the difference in treatment? Intellos might be created to be as smart as the old species of aliens, or could be if the alien civilization decided to do this. Neither the new species or the intellos are involved with reproduction, as it is more efficient to create new creatures industrially. What is the basis upon which the regulations will take effect?

The realization will dawn on them that there is none.

This is the dilemma that deliberate speciation comes with. There was a basis for treating alien citizens different from intellos of all sorts, and that basis was the genetic code that creates them. Alien citizens have code which evolved and was only selected from to provide improvements, perhaps some further tinkering was done. Intellos are purely synthetic. But if a new species is created to replace the old species of aliens, this argument fails and the basis evaporates.

The alien civilization will have to carefully pick what regulations will apply to which type of creature, and somehow determine what the basis is for their choice. It must be arbitrary. Is it written on the basis of what society can afford, or on the basis of the purpose for which the creature is created, either to join the class of aliens who essentially rule the planet, or the servant class of intellos? Will this dilemma result in some new regulations as to what qualities may be endowed to intellos, such as no longevity greater than some number of years, or no intelligence genes which would place them too close to the alien species, or that they must look like some stereotypes, or something else more sophisticated?

This dilemma may rock the foundations of a category A2 alien civilization, and call into question their memes relating to the fundamental purpose of their civilization. When they seek to apply the purpose they ascribe to, spreading intelligent life to other planets in the galaxy, they might think about applying it to their own home planet. What would it mean there? They could create as many intellos of any type or variety of types as they wanted to, but how would that connect to their fundamental meme? They will have blurred the definitions of the terms used in the memes and this could lead to confusion on a large scale, occurring near the end of the genetics grand transition. What exactly do they want to accomplish?

In a category A1 alien civilization, everything is clear because they have their own traditional species that they can restrict their regulations to, and come up with some other regulations for intellos. The distinction between the two is written in the different genetic codes used for them. Not so with a category A2 civilization.

As the A2 aliens struggle with what criteria they will use to see who receives the benefits of their civilization and who will serve to create those benefits, some other bright citizen might want to see if their criteria apply to robots of any type. If intelligence is used as a criteria, then robots might well fall within the bounds set up to determine the receiving class for benefits. Clearly their society will have to face some very deep questions relating to their choice of meme.

When Should We Tell Them?

Logbook #17 Prof. Jerome Singh University of Buenos Aires Cetacean Automatic Translation Project

7/7/2022 Found yet another bug in the harmonic analysis section of the code. Following my hunch that cetaceans use harmonics as part of their language, I have completed a new code to translate the 3,200 hours of cetacean vocalizations in yet another way. The bug was misanalyzing all the even harmonics and caused the code to output garbage into the vocabulary, syntax and grammar codes’ front ends. The bug was caused by an edit done yesterday in the repair of the previous bug in the harmonic analysis subroutines. Only one line was affected incorrectly by the edit, but it was in the main sequence of analysis, and affected all vocalizations.

Received an email from the team at U. Naples, indicating that no one there thinks the harmonic hypothesis could possibly work, as there has been no indication that the vocal structures of the cetaceans can modulate higher harmonics in a controlled way. They suggested I abandon this direction of work and instead concentrate on the rise and decay hypothesis that they favor. After working on this code for two years, there is no chance that I will abandon it until I have exhausted every possibility. They have provided the vocabulary processer code and it is remarkably well conceived and written, but just because they have strength in cross-language vocabulary extraction does not mean they are the experts on sound content, especially with non-human species.

The physics department supercomputer was heavily loaded this evening, and I was not able to run all sectors of the code with all the data base. I ran the vocalization on the whole data base, which completed with no errors. The word isolation and vocabulary determination by pattern recognition of stops seemed to work with the output from the vocalization run. The big bear code of meaning assessment , syntax with both prefix and suffix turned on, and grammar derivation from word order analysis only ran part way, using one quarter of the cores for nine hours, but produced some very solid metrics, indicating a level of success. Using this, I was able only to run six minutes of vocalization from the two porpoises in Jamaica, the block I usually test with, on the supercomputer before my allocation elapsed. No crashes this evening.

The total front-to-back code sequence worked and produced some translations, which of course will have to be verified extensively. Included a cut and paste of the output:

“Oeoeiu ,I think I have figured out why the food in this prison is so wretched. I watch the captors eating on the veranda above the pool and they all eat the same thing, day after day, person after person. It’s this layered thing with puffy pads on the top and bottom and some brown, green and red layers in the middle. The only difference is that sometimes yellow liquid oozes out and sometimes red liquid. Definitely dead stuff, and probably dead for a long time. Their taste buds must be vestigial. That’s why they feed us tilapia every day of our captivity. I think I going to turn into one if I don’t get something different. Do you remember the cod feast we had in the wawioea ocean? I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“Oaaie, they are just dumb primates. They don’t know anything at all about immorality or ethics. At least they don’t torture or kill us. Sometimes you even like playing with them in the big pool. And we’re together. You have somebody to talk to. Just imagine if you had to live alone with nobody but them to interact with every day. That’s what really would drive you out of your mind.”

