The Implications of Finding Aliens – Example 4

This example continues the set of three already posted by postulating a situation in which we learn something about aliens, and then speculating about how it would affect Earth. The first three examples had no communication with aliens in it, and worse, they had no direct observation of aliens. They were all at-a-distance scenarios. This example continues the parameter excursion to include something a bit more close-at-hand, but still not exactly contact.

Suppose tomorrow morning some astute amateur astronomer notices a new comet. Looking to have his name attached, and to reap the fame of being the first to find it, he announces the astronomical coordinates of the new comet, which is simply a barely discernable point of light. As with all new comets, many other observers turn to corroborate the finding, in the usual courtesy of the amateur community. It is there.

Now comes the period of watching it to observe its motion, and to begin to plot its orbit, and see just how interesting it would become. Comets which barrel into the inner solar system and outgas in various jets provide a more interesting show that those which simply continue to be points of light at the edge of detection.

After some time of watching its motion, with the kind collaboration of some larger dishes, it is clear that it is on something like a deep elliptical trajectory, and will make the discoverer proud, as it is coming into the inner solar system. It poses no threat to Earth. A little more observation over some months indicates that it is coming straight into the inner solar system, and it is not in orbit. Its trajectory is not an ellipse. Now comes the fun for astronomy buffs. What could make it depart from an elliptical trajectory? It is too far from the sun to be outgassing. Thermal signatures of the comet indicate it is outgassing, but with a high energy jet? Now things get really interesting. This is novel, and a few more big eyes are set upon it. It is something novel. It is a decelerating alien ship.

The signatures are unmistakable. This huge thing is decelerating, and heading into the inner solar system. Since approximately 99.999% of the Earth population haven’t thought about aliens except by watching a few movies about them, the level of speculation goes wild. Are Earthlings going to be eaten by these creatures? Are they going to rescue us from some problem or another, or tell us about a problem they have with other aliens? Are they refugees escaping from the clutches of a galactic federation of evil overlords? Are they going to blast our planet into bits? Unfortunately, the ship looks rather nondescript, without anything that looks like a weapon, but then they might be concealed inside the hull. Our military is put on alert, as if they had any capability to do something against a high technology alien ship. At least they can help clean up any destruction. The trajectory is plotted, but since the deceleration direction is changing, no destination can be chosen. What part of Earth will they land on? Will they just orbit and expect Earthlings to go up to them? What do they want from us?

It turns out, nothing. They go into orbit around Europa and run some shuttles up and down. Over and over. We watch them. We assume they are refueling before they come here. We send them radio messages, at every frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum. We compose the kindest welcome possible. We still have the military flying around and making speeches. We wait.

They keep shuttling down to Europa. We keep waiting. They just keep doing it. How much stuff do they need from that satellite? They keep doing it. A wretched year goes by. They are still doing it. They don’t respond to any of our messages. They send nothing. They signal nothing. They just keep shuttling down to Europa and back. Obviously they are mining. We can see the excavations even from ground telescopes and orbiting ones. Every available observer is looking there. The aliens just keep mining and ignoring Earth. After a while, the more astute Earthlings realize that the aliens don’t give a damn about us. They just want some resources from Europa. We make plans to send a space probe to Europa, but the thing will take ten years in conception, design, construction, testing, launch and flight, and nobody can agree on what to send. So we just send some scientific probe to examine their ship and their site. We launch it.

More years go by. The news about the aliens is pretty repetitive. We have a close count of how many shuttles go down to Europa, as they are regular in schedule and we assume the ones going down when the ship is out of view, eclipsed, are the same. The numbers are getting high. We still speculate about them coming our way when they are done, but the absolute lack of communication indicates this isn’t likely. Then they make our probe disappear before it even has a chance to decelerate into orbit around Jupiter. Some laser blast and it turns into dispersed atoms. Not a very pleasant greeting.

Then they leave. We have no idea what to do.

This example continues the series of the first three in adding one more piece of information about alien civilizations to what was postulated to be learned in the first three. We learn space travel is possible and aliens are doing it. We learn they need resources but they don’t need us. We learn we are not very important to aliens, at least the ones who came by on an expedition. Instead of the exhilaration of previous examples, such as number three, where we accidentally intercept communications and think that with a lot of effort, we can join in the network, there is the realization of the utter unimportance of mankind. This is a worse sociological impact that the first example, which was the realization of loneliness. This is the realization that nobody wants to bother talking to us, even when they are nearby.

We could adopt the opinion that we need to continue developing and then we might become something of importance in the galaxy, but that is countered by the expectation that if this was the case, the alien ship would at least have said something to the effect that we were just too young, and we should keep working. But they didn’t. So the result is that we recognize Earth is an uninteresting backwater, and will always be. Mostly, life goes on, but our spark is diminished, and maybe just burns out. Should we go on to space? Why bother? We are nobodies. Should we take offense and prove them wrong, and try and become a civilization worth talking to? They have probably figured out we won’t make it. So why try? Maybe we should just enjoy our time here on Earth, and not worry about aliens. Maybe we should go out to Europa and try and figure out what they were digging up there. Maybe they left something behind. Do we want to do some interplanetary dumpster diving?