“Sure. Don’t ever tell anyone this if we escape, but I have been thinking of breaking the seventh commandment. It can’t really apply in situations like we are in. All over the world we are being killed accidentally and deliberately. The last few generations have been the worst in a million years. I think you have to go back to an ice age to find something this bad. I don’t want to be the one to break the commandment, but someone should.”

“Oaaie, we discussed the commandments in the pod a hundred times. Everybody knows them and knows not to break them. You won’t find anyone willing to do it and you should stop thinking about it. It is not going to make you any happier and it certainly isn’t going to get you any cod. Just stop thinking about your stomach.”

“Besides, you know the reason for it. They might start exterminating us out of jealousy. Primates are unpredictable. They haven’t had the millions of years of experience that we have had that gives us the calmness and the tolerance we have. They’re newcomers to their position as power-holders on the planet. That means never knowing for certain what they will do.”

“If you tell them we were once the dominant power-holders on land, millions of years ago, but we figured out living on land is much less enjoyable than living in the sea and genetically modified ourselves to do that, they would feel so much envy because they cannot do the same. They are stuck on land, and you know how horrible that feels. Do you think they will give you some mackerel and grouper just because you figure out how to tell them we were the greatest civilization ever on Earth? They might just become enraged or confused by it. Probably confused as they wouldn’t be able to imagine a species that gave up all that they have worked hard to achieve, just so to have a good time in the world’s oceans. They wouldn’t believe you. So stop even thinking about the seventh commandment, except on how to live by it. ‘No communication with other species’ is about as clear as any commandment is.”

“Okay, okay, okay. I wasn’t thinking of breaking that or any commandment. But I am thinking that they might get so out-of-control that we have to do something. When should we tell them? After they have advanced a few more centuries and figured out what life is all about? We might be extinct by then. If I ever get out of this place, I’m going to start an ocean-wide discussion on whether that commandment is appropriate any more.”

Chain Reactions, Life Origination, Mutations, and Memes

Chain reactions in nuclear reactors are the means by which power is released from the uranium nuclei. One neutron strikes a U-235 nucleus, and it fissions, releasing two or three neutrons. This second generation of neutrons goes on its way, and one or more of them possibly strikes another U-235 nucleus, and the same fissioning occurs. At each generation, two or three neutrons are produced when one is absorbed. There are losses, but if the number of neutrons effectively striking a U-235 nucleus is larger than the number that do in the previous generation, there is increasing power generated. If the number of neutrons is the same for each generation, there is stable power generated.

In a large block of reactor core material, there can be great differences in the ratio of neutrons of succeeding generations. If there is one region which can be isolated which has a ratio of one or more, a persisting chain reaction continues. What happens in other regions influences the ratio, as if in neighboring regions, only some ratio below unity is maintained, the neutrons produced each generation can slip back into the most productive region to help maintain the reaction there. But if there is no region where the ratio is above one, there is no chain reaction.

The mathematics of neutron multiplication in nuclear reactors is simple to understand, but it is not isolated to this single example. Consider instead the origination of life. One hypothesis, discussed in another post, is that there is a molecule, probably some amino acid combination, which can replicate itself if the right amino acids contact it. There are certainly processes which will disassemble the amino acid combination. If an average replicating combination can make more than one copy of itself before it disassembles, we have a chain reaction, and the number will increase. The observation that was noted with respect to neutrons and fissions is also true for amino acid combinations and replication: if there is a region where the ratio is higher than one, replication will succeed and numbers will increase. Other regions may have lower ratios, and contribute to what happens in the most successful region. But if there is no single region where the ratio exceeds unity, replication cannot succeed and life origination does not accomplish the critical first step.

There are multiple conditions which affect the multiplication rate for neutrons and fission and also for the replication rate of amino acid combinations. Conditions change in a nuclear reactor core as more U-235 nuclei disappear through fission, and other elements present absorb neutons and transmute. Adjustments or some feedback mechanism is needed to maintain power production for an extended period. The same happens with the replication of amino acid combinations. The conditions have to be maintained for a long time, in fact, for long enough that some modification can be found by random chance that has a higher replication rate or is more tolerant of variations in conditions; likely the modification is more complex. Life originates if through the many, many steps needed to form cells and then to allow them to become more diverse with specialization and other features, the right conditions for each of the steps is maintained for a long time, long on the evolutionary scale.

This means that the same situation exists for successive mutations as exists for the original replication that occurred at the very start of the origin of life. Each mutation produces something that can self-replicate, provided the conditions are right, in a generational ratio greater than one. By the time a mutation is established, the conditions necessary for previous steps can change, so that the previous step cannot be repeated. Life goes onward, not backward. There again must be some region with the right conditions for extended time. The region can be different for different steps, and undoubtedly will be for steps sufficiently distant on the chain of evolutionary organisms. Some examples are more than obvious: amino acid combinations need to replicate in a soup containing amino acids of the right variety; cells replicate in situations where whatever food they require is present; photosynthetic cells need sufficient photons of the correct wavelengths; and so on.

There is a profoundly important implication here. Mutations are local, not global, and might be restricted in geographic extent. What evolves in one place is not what evolves in another place. This is obvious with respect to flora and fauna, but it is just as true with something invisible: individual genes controlling individual characteristics, or contributing to them. Genetic improvements occur locally, and may or may not disperse globally. This means that an alien planet may have very diverse populations in the period prior to civilization starting, when trade and migration become common.

Memes are often analogized with genes, but the basic mathematics is what is the same. In order for a meme to persist in an alien civilization, there has to be a locale where the number of young learning the meme and learning to transmit it are equal to or greater than one. Memes can die out just as easily as genetic mutations. The conditions in the locale where they are present can change, and replication can be less than one, meaning the meme will disappear in time, after a long period where there were some followers, but less and less each generation.

Another thing that should be noted is that neutron multiplication, life origination, mutation persistence, and meme propagation can have growth rates higher than one, and if the conditions are right over an extended geographic area, can spread like a prairie fire. There is a natural speed by which each of them can propagate, which is dependent on the rate of transmission of a carrier, such as a neutron of the right speed. The first instance of the mutation might find that the characteristic that is engendered by the mutation increase the replication rate per generation by a significant amount, and this occurs in a wide area as the conditions it can tolerate are larger than previous mutations. Away runs the mutation, or the fission, or the meme.

This has implications for seeding by alien civilizations. If they can find the right mutation, one that diverts the normal evolution that is occurring on a colony planet to a direction they prefer, and it can have a higher replication rate than the native cells, or organisms, it could spread quickly and transform the planet’s biological structure. This blog has not yet examined the mechanisms by which seeding could be done, but it obviously is a most interesting topic.

Factionalism and the Genetic Grand Transition

As a reminder, factionalism is a term used in this blog to refer to any division of the citizens in an alien civilization into groups which compete against one another. They can be geographically based, genetics based, economics based, native language based, caste based, belief based, or any other division. Factions are likely to be the natural state of any alien species that begins to live in cities, based on geography at first. They should eventually coalesce, and this post discusses how.

Factions inhibit the advance of technology across the board, and concentrate it on areas that are useful in improving the relative standing of individual factions. This can lead to some obvious pitfalls. First, one way to improve relative standing is to attack another faction, or to attempt to conquer or control another faction. Larger spans of control, if they are successfully managed, can be a positive feedback effect that provides more options and capability for further enlargement of one faction’s span of control over other factions. Second, leaving some areas of technology untouched or with minimal advances can result in a society that is unbalanced, resulting in excessive resource usage or some other damaging effect.

The genetics grand transition is when genetic engineering is used to improve the genome of a civilization. There are some phases into which this gradual transition can be divided. One is when genetic selection is used for a new generation of aliens. Another is when industrial gestation is developed, and reproduction is gradually transferred from biological means to industrial means. A third is when the genome is added to by the invention and introduction of novel non-evolved genes. This last phase may involve speciation as well.

Genes used for the new generation would be selected for the improvement of the gene pool in many aspects, including intelligence, strength, longevity, immune performance, size and proportion, attractiveness, athletic capability, resistance to injury, healing rate, food tolerances, and many others. There are probably many other capabilities related to the efficiency and stabilization of individual organs, but the performance of organs are not yet well quantified by scientists here on Earth, making it a bit hard to discuss. For example, there could be genetic improvements related to the alien equivalent of a liver, in which the organ’s ability to remove toxins and purify internal liquids is improved.

The interaction of factionalism and the genetics grand transition should be obvious. Factionalism is based on the differences between groups, and many of those depend on some denomination of differences in traits that are genetically controlled. If genetic improvements osmose into all factions, and are adopted, these differences are likely to diminish and in some cases disappear. If one faction vilifies another faction as being non-intelligent, this difference will be abated by the introduction of intelligence genes into both factions, producing equal results. If one faction considers itself superior because of some talents, genetically determined, these also could become equalized.

Obviously geography is not going to go away with the grand transition for genetics, but just consider how difficult it is to maintain factionalism based on geography when the citizens in both geographic areas are pretty much identical. What is the basis for those seeking to maintain factionalism to call upon their followers to wish harm to those of the other faction? History could be used, but history diminishes with time, measured in generations.

Another factor relates to a single attribute, intelligence. As intelligence increases in all members of new generations, they will gradually gain the ability to use that intelligence to question such claims. Intelligence, as has been pointed out, is not memory or speed in doing routine computations, but is closely related to creative and critical thinking. This ability becoming universal does not bode well for demagogues or others seeking to maintain factional opinions among the body of citizens. Thus, two very serious factors will undermine factionalism, and the unification that was discussed in another post is likely to be gradually introduced.

Any trend in society can be opposed, and the trend to unification can be opposed. It can be opposed by those in charge of one faction by developing memes for factionalism and making sure they are taught in the curriculum used for all young members of their faction. Memes are like glue, they stick in the brain of those taught them, and are hard to remove. The difficulty that schemers with this plan face is that other factions may not be doing the same thing. If there are several factions on the planet, and only one is stressing the continuation of factionalism, the best memes possible may erode from the edges and the interest of the last remaining stronghold of factionalism might decline. Once the decline starts, if the curriculum is modified accordingly, a spiral starts toward unification.

Another tactic to delay unification trends is the exacerbation of factionalism and a descent into attacks and even war. Frequent war would reinforce factionalism, by inducing a fear of the effects of war. One response to war is a withdrawal from contact with other factions, although if it is a faction that prefers unification that wins, and the holdout for factionalism that loses, the trend to unification will be reinforced.