The implication of being ignored has been with us since we first started asking about where all the aliens were, but in this example, we learn where the aliens are and we are still ignored. This is an awakening and perhaps represents a conclusion to our progress towards space. Why not just forget about it?

The Implications of Finding Aliens – Example 3

In the first two examples related to the importance to Earth and its population of finding out something about aliens in our galaxy, the amount of information received was started at almost nothing, and then increased. Let us try and continue to explore what implications there might be by constructing another example, with a bit more knowledge about such aliens to be gained, and think through what might happen. These thought experiments are a way of exploring the parameter space of gained information. Different steps along the variable trying to measure quantity of information need to be taken in order to see the changes wrought by a simple increase. Recall that exploring along a parameter line if one of the chief methods of gaining insights about something more or less unknown, but with much associated, useful information that can be coupled into it.

In this example, suppose we continue on as we have, building telescopes on the ground and in orbit, of a great variety, with also a great variety of associated spectroscopic devices, and a great variety of information processing equipment, and a great variety of specialists poring over the data after having devised interesting research programs, mostly to find out more information on every possible thing in the galaxy and beyond, from stars to exo-planets to clouds to nebula to supernova to anything at all. By and large, the research is successful, and our knowledge of astrophysics and astronomy, and some new niches of science, just keeps growing. This is wonderful, both for the scientists involved and those involved in building the toys they need. It is also wonderful for those on Earth who like to learn about these topics.

One solitary scientist, of some renown, is involved with investigating sunspots on other stars, and has published extensively on it. His fame allows him substantial time on one of the larger radiotelescope arrays on Earth, and he is focusing on a star about 107 light years distant. As a matter of course, he runs exhaustive data examination programs on the data he collects. After some long period of collecting data, he notices that one of his extraction programs says there is a modulated carrier at a particular frequency in X-band, but it is buried deep in noise.

Jaw drops.

Eyes open wide.

Un-understandable sounds emitted.

The scientist immediately knows what this might mean, drops all other work, and looks for a terrestrial source that might be causing this, some sort of error in computation, some artifact of engineering, something, anything, that could create this signal. But there is none and the signal continues on. Soon other radiotelescopes have detected it. The strength of the signal slowly increases.

It is recorded everywhere, and every new source on the planet has announced it. The SETI signal has been found, in an unexpected way. Aliens exist! They are talking to us. We only need to decode the signals.

But after ten months, the signal stops increasing, and starts to decrease. In another sixteen months, it has dropped to undetectable values. The aliens have stopped sending us messages. Why? Was it because we did not respond, as we could not? Did they only want to send us some information and we got it all? No decoding progress at all has been made, even of the signals received at peak power level, and in the combined data from all partipating radiotelescopes. But efforts did not stop in that regard. Did Earth miss its chance at meeting the aliens?

The scientist who discovered the signal was the first to notice that what was happening was not that someone was hailing us from his targeted star, but that we had passed through a communications beam, from that star at 107 light years out to another one 88 light years in exactly the opposite direction. It was a triumph of serendipity. He happened to be looking in the right direction when the motion of the three stars, caught in the galactic gravitational field, had aligned themselves perfectly. A one in a million chance had happened, or maybe a one in a lot less chance, if there was a lot of this communication going on.

The realization that the galaxy was a network was the only hot news topic for the over two years it was detectable. It actually dominated discussions and chatrooms and every type of social media, to the exclusion of everything else. Who are they, and what are they saying? But the conclusion was finally reached that the signals were encrypted, and we could not bust them. It looked like random bits initially, and it looked like random bits finally. Efforts continued, but to no avail. We couldn’t find out what the aliens were saying to other aliens. Speculation was rife, and everyone had an idea on it. But as the intensity of the news of the breakthrough subsided, something happened. We decided to get on the network. It was calculated that a dish a kilometer wide needed to be constructed, and it wouldn’t be useful to build it on Earth, nor would it be possible. Nor was this possible to engineer in space, but now money was no object, and the lackluster interest in space things flipped over to intense interest. Mankind returned to being excited about space.

This third example serves to explore what would happen if there was a chance Earth could communicate with aliens. It could not, in the example, soon visit them or expect a visit from them, but with some monumental efforts, it could join in the communications. It might take decades to do the research and engineering on how to build the communications station, but that’s what mankind might do. Would Earth just collectively shrug its shoulders and say that, while it was nice these other civilizations were communicating with one another, we were too busy and didn’t want to get involved? Not very likely.

The implication of finding a way to communicate with other civilizations would affect us at this point in our development. Perhaps if we had more millennia under our belts and had already developed just about everything in technology, we could decide to ignore other civilizations, but at this point, we are still too much of an adolescent civilization to not want to join in. Message return times might be two hundred years, but we still would want to join in.