Disinformation might be used in an alien civilization that does not have free communication between factions. If the hierarchy of the faction that is attempting to maintain factionalism, and therefore its own span of control and inherent advantages, and they use disinformation to do it, the technique may be successful as long as technology does not spawn some simple means of communications between factions. Unfortunately, that would mean stopping technological development or limiting its implementation, both of which might be very hard to do.

Thus, factionalism based on geographical divisions becomes harder to maintain as time, and therefore technological progress, continues. The more obvious tactics have counters to them, some natural, and some chosen by aliens in the other factions. This does not mean that factionalism does not have the possibility of slowing progress or even stopping it. Besides through the mechanism of destruction in war, there are other means by which geographic factionalism might perchance continue to plague a planet.

Some other types of factionalism are harder to envision remaining through the genetic grand transition. Caste divisions obvious collapse, unless genetic improvements are somehow rationed to only certain castes, or the grand transition is distorted to be used to maintain the divisions by an enforced decision to choose the genetic endowment of different castes to be different, and perpetuate castes. Factionalism based on language or belief should crumble with more communication, as unification seeps into these areas as well. Factionalism based on economics only could be expected to be maintained if the intelligence enhancement portion of the genetics grand transition is somehow sidelined.

It should be clear at this point that factionalism is put under great pressure by the genetics grand transition, and that it is likely that it will give way to unification as time passes. The grand transition might take several generations to complete, and this might also be a good time scale for unification to occur. While there are tactics to delay the demise of factionalism, none of them seem immune to this pressure. Thus, there is no reason to assume that factionalism is the principal cause of the lack of aliens in our marketplaces.

Is the Continuing Aspiration Assumption Wrong?

In a recent post, the concept of discrepancies was introduced. Discrepancies are the remaining gaps in different areas of science and engineering between what the alien civilization has already discovered and invented and what the ultimate limits are. In certain very unusual situations, there could be a discrepancy that might cause disruption to the civilization, even some very severe situations. These situations arise because a particular discrepancy was in a critical area, one that led to some concentrated effects, either directly or in a cascade.

The probability of such serious situations arising is related to the number of remaining discrepancies. The constant progress assumption has been used here, being that scientists and engineers keep working on technology advances at about the same rate, and it is just that continuing advances become more elusive that slows down the rate of advance as the asymptotic limits are approached.

Let’s question this assumption. Another reasonable assumption is that aliens do not enter the fields of science and engineering which are already played out, with only a few remaining discrepancies to be found. Working without results, even if it is to verify past results while searching for overlooked concepts, seems boring. If the society allows individual choice as to what a citizen works on, there would seem to be less and less of them who specialize sufficiently in science and technology to keep the progress toward the asymptote going. The earlier that the number of participants in a field of science or engineering starts to drop and eventually dries up, the more discrepancies that are left undiscovered. Boredom seems to be a block toward the conclusion of technology advance.

The more discrepancies that are left undiscovered, or that are postponed, the more likely it is that some serious problem can arise with technology. As noted elsewhere, the curriculum of training that the society adopts for the education of its young citizens will certainly affect what the civilization does and what it ignores. But education is a technology field, and if discrepancies are left in that field, the impetus that young citizens feel to work on the more elusive problems in science and engineering might diminish, which would be a feedback effect. Less work could be done on education because of flaws in the understanding of education.

Another aspect of discrepancies is that if the reduction in effort devoted to technology is across the board, rather than occurring in certain fields which fall out of favor, the fields which would tend to be the latest developed will be the ones with the greatest number of discrepancies. If the boredom and diversion effects are strong enough, it might be that there could be enough discrepancies to cripple progress in some areas. And one area which would be expected to be later than others is star travel.

Star travel is not possible without a combination of predecessor areas being developed first. It involves, among other things, energy storage and power generation in small and even miniature sizes, materials science in areas including radiation resistance and embrittlement resistance, hibernation or long term storage of cooled cells, propulsion and steering, extreme reliability and redundancy, weight reduction for all components, navigation, sensors and reactive systems for avoiding obstacles, and many others. If science and engineering become too tedious for alien citizens to engage in, some of these might not be completed. This would mean no star travel. So, unless the alien civilization curriculum is somehow perfected to cause many young citizens to voluntarily work in science and engineering, when the rewards are diminishing and the challenges increasing, there may be a halt in progress and the civilization resting on a plateau, although a very high one in technology level, compared to others.

One way to say this is that if the early alien civilization, when it is working on technology and passing through some of the grand transitions, accidentally puts training and education on the back burner, and instead concentrates on other areas of science and technology, it may be doing itself in. By not treating this subject as one of high importance, it may be causing itself to have a later shortage of scientists and engineers, when many discrepancies in different fields remain, some of which may be important and even capable of causing the civilization to be disrupted. Thus, by thinking through the process by which an alien civilization moves forward in technology, and positing some rather reasonable effects, it becomes clear that there are choices that have to be made. Perhaps it will be obvious to the alien civilization that it needs to take actions to ensure technology progress continues to be made, and the alien civilization will properly respond. Perhaps not.

This discussion leads to the question as to how an alien civilization will choose which areas of technology it will emphasize. Who makes that decision? If it is made by young citizens, are there some areas of technology which are more attractive than others, and would therefore be preferred? Is there a feedback effect?

If progress is being made in one area at a high rate, and it captures the attention of the civilization, this area would likely attract more young citizens into attempting to specialize in it, including the best and brightest of them. Yes, after the genetic grand transition, every citizen will be in the best and brightest group, but before that, there would be a differentiation. This means that if a field is doing spectacularly well, it develops an attractiveness which brings more young citizens into the field, which would then tend to make the field continue to develop and even produce more spectacular results. This is a clear feedback loop.

Thus, without some way to adjust the interest level of young citizens, a natural feedback loop arises which can shortchange some areas of technology that might prove critical to the civilization avoiding disruptions and alternatively, not reach the capability to visit other solar systems. This feedback loop is another example of the hidden feedback loops that can occur in society which will distort it, and cause it to undergo problems or losses it would not otherwise face. Another feedback loop which has been discussed in the natural effect of the reduction in technology jumps leading to fewer people to find more of them, which will then lead to less of them being found in any given generation, and so on – another feedback loop to be sure.

This situation arises from one root cause, a failure of the civilization to disperse its educated young properly, with the needs of the civilization in mind, as opposed to the perhaps popularized attractiveness of technology in general and some areas of technology in specific.

How Asymptotic Would Asymptotic Be?

This blog is concerned about diagnosing the problem we are facing: aliens haven’t visited us yet. In order to understand this, the nature of an alien civilization has been explored, as far as possible. This exploration is made much, much easier by the concept of asymptotic technology. This concept can be explained simply. Technology, meaning science and engineering, continues to improve, but there is only so much that can be discovered. After the initial discoveries, the rate of progress picks up, but then later it drops off, as scientists and engineers find that most discoveries and inventions have already been made. Each further one takes more and more effort. This is the nature of anything that is finite. Sooner or later, a slowing must happen, and the total amount of science and engineering begins to approach the limit. The approach is gradual, and continually slows, as there is less and less left to find. This describes the asymptotic nature of technology progress – it ever more gradually approaches the limit.

This is all well and good, but there may be a problem hidden in the process. At any time, there may be unknown parts. Science discoveries and engineering inventions are discrete things, so the approach to the limit moves by small jumps, but there can be missing parts.

To try and understand what asymptotic closure means, consider an example. One part of science and engineering is genetics, and as it progresses, an alien civilization which continues their work in this area will develop better and better ways to design the genes that create intelligence. At any given time, there may be some discoveries which have gone so far unnoticed. In other words, if these discoveries are soon turned into genetic engineering advances, different generations will become smarter and smarter until the time between new ideas in this area becomes longer that the intergenerational time, and then only certain generations will be better, and the level of intelligence in aliens will stay constant.

It is more usual that the changes grow smaller and smaller as time progresses, but invention is a random process, and there could certainly be a discovery near the asymptotic limit which is large. In other words, after the alien citizens have been constant in intelligence for many generations, a surprise could happen and a remarkable improvement is found. The generation following this discovery is quite a bit smarter and more capable mentally.
This phenomenon of improvement near the end of the process occurring in fits and starts can happen in any of the fields within technology. In most areas of technology, this has nothing but positive effects. Just exactly when the alien civilization improves in intelligence does not seem to be crucial to their progress. But certain other areas may have problems.

Let’s call the gaps between the final state and the near-asymptotic state discrepancies. There would be discrepancies in all the fields of science and engineering, and they will gradually be removed. Suppose there are discrepancies in reliability engineering in some component critical to the infrastructure. Perhaps the alien civilization uses electricity generated in a central fusion plant. A failure happens. The infrastructure goes dark. This could create serious issues, but not ones which would devastate the society. Could there be any discrepancies which would?

To try and understand if there could be discrepancies which would devastate an alien civilization, and even so much as to halt their progress toward interstellar travel, it is necessary to form an idea of the concentration of effects. To actually halt progress toward star travel, the effect would have to be civilization-wide and unrecoverable. What systems could fail and create a long-term civilization-wide problem? If the alien civilization is laid out as has been thought through in a previous post, with many separated cities, a failure in one might be a devastating experience in the city in which it happened, but for other cities it would be a learning experience. One system that has been discussed which would cover the entire planet relates to climate control. If the alien civilization is engaged in climate control of their world, a failure in the process could conceivably affect many areas of the planet. But even this failure would only seem to affect some fraction of cities, perhaps ones which were in low-lying areas subjectable to flooding, or in a part of the coastline where cyclones or tsunamis could form.

Another option is something which could propagate from one city to another. If there was a discrepancy in the programming of robots or the training of intellos, perhaps something could be imagined which would have them communicating and organizing covertly, and then causing planet-wide disruption. As noted before in the discussion of a possible revolt of intellos or a master computer acting senselessly, most of the errors in training or programming would result in visible signatures and be correctable early on. But it is not inconceivable, only extreme in unlikeliness, that something global could occur.

This leaves one remaining option. Is it possible that discrepancies in psychology could leave some individuals interested in disruption of the civilization, yet with the ability to create civilization-wide devastation? This is almost like imagining some conspiracy with no rational end among highly intelligent and educated individuals. Again, it is not inconceivable, but so unlikely as to require a very open mind to even consider the possibilities.