What would it mean for mankind to start thinking of a future event two centuries or more in the future? Much as in the second example, our habit of not looking very far forward in time would erode, and be replaced with a longer term perspective. Once we started to think about this long, slow communication, we would start thinking about other aspects of our existence, and how they would be two or more centuries out. The difference between the second and third examples is that the collective loneliness, as introduced in the first example, disappears. We find ourselves not alone in the galaxy, but in the midst of a group of communicating civilizations, or at least two for starters. And we know the direction to push technology in order to join in. So, although the second example provided Earth with a direction, the third one provides a much more concrete requirement. We know what to do, and how to do it, at least in a general sense. As far as implications go, they certainly increase at this step of our thought experiments.

The Implications of Finding Aliens – Example 2

One reason to inquire as to what might be the fallout from finding proof of aliens is that we can gauge the importance of the investigation. If it really doesn’t make much difference in the life of anyone on Earth, it probably isn’t worth spending a lot of research dollars on. If it does change the course of history, it should be funded flat out to the max.

The first example was one where we discovered a proof of existence of aliens on a distant star’s system of planets, and knew there were aliens there, some thousand of years ago, when the light we detected left their solar system and started its voyage to here. Maybe they are still there or maybe they went and destroyed themselves, we won’t know for a while. We can keep watching them to find out, but it might be a while, and when we are done watching, we still won’t know if they have destroyed themselves in the last couple of millennia.

Consider a different example here. Suppose there is a kid somewhere on Earth, whose parents buy him an expensive science kit, and he plays with it. One of the pieces of equipment is a simple radiation detector, able to detect gammas and give a rough count of them. He goes out with it, through the rural, mountainous area he lives in, finding out that trees and living things don’t have any additional radioactivity, and the ground has just a little. Except one place on a low peak that has a very high signal.

A few days later he tells his parents, who verify it by going out there. They call somebody at the local university, who measures it better, and says there is a large source of potassium-40 there, and some simple passes over the ground indicate it is buried 4 meters down. It is too hot to be dug up unshielded, but some robots are brought in, and above the source a metal box is found, with eleven plates in it. There is virtually no activation of the plates, and they each have 10,000 characters, arranged in a grid of 100 by 100 on one side of each plate.

From the existence of several separated isotopes, each at 99.99+% purity, comprising the source, the box and the plates, it is inevitably concluded that this is an alien artifact. The race is on to translate the plates. Even the orientation of the plates and the direction of the writing is unknown, as there is no ending on the last plate to show that. Surprisingly, they are published openly, and every agency with any decoding capability comes to a decision that these will only be translated with the help of all, in a sudden reversal of centuries of secrecy. It is slow going, and after a year the only progress is that the orientation is resolved, along with the direction of writing, up from the left, and that there are seven marks which seem to be punctuation. Another year later numerals to base ten are identified, and many years after that a tentative translation of about 20% is ready, a completely joint effort of amateurs and professionals.

It says that 107,000 years ago, as measured by some orbital variables which slowly change, in the numerical section of the text, aliens were there and introduced some genes into a primate species for a larger, more convoluted, and more connected frontal lobe, and we have them to thank for our intelligence, which would not have otherwise evolved. They described themselves as space insects, whatever that was, and wished us good luck as they were leaving, never to return. They were in our solar system for a little over 200,000 years, and were leaving for another one they did not list.

Other parts get gradually translated, and the rest is a history of their species, stretching back many millions of years, involving other seeding efforts in other solar systems, but mostly names of notable figures and where they were when something happened. The lack of knowledge on Earth of accurate proper motion of even nearby stars prevented any backtracking of their travels, although some clues based on star types were included.

These eleven tablets, over the course of a century, changed the inspiration that guided mankind. There was an example of a successful species and by and large, something to be emulated. The short-term thinking that had dominated our planet, which had led to much of the destructive side of competition, gradually became tempered with long-term thinking, and the population began to think of what long-term goals they should have. This was aided by the continual increase in technology and the associated benefits of it, and by the time a century had passed, mankind had grown more wiser and more thoughtful.

This second example illustrates that there may be much more of an effect on Earth people by their learning that there is or was an advanced civilization traveling the galaxy than the alien civilization postulated in the first example. Knowing that the galaxy has other intelligent life has an effect, but it does not tell us anything about how we might change for the better. Knowing that the galaxy has other advanced intelligent life, and they have overcome all the problems they might have had to persevere for millions of years, does provide some clues for our own future and how it might be structured. The example was chosen so that there is no opportunity for factionalism to play a role in gaining an advantage from the information provided, as the aliens were smart enough not to put any such information onto their tablets. They did not feed any negative aspects of the civilization they expected to develop some day from their genetic tampering with an Earth species, but instead simply announced their former presence. This may be enough to alter the thinking of the species that gets to the level of technology where they can find a radioactive semaphore and that has the computational capability to decipher a string of 110,000 characters of totally unknown variety. In the example, the tablets had no instructions for the civilization that found them and simply provided one thing: the knowledge that there were advanced, long-living civilizations in the galaxy. That one fact may have an effect far in excess of its extent.

The Implications of Finding Aliens – Example 1

One of the justifications for writing and reading this blog is that finding aliens is important to us. But why would that be? Perhaps only finding a certain type of alien would be important, or perhaps we are mistakenly thinking it would be important.

Let’s try to break down the implications of a successful hunt for aliens. The simplest result would be we discover they exist, but there is no way to do anything more than just know that. We have observatories of some sort, and a brilliant astronomer and his/her team find some clue that indisputably says there are aliens on a planet a long way away. And probably none closer. Years of careful work goes into this, and we discover that they inhabit this planet, let’s call it Planet S for success, and fly around the solar system there, but don’t go any farther. This discovery was made on the basis of something, it doesn’t what matter for the discussion here, but whatever that was, it was incontrovertible. Other scientists took a long look at the process and the data, and concluded that what was observed was the result of alien engineering. Maybe it was interplanetary shipping that was seen, with a ship detected going from one planet to another. Nothing natural looks like that.

So we spend a lot of our time watching them, maybe seeing a ship go from planet to planet every few months, and the hard science result gets even more solid. Yes there are aliens on Planet S, and it is so far away we can’t do anything about it. Cheers for the science community. Maybe some prizes are given out. Maybe funding is increased. Another result is that the thousands of stars that are closer don’t have this at all, and we gradually confirm that there are a few alien populations around which are detectable, and maybe some that have never reached interplanetary space travel and are invisible to the new technology. By and large, the galaxy is uninhabited.

Now, the public all over Earth gets to read about these results, and figures out finally the result is in, and we know. A few aliens exist here and there. Some impertinent people ask: “So what?”

Scientists will have a new area for funding proposals, which is figuring out why so few worlds have aliens. Suddenly the study of alien civilizations gets some interest. A little niche of science is created and a small community of scientists starts having meetings specifically dedicated to Planet S, and others which are identical in ten ways to it, which is where other aliens might be. There are hardly any of them.

For the rest of the public, after a week or two, Planet S falls out of the news, as new results will only be coming in every few years at best, and then the information is just going to be a little update on what has already been found. People mention it in conversations at cocktail parties. Commenters, trolls and other people alike, mention it once in a while. But nothing else happens.

Social inertia is a great thing. It provides us with a context in which to live. But it is hard to change. Our society here on Earth would be largely oblivious to the existence of an alien civilization on Planet S. Maybe it would become the subject of a science fiction novel, or two or twenty. Maybe some journalists would interview various scientists on their opinions about the planet and its aliens. Maybe someone would compose some music using it as inspiration.

Possibly the first important effect of the news that there is an alien civilization on Planet S, other than to redirect some small fraction of science funding, is to confirm to some skeptics that whatever was found, say interplanetary shipping, was a smart thing to do. After all, another civilization is doing it, and they are older that we are, and therefore more knowledgeable, and therefore must have a good reason for it. So we budget for more interplanetary space travel and exploration, and think even harder about how to do it, and Earth’s adventures in our own solar system get a boost. In time, this might advance the date on which we first make some interplanetary mining or something else by some months or years. The course of history has been changed by an iota.

Then the loneliness sets in. After some years, the science is confirmed over and over, and we realize that aliens are not going to visit us, probably ever, and we are likely not to find any to talk to, no matter what we do. The galaxy is a bit too large. We are virtually alone. The finding of aliens is something like the finding of no aliens, except that finding no aliens is a negative result, and it might also mean we don’t know how to find them. We didn’t know how to find them so we didn’t find them, but maybe we are not looking correctly. Once Planet S has been discovered, that option is all over. We know what type of planet they live on, and how few there are of it. We know there aren’t any in any reasonable travel distance. We know we simply have no one to talk to.

As part of the example, assume that the distance to Planet S is too large for any signals to be received, and certainly sent. So the philosophical and emotional results of being alone set in after some time. Here we are, with no one to bother us, forever. What we do will make no effect on anybody. There are no friends we will ever meet in the galaxy, and no enemies. Maybe the interest in star traveling for ourselves will diminish. What is the purpose of going to other solar systems now? Nobody is there waiting to be discovered. Nobody has built some nice more primitive civilization for us to help out. Nobody to have a war with. Nobody to do trade with. Nobody for anything at all.

Loneliness on a planetary scale has never been experienced before. Even the Lotus Sutra from 2500 years ago talks about a universe full of other beings. In this example, we finally know that it is pretty much empty of other civilizations. Nobody to share anything with. Nobody to provide us with different art objects. Nobody at all.

The implications of this example of possible scientific discovery are more intangible than tangible. We would need a long time to get used to being isolated, but not being the only creatures in the galaxy. We are not that special, as there are other intelligent creatures, which we will likely never get much details on. Maybe this will deflate out collective ego, if there is such a thing.

The bottom line is that life will go on, perhaps marching toward our own asymptotic technology, but without any inspiration coming from the heavens. Nothing to do here except live and then go extinct.