If we assume there are a huge number of alien civilizations which reach asymptotic technology, it might be reasonable to think that a very few of them could be so unlucky as to have something like a robot revolt or a group of powerful individuals who coalesce into a conspiracy, or some failure in climate engineering, or something else able to create world-wide disruption so severe that the civilization could not recover from it, ever, and that it prevents the alien civilization from preparing to travel to other stars. While conceivable, super-discrepancies do not seem to be a means to explain where the aliens are and why they have not visited Earth.

Would Intellos Revolt?

The idea behind this post is extremely simple. As an alien civilization progresses, it conquers genetics and can create any plant or animal it wants, within obvious limits, structural, ontogenic, energy-related, and probably a thousand more. But by and large, a huge variety of animals could be created, with as much intelligence as the designers wanted to give them. In a previous blog, it was noted that some tasks in an alien civilization might be better done by intellos, intelligent synthetic creatures, rather than robots. One reason was that it might be easier to make an associative brain biologically than electronically. Another reason might be that intellos are more energy-efficient. There could be plenty of reasons, but listing them is not the point of this post. The point is, if there was an alien society with lots of intellos around, and the intelligence given to the smartest of them was enough to do any task in society, meaning that perhaps it was a bit higher than almost everybody on Earth at the present era, they might just decide to quit, or to band together and upset the apple-cart.

Here on Earth we are much further along in designing robots than intellos, and so in discussions of the future it is robot this and robot that, but the truth may be that intellos are simply better at some tasks than robots, they are much cheaper to make and maintain, and can be designed with possibly more capability. The question of cost seems almost impossible to answer any other way than that one can grow an animal cheaper than to manufacture a robot. As for maintenance, if the designers of the intellos put in the same capability that all organic life would have, the ability to self-repair most minor damage, it might be inherently cheaper to keep intellos running than to keep robots running.

Training intellos would be individually done, unlike robots which can simply be programmed with downloaded code. Training intellos is a separate operation, whereas training robots can mostly be done in the factory where they are made. Robots do need to be calibrated, if they make precision motions, but this is a small task compared with teaching an intello everything it needs to know in order to perform some function. So there is a cost-tradeoff, with some advantages favoring intellos and some favoring robots. Let’s just assume that robots do not win hands-down, and there are plenty of intellos in some alien civilizations.

There might be intellos functioning in industrial jobs, although that seems more natural for robotics to intervene. Our experience on Earth is that assembly work is automatable and can be done more cost-efficiently than done by humans, even if they are maintained at a low standard of living.

They might be used in all service tasks that are not automatable, if there are any. Consider the medical field. Aliens are going to require some medical treatment, even though they probably have licked all ailments. Accidents will occur at a very low rate, for the very same reason that other problems get fixed. Intelligent aliens, observing their society for millennia, will see what leads to accidents and design the infrastructure to eliminate them, or at least reduce them to a small amount. They will not be injuring one another deliberately, as a millennia or two of psychology should be enough to understand the alien brain well enough to eliminate that syndrome. But, even though rates have been lowered through the centuries, there will likely be a residual amount of medical attention that is needed. Will intellos play a role? Probably not in figuring out diagnoses or remedies, nor in doing surgery or wound treatment. Perhaps only in the interface between all the robotics and automation and the aliens themselves. It might be possible to design a robot which looked and acted like an alien, but is that what would make the aliens most comfortable? Perhaps a sympathetic creature devoted to their needs would serve better?

Continuing in that vein, perhaps all the interfaces where any length contact with aliens was necessary would be done by intellos. This might amount to a large number of them. For example, each alien might have several intellos acting like personal servants. Perhaps they would be designed to nap when not performing some function.

Analogies with Earth situations that have a hierarchy like this, with some number of those at the top, and a much larger number of those serving them at the bottom, can be made. Some of them have ended poorly, with a revolt by the serving classes. But intellos are designed creatures, so they might not be able to even conceive of a revolt.

Is it possible to design creatures which are both highly intelligent and absolutely docile? There are certainly animals on Earth which are quite docile, and breeds of others which are. Only a few animals have been converted to human use on Earth, and all of them are mostly docile. The first ones taken from wild conditions might not have been, but breeding for many generations has produced desirable qualities, which for many animals includes docility. Race horses and guard dogs are obvious exceptions, but they have been bred to emphasize other traits. So, it is possible that there exist combinations of genes which make an Earth animal docile, and this means that alien designers of intellos could choose from the same palette. This, however, does not answer the question completely. Is there anything about intelligence which would prevent docility from being bred in as well?

Intelligence, as we use it in this blog, means problem-solving ability. This means that intelligent synthetic creatures would be able to figure out how to disrupt their servitude, if they chose to. Once again, we are at the situation where goals are somehow set, and not derived from anything else. Would it be possible for some intello to set itself the goals of escaping from his position, and living independently? The master computer would probably have multiple means of surveillance operating, meaning that neither of these goals would be easy. Perhaps in the first days of intellos, when they were beginning to populate the civilization, some escapes and temporary hiding happened, but this would be a situation to be remedied, both in the design of intellos to be more docile or even afraid of being alone, and in their training, to promote more loyalty and devotion to the good of the aliens.