Why Study Alien Civilizations? Part 2

The previous post on "Why Study Alien Civilizations" covered the amusement aspect of it, or rather, why the study of alien civilizations has to be one of the most interesting areas on the basis of its breadth. Everything about a civilization, its origins, astronomical connections, and anything related is within the coverage envelope. From a standpoint of satisfying a diversity of interests, or fitting in with a lifelong habit about learning about all kinds of knowledge of the scientific or near-scientific variety, alien civilizations has no peer. The alternative viewpoint is that anyone on a quest for certainty, or deep investigations into a specialty area is not going to find what they need in this field. Deep digging into a niche cannot be done until the niche is located, and for alien civilizations, the initial maps are just being drawn.

Flip the coin over. Is there any use for studying alien civilizations other than amusement? The answer is a YES, in capital letters and bold type.

If someone in some field of study wants to question assumptions, hypothesizing an alien world is a nice way to think through what alternate assumptions would mean for some conclusion. When we think about things here on Earth, we have one civilizations, with factions certainly, but just one example, and so it is sometimes rather difficult to question things. But on a hypothesized alien world, things could have developed differently, and the assumptions cannot be just questioned, but replaced amid the rest of the knowledge, and the effects determined. The figuring out is all mental, no experiments possible, but a trained mind can put together factors to find out how they might interact. One way of saying this is to think of a theorized alien world as a mental laboratory, where different situations can be imagined.

This type of theorizing wraps the current thinking in a larger framework, and so it is possible to see the variations that might be possible. When thinking about an alien civilization, it is not necessary to stop at one, but a suite of them can be looked at. It is possible to think about an alien civilization that made this choice and one that made that choice and one that refused to choose. It is possible to think about an alien civilization that made its choice early in the passage of technology development, and one which did it in the middle, and one which put it off until much later. It is possible to think about an alien civilization which has plentiful resources for its population and one which has nothing but scarcity across the board. All of these hypothesized alien civilizations can be thought through, and some insights developed on a broader basis, or rather that cover a broader range of possibilities, than ones which only arise from the well-known instances we have documented here on Earth.

Time is another variable that is given free range in thinking about alien civilizations. We have some paleological records of what evolution did millions of years ago, and for times since then up to now, but we have no anti-paleological records of what will be in the future. All that can be envisioned by thinking about alien civilizations that have lasted for millennia or even millions of years. No, there is no certainty to what we deduce, but instead there is consistency. Consistency is the mainstay of reasoning about non-experimental situations. One layer of details may allow the hypothesizer to say anything at all, but when the implications are looked at, the next layer of details may show that some possibilities simply cannot happen, and certain situations cannot arise, because the preceding situation cannot arise or the conditions needed cannot come into existence or something else.

Plausibility is also a reasoning tool that is exercised to the extreme in thinking about alien civilizations; but it is a dangerous tool as well. Consistency is solid. Something inconsistent cannot exist. Plausibility is mushy, and when arguing from plausibility it may be necessary to go back and dig down another layer of details and see if something plausible on the surface stays plausible when the details are uncovered.

Another benefit of thinking about alien civilizations relates to connections. Many times consistency is not a problem when things are thought about in a narrow range, but if someone steps outside that range, the inconsistency or even implausibility becomes obvious. Since alien civilization study is boundless, and should stay that way in order to maintain the maximum checks, connections are easier to make. In a field where one can dig deep, that is sometimes all that is done, and deeper and deeper investigations are done, when they should not be done because some external implications were ignored, and these show the inconsistency and implausibility of the assumptions that go along with the deep investigation.

Maybe a good way to express this is to say thinking about alien civilizations helps to relax assumptions. We can easily assume that the way we know is the way things must be, and often the assumptions are made without being called out. They are just asserted. This is the way things are because that is the way things are on Earth. But on Planet X somewhere out in the Milky Way, they might not be that way. Then, by asking about how things would be affected by some alternative assumption related to conditions on Planet X, our own thinking is expanded, and our own assumptions become more explicit. Then the statements change from assertions to stated assumptions. Instead of “This is how things are” we have “Provided we assume things are this way, this will happen”. It is so much stronger in reasoning to make all assumptions explicit, and then they can be examined to see if they are really true. In the pre-alien civilization situation, without assumptions being even listed, they can hardly be looked into to see if there are failings in making them, such as poorly defined terms or snapshots extended into the far past and future or some other illegitimate use of reasoning.

Thus, besides the amusement that examining alien civilizations provides, they might even be a bit useful in helping us make the long distance march to asymptotic technology. Well worth doing!

Why Study Alien Civilizations? Part 1

Isn’t it rather frivolous to spend time studying alien civilizations? A large part of human time is spent on frivolous activities, so doing something frivolous isn’t bad at all, but entertaining. As a matter of fact, alien civilization study is extremely entertaining, but it isn’t all frivolous amusement.
Putting aside for a moment the question of whether the study of alien civilizations is totally frivolous, consider the side question of just how interesting it is. When you say, ‘Let’s think about alien civilizations’, you have opened up the door to thinking about virtually anything you can think of, as an alien civilization would have everything in it that our Earth civilization does, but lots more. In the later stages of an alien civilization, after they have passed asymptotic technology, they have inventions we can only imagine, have faced questions we have not yet thought of, much less asked, built themselves a world and maybe clone worlds in forms we have to stretch our minds to conceive of, and live according to rules that might seem strange or mis-directed to us.

Alien civilizations may be the most broad subject anyone could conceive of. It includes the origination of alien life, which means that any astronomical feature that might influence the origination of life are included. We don’t exactly know how life formed, so there are few limits here. The influence of various astronomical oddities on life is included. Then it’s time to think about the evolution of life, which we don’t understand too deeply as well, so many of our own assumptions about how it happened can be challenged. Once evolution gets to a particular point, the evolution of intelligence can be discussed, along with just what it means, during the evolution stage and later. Then comes city building, and how that happened. Then comes technology, and how that happened. Then comes star travel, and how that might be accomplished is included. Then comes asking what would they do once they achieved star travel. Also included is how they might go extinct.

So, for a frivolous area to think about, there are none more broad or even more deep. Anyone who likes to think through any of these fields, and connect them, or seize on alternative explanations for one or more of them, or try to understand things that are not discussed elsewhere, this is the place. For someone who likes to solely collect information, this field may not be so interesting, as it involves perforce connections between different areas. One of the guiding principles of the investigation of aliens in this blog, technological determinism, is predicated on the strong connection between the details and levels of technology as it exists in a civilization and how the civilization organizes itself. Technology thinking permeates thinking about many other areas of alien civilizations, and might be said to be the starting point. This means, as a frivolous topic, anyone interested in a broad range of technology and its interaction with a society, alien civilizations is the best bet.

Thinking about alien civilizations is also quite unconstrained. It is certainly possible to hypothesize some type of world, and ask what could live on it, or why anyone would want to visit it, or what resources it could provide. Alternatively, any aspect of society can be investigated and thoughts given on how it might be different than we commonly think, and then more speculation and deductions can be taken from that point onwards. Areas of technology that are not deeply understood here can be thought through, as an overview, and their impact on society can be researched, in a top-down sense. Laying out plans for how an alien civilization might accomplish a task assists in figuring out if it could be done, or what would be the biggest problems to face that civilization in doing it. Pitfalls can be looked at.

Astronomy can be brought in to investigate aspects of perils that might face the alien civilization, and maybe some quantitative estimates can be done to understand their frequency or their inevitability. Sociology, as much as we know about it, economics, the same, philosophy, the same, education, the same, and every other field can be brought in to see how it might be adapted in an alien civilization or even to see if it might exist, be divided, or merged with other fields.

In short, alien civilizations is an immensely broad field, that is interesting for anyone who has interests in science and social science that cover the entire spectrum of possibilities. Studying them, to the extent possible, poses intriguing questions.

The study of alien civilizations is also amusing for anyone who is interested in how a scientific, or quasi-scientific, or a wannabe-scientific field develops the foundations for itself, and the rules by which further investigations can be done. Studying alien civilizations is not like studying physics or materials science, where one can go to a laboratory and make some precise measurements, go back to the office and come up with some tentative theories to explain them, and then do a comparison and a winnowing out of theories and data. There is zero information about aliens available to us, and none is likely to be available in the near future. Zero.

It might be compared with people on a planet with a permanent cloud cover, and no capability of flying above it, figuring out what the rest of the universe looks like. (By the way, this sounds like a good question to think about.) How would this cloud-bound civilization determine that they are on a planet orbiting a star? They might develop science on the ground, understand energy, and figure out there must be some source of it. They could figure out gravity in the same way Newton did, by looking at things fall here, and then o so laboriously figuring out the laws that govern it. Then they might hypothesize a star.

We are cloud-bound for aliens here. But we can figure out some necessities for their civilizations, some timescales, some limitations, and more. Anyone who is into the frivolity of thinking long and hard about possibilities like this is certain to want to be aware of the study of alien civilizations. And this is just for the frivolous among us.

The Spread of Alien Terminator Civilizations

In a recent post, the possibility of an alien civilization which was dedicated to terminating other life in the galaxy was discussed. This is the inversion of another category of alien civilization, the A2, which takes it upon themselves to propagate life onto planets that do not originate it, and to provide a seed to help life on some planet which has not jumped a particular hurdle, like chlorophyll, to do so. They are the embodiment of the ideal example of the benevolent uncle in an entire world full of aliens. They just like to see life propagate, because of some choice made early in their history, pre-dating some of the grand transitions.

Their opposing number, the terminator civilization, likes to do just the opposite. They eliminate life wherever they find it. If we have been unable to find any reason why the A2 civilization could not arise, it is likely, by parallel reasoning, that we would be unable to find any reason why the B civilization could not arise. Let’s use B to label terminators, and perhaps there are different varieties to be labeled B1 and B2.

One quick to surface objection would be that not killing everything in existence might be more cost-effective, and as alien civilizations pass the genetic grand transition, and become smarter and smarter, they begin making more and more of their decisions on the basis of efficiency and effectiveness. Even if the alien terminator civilization slowed down their progress in developing genetics, sooner or later, and actually only a very short time compared to evolutionary or geological times, they would do it. So here we have a civilization that is intelligent, able to calculate how to do things more effectively and very likely to make decisions based on their calculations, who go around killing off other species. Is this reasonable?