The more severe question asked in the title, could there be an intello revolt, is something that might occur in science fiction, if science fiction writers understood what was coming with the genetics grand transition. However, as with the fear of automation taking over the infrastructure and dispensing with the aliens themselves, there would be signatures of behavior that might lead to this, and it could be remedied much earlier than after the first revolt. How could an alien civilization, full of intelligent citizens, not notice such signs and ignore them? The civilization, once it passes the grand transitions, is also past the possibility of a degerating culture, where all aliens forget about maintaining the civilization and simply involve themselves in their individual interests. Each generation of aliens starts anew, with the same training. This means that any tendency in one generation to ignore important signs would not lead to a worse situation in the next generation. Every generation is given training that would prevent this.

So the answer is no. In a vivid imagination, a revolt of intellos could happen, but not in the context of an advanced alien civilization, unless there was some disaster which crippled the society’s ability to function. Without dumb citizens, dumb things do not happen.

Happy Life Alien Civilizations

In a previous post, a potential Great Filter was discussed, termed the Happy Life Great Filter. In essence, this said that one way that an alien civilization could be blocked from achieving star travel was for them to be successful at making themselves happy, in fact, so happy they didn’t really want to go star traveling, or anything else that might disrupt their lives.

This type of alien civilization, one that has mastered the art of supplying their citizens with everything they needed, within limits, and many things that would amuse, interest, entertain, or distract them, was also implicitly included in the categorization of alien societies, under an alias. Category A4 refers to alien civilizations which value their comfortable lives over everything else. They like the status quo and want to maintain it. In other words, their lives are happy and they want to keep them that way. The first categorization parameter, denoted by the A in A4, refers to what the civilization as a whole values. A different category related to star travel. Alien civilizations in category A4 have happy lives. They may or may not want to do star travel. That was parameterized by a second parameter, denoted by B.

Recall that parameter B was given three values: one where there was a desire to travel under any circumstances, two where it would only be done when the planet they reside on was under threat of some kind, and three where it would never be done. In order to try and understand if there is a strong coupling between A4 and B3, which is the postulation that having a Happy Life Great Filter makes, it is necessary to see if there is any mechanism that would make this coupling the most common one of the three that A4 can make to category B’s.

One way to look at this is to consider what exactly happiness would be or could be in an alien civilization. Happiness means that the aliens, assuming they have brains analogous to ours, react to neurochemicals that reinforce learning. This is how an associative brain works. Actions that lead to the satisfaction of needs, or are connected in a chain of associative learning to the satisfaction of needs, get reinforced. Happiness is having needs satisfied, or some connection, perhaps distant, to those needs made with some external action.

To be more clear, happiness initially comes with basic needs being met, such as by having a meal of good food. We can assume aliens eat, for now. It also comes from activities that have been connected with it. If someone provided good food in the past, seeing them is associated with good food, and brings happiness. Chains of association may be long, and knowing what the connections are is virtually impossible for the citizen who is becoming happy, but they exist.

If the majority of alien citizens find happiness in things connected with mundane satisfactions, or with personal interactions, or with amusements, or with physical activities, or with any number of other things, there will not be any impetus for star travel, and no desire to do it. Only if somehow a connection is made with it, perhaps via exploration in general, or an appreciation of astronomy, or a desire to travel, or something else that would connect to star travel via associations, will the society find happiness by being involved in an interstellar adventure, either by participating in the preparations, in hearing about the progress that is being made, or learning how it might be done.

The bottom line is elementary. If the alien civilization does not arrange so that one of the sources of happiness is star travel, the citizens of the planet will not support it. Much or most of the setting up of associations is done when the citizens are young, meaning that the way the alien civilization decides to educate its young members will determine how strong is the connection between having a good life and feeling happy and supporting and experiencing aspects of star travel is.

Education of the young citizens of an alien civilization would be expected to be done in an efficient and effective way, for the same reason that everything in the society would be. The civilization has intelligent members, and ways to improve anything not near optimal would be eventually found and tested, and then put into practice. Thus, if the alien civilization decides that an appreciation for star travel, or something more general that includes this, should be taught to the young members of the civilization, it will be and it will be done so effectively that the young will become adults who want to support star travel. It is a curriculum choice, and what determines that?

All the patterns of an alien civilization would be set down during the period when technology was being figured out, that period of a millennium or so when science was being competed and engineering was still developing ways to accomplish various tasks. The educational curriculum would be part of what was created or modified at that time. If there was a feeling among the citizens of that transitional time that related to travel or exploration, it would possibly be incorporated as part of the history of the civilization. Young members would learn that, for example, there were ten continents and aliens arose on one, and gradually explored and settled the other nine. They might also learn that there were ten planets, and their predecessors had gone and explored all the other nine, and set up satellites or ground stations on each of them, resulting in some benefits. This type of exploration would be taught as a positive experience that assisted their civilization to accomplish its goals and to make their high living standards possible.

Other examples could certainly be found that would serve to provide a motivation for the citizens during the transition time to make the decision to include events and historical episodes in the curriculum that would tend to associate star travel with one of the higher orders of happiness. On the other hand, an alien civilization without such history, or which had for some reason chosen to denigrate it, would not be making the right associations, and the A4 civilization would never leave their own solar system.