Eminently. The start of all cost-benefit analysis is the choice of metrics. A terminator civilization has a metric which says, our highest and most historic benefit is the number of other species we terminate. Now let’s use cost-benefit analysis to figure out exactly how to do that most efficiently and effectively. Do not confuse the setting of metrics, which is a non-rational process, with the computation of methods for fulfilling them, which is rational in the extreme, quantitative, and precise. There is no feedback to the setting of a metric, except if the cost-benefit analysis says that some fulfilling some metric is not affordable. Otherwise, it just helps the terminator civilization do that.

Maybe asymptotic neurology would eliminate these impulses to kill every non-useful living things. They would understand how their brains operate, from how the basis cells that comprise them work, which may be neurons like our or something else, up to how the information flows in the brain, how it is encoded, and everything else that neurology can cope with. Then they could use this knowledge to find any individuals with anti-social tendencies and work with them to make them more comfortable in society.

In a terminator society, this means that any alien who has some compunctions about slaughtering every individual of a newly found species could get help for this, and over time, dissolve these compunctions so he could better fit in with the rest of the alien society. In human thinking, we like to slip in hidden assumptions in all kinds of places, and this might be a good one. We could say that neurology serves to remove homicidal tendencies here, so it would there as well. No. That would be an error of assumption. It would be used for conformance with society’s dominant themes. Their dominant theme is termination.

Jump now to the whole galaxy. There are alien civilizations all over the place. One of them is a terminator. It finds another civilization on an exo-planet, and it terminates it, and replaces it with their own. Now there are alien civilizations all of the place and two of them are terminators. They both find another civilization on an exo-planet, and terminate them, and replace them with their own, if the planet is habitable for them. This seems to be a process that can be projected. The final state is: there are no alien civilizations all over the galaxy, except for terminator ones. This process might take some millions of years, and all the interesting things discussed elsewhere, such as resource exhaustion, would be taking place. Thus, the number of alien terminator civilizations would not be as large as the total number of solo planets where intelligent life originated, but at any given time, much, much less. But not zero. Zero is the number of non-terminator alien civilizations, except for those which are just emerging from non-intelligence and have not been around very long.

If we want to understand if the galaxy is full of terminator civilizations, there are a number of preliminary questions to be investigated more completely. How possible is it for one civilization to successfully attack another? What has to be taken into account is the level of resources needed. A home planet has immense amounts of population, energy sources, land to hide in, and everything else a home planet has. Attackers have what they can carry in a single ship, which is expensive to manufacture and send out. They also may have a tradition of lone hunters going out after horribly vicious beasts on their own home planet, which translates into a great amount of motivation to figure out some way to get rid of the aliens on this new world they discovered. They also have the choice of time to attack, and a solar system to hide in. They may have reached asymptotic technology, and the world they are attacking has not. However, this assumption is one that would very rarely occur, as the coincidence of aliens arriving during the window of technology development of this exo-planet would be very, very unlikely, unless there was something the terminators could do to find easy prey, such as a signature of immaturity in technology. If technology development, from the Baconian transition to the 99% mark takes only a few centuries, and star travel takes centuries as well, this coincidence is not likely.

So, to find out some insights into the possible prevalence of terminator civilizations on planets in our galaxy, more thought should be given to the options an attacker has, and the potential defenses a home world can use. This, combined with some estimates of how likely terminator civilizations are to spring up on a planet, would tell us the combined answer.

Alien Terminators

Some people on Earth think all alien civilizations will be benevolent and caring, looking for primitive aliens (to them) to come and help. This is likely because that is what they were taught about people when they were very little and only able to learn by accepting and memorizing. And material taught at very young ages sinks deeply into the brain, lodging in parts which may never be subjected to tests of logic or reason, but which give off very strong feelings of certainty.

Other people on Earth think all alien civilizations will be rapacious and looking for things to steal, other aliens (to them) to kill, opportunities for plunder, and the general disposition to eliminate any other living sentient creatures and plunder their planet. In short, the incarnation of evil. That is what they are. They were either taught, again at a very young age, that evil exists and this is what it looks like, or they experienced evil first-hand. Again, this sinks deeply into the very young brain, and gives off such feelings of certainty that they spend their time trying to prove to the world that this is an actual representation of the way things are.

These two subsets of individuals here on Earth, each with their own very deeply felt certainties, are simply reflecting what they learned as young children, from their own experiences or from others who were trusted as providers of both goods and teaching. They are both very beneficial to others as they seek to find arguments for their certainty that come from logic and reason, by cherry-picking. Comparing the two groups of arguments allows us to do some sort of Hegelian synthesis and come up with a view of the universe that is more complete and has more of a chance of being accurate.