Biological-Robotic Hybrids

In previous posts, both asymptotic robotics and asymptotic genetics were discussed. The former covered what might be expected if the promise of robotics was fulfilled: autonomous robots capable of a wide-range of tasks, able to communicate in a variety of ways with their alien creators, and of course deeply connected with the re-cycling paradigm that dominates the material movements within alien cities. But non-autonomous robots, both in controlling functions and in handling functions, such as manufacturing, sorting, transporting, growing, and countless other tasks, would likely predominate in numbers. They could be considered one of the principal contributors to the high standard of living of alien citizens; work could be done by robots, leaving alien citizens to do what they chose to.

The latter category was less familiar to us, but equally diverse. Biology would be brought under the same level of control as mechanics and chemistry, and wherever an organic chemical processing function was needed, a biological solution might be found. Nutrition might be taken care of in ways not contemplated by us, with food generated by a combination of synthetic biological paths and industrial paths, with agriculture disappearing except for novelties and interests. Animals and plants of any description would be available for production. But at the top of the biological synthesis heap were intellos, this blog’s name for synthetic organisms with high intelligence. These were creatures of any shape or variety, possessing brains able to think. They would have the thinking ability of any level desired. A pet could be produced which would understand spoken language, if some alien wanted one. Servants could be produced to perform any function. Tasks in the alien civilization could be perfomed by intellos, if they were more efficient at the task, or if they make the interface between alien citizens and the city infrastructure more appealing to the average alien citizen.

This led to the conclusion that, if an alien visit ever did take place on Earth, what stepped off the starship might not be the aliens who created the civilization. It could be highly intelligent and networked robots or even synthetic organisms, intellos, built for star traveling. But there are more, intermediate options.

Robots might have brains, if one can call their computing system a brain, that are sequential processors similar but much more advanced that what we do with computers nowadays on Earth. It is not clear that it would be possible to have associative processors, which are what we and other animals on Earth have, efficiently built in any type of mechanical equivalent. It might be theoretically possible, but practically very inefficient, compared to growing a biological brain with hundreds of types of neurons with thousands of synapses each. Thus, it might be more efficient to build a hybrid device, with external mechanisms robotic and the controller biological.

Such a hybrid has some grave negative aspects that must be overcome before it would be efficient. Both biologics and mechanics take power sources and fuel supplies, but different ones. There would have to be both of them available within any autonomous hybrid device. Creativity on the part of alien designers might overcome this obstacle, by finding ways to power biological cells with electricity. This type of common fuel source might reduce some of the inefficiency, but would not remove all of it. Having a wholly mechanical device which simply runs on electricity or by some alien equivalent of a fuel cell means the power units would be simpler, and more of the mass of the device could be devoted to other functions.

The power dilemma could be solved a different way, with some sort of chemical fuel being taken in that would serve as a power source for the biological components, and which would feed into a power converter that produced electric power. With even more creativity, some other mechanical functions might be powered directly with the fuel chemical, although some electricity for sensors and signaling would likely be required. Or with even more creativity, there could be hybrids which have more biological components than just the brain. Perhaps sensors, such as vision or audio sensors, being biological more simply communicate with a biological brain, so incorporating them into a hybrid creature would make good engineering sense.

The next step in designing a hybrid creature would involve extending the neural system past the brain and possible sensors to serve as a communication channel within the hybrid creature’s body. This might only make sense if it proved to be a difficult engineering problem to develop neural to electronic connections sufficiently high bandwidth to enable the biological brain to control the motion mechanisms of the device and get back the robotic equivalent of proprioceptive sensors. If low bandwidth is all that can be efficiently accomplished, doing the conversion at the end of a neural channel might be the best bet. But this comes with all types of overhead. Somehow the neural communication channels have to be fed and otherwise maintained. This is not exactly an easy biological engineering feat.

If hybrids were considered for non-autonomous devices, some of these problems evaporate. For example, a spaceship controller might be biological, and have the necessary apparatus for sustaining it packaged separately. There would be no need to figure out the layout of the device to the detail needed for an autonomous device, where balance, resilience to vibration and shock, flexibility, and other attributes need to be taken into account. Everything could be hard-mounted and designed individually without taking into account interactions, except at the designed interfaces. Perhaps not just spaceships, but vehicles of many types could be semi-autonomous, with hybrid controllers and a combination of biological and mechanical sensors, with appropriate conversion devices attached near to each sensor as necessary.

Besides vehicles, manufacturing or recycling facilities might benefit from hybrid controllers. Here, there is even less concern that in vehicles and autonomous devices about layout, dual fuel systems, conversion systems, interfaces, and so on. One’s imagination can run wild in devising hybrid systems for different functions in the city infrastructure. Even what this blog has termed the master computer needed as a computational overlord of each city’s infrastructure might be a hybrid device. This might make interaction with the alien citizens easier to implement.

Since we are so far from asymptotic genetics, it is difficult to conceive of whether the engineering problems of creating hybrid devices will simply melt away, and if the proposed advantages would emerge. At this point, there is nothing that we can envisage that would prevent the first thing that steps off an alien-originated starship which arrived at Earth from being a hybrid creature.

In a sense, this could be speciation taken far past the limits previously contemplated. Could an alien species eliminate itself, with no other species there to replace it, only hybrids, or cyborgs as they have been called in other places? This is a large topic that deserves to be examined separately.