Instead of citing other people’s reasons, which this blog does not do as a matter of policy and interest, let’s instead ask how to figure out this aspect of alien civilization from the bottom up. Figuring out things means collecting what we think we know, making sure it forms a consistent bundle of suppositions, and then deducing what we can from that bundle. If we don’t know too much, choosing different possibilities and reasons from each of the hopefully small set provides us with a spectrum of possibilities. Sometimes this spectrum is a useful result in and of itself, without narrowing it down to the one true answer, if there are many occurrences of the situation and we can rely randomness in various inputs to generate a distribution of answers across the spectrum. In other words, if aliens could be one way or another way, and it depends on something variable, like the stellar class or the occurrence of ice ages or whatever, then there should be somewhere some aliens of one type and elsewhere some aliens of another type. This obviously depends on the second assumption that there are lots of worlds with aliens of the smart type in them.

Because this post is intended to be about terminators, let’s concentrate on that possibility and give short shrift to the others. Suppose there is a planet somewhere which develops alien life which evolves intelligence and it branches into several species in different geographic areas. They migrate, and since both are competing for the same food sources, they fight for them. The species that evolves the most cunning for fighting the other species, and perhaps develops weapons first, wins the fitness battle and grows their population while all the other alien intelligent species get terminated. The population of aliens that wins this competition may simply love the feelings that come when they raid a village of another species and put everyone there to death. Could be this is solely genetic, if that is possible, or it is partially carried in their memes. Either way, they become terminators.

The same instinct may cause them to eliminate all other animals, starting with the largest ones, except for those they install into their animal husbandry schemes. In the extreme, they may even feel happiness when they eliminate plant species that don’t fall under their control for agricultural use. In a short period of time, this species has cleansed their planet of all larger multi-cellular life that they don’t have a use for. Maybe their scientists are highly motivated to get rid of as many microbial species as they can. On and on they go, until their planet is nothing more than a highly simplified ecology of things that interact positively in one way or another with the intelligent species, which has been for a long time the only one that survived.

Their literature is about famous terminators, that battled the ABC species and got rid of them, and about the hunter-terminators who, using only hand or paw-carried weapons, got rid of the giant XYZ animals, and about the leader who organized the teams to cut down all the tall plants in the UVW region, and on and on. Alien kids grow up with these role models. They have little figures of the heroes of their species and the various things that they have terminated, and then they play at doing the same thing. They have videos or something more advanced about the lives of these heroes, or some invented heroes who just barely manage to survive when on the quest to eliminate the DEF species of intelligent competitors or the vicious MNO animals who would have liked to tear the heroes apart, and probably did some of them.

Very early on in their climb to asymptotic technology, they are going to come upon the task of setting a star traveling meme. Alternately, they have to decide on a goal for their civilization, after it passes the era where only short term goals are present and where the whole civilization is not talking to one another and living in enough affluence so they can figure out long term goals. What do they pick? Each one of the aliens grew up with terminators as heroes. What do they instinctively want to do with the galaxy? As soon as some observer there finds there are exo-planets, maybe a good while before the robotic or genetic grand transition, they all rise up from their couches and decide they want to go there and kill everything that is on it. And they divert their scientific research away from other fields, including those which might have served to moderate their impulses, and pour it into starship technology.
These guys might be our neighbors.

The first thing to do is to ask, is such a scenario possible? On even one planet in the galaxy, could a civilization like this one arise and evolve and develop traditions such as were depicted here? Are there any chance happenings which could put an alien species on this track?

To answer this question, and it seems to be an important one, we need to do two things. One is to see if a self-consistent scenario for the development of a terminator species can be created. The task would be to see if it contradicts itself, meaning we have to make one assumption for one period of their existence, but a contrary one for another period, as an example. The second thing is to see if there is anything we have in our woefully incomplete understanding of sociology, neurology, anthropology or any other –ology which shows it cannot be possible. This does not include strong feelings held by those who have strong feelings about the inherent goodness of any intelligent creatures, but some understanding, even tentative, that we have from our own scientific knowledge that indicates there is a flaw in the scenario.

If there are none, then we need to do some more checking on the possibility of space flight, looking for Great Filters there, and if it is as possible as current indications show, then we should possibly figure out what to do if there is one of these terminator species in our galaxy. One sign would be the non-existence of other aliens as they have all been killed off by the one or more terminator civilizations. But wait – isn’t that what we found so far?

Life Originating on a Satellite

Here on Earth we have speculated about some form of life originating on a satellite of a gas giant, perhaps in a subsurface ocean heated by tidal effects. But in our solar system there is no satellite large enough to originate intelligent life. In other solar systems, this may be quite possible.

The ratio of satellite mass to planet mass varies a great deal in our own solar system, which demonstrates that it can happen and is likely to happen in other solar systems. In order to generate intelligent life, in the way that it happened here on Earth, a satellite of Earth-like size is needed, and the planet it orbits has to be near the habitable zone of the star.

It would be expected that the planet around which an Earth-sized satellite was orbiting would be large. Planets can range to masses more than ten times Jupiter’s mass. Going much beyond that raises the possibility of thermonuclear fusion in the object, which would then be called a star, and the system a binary star. Having a planet around a brown dwarf in a binary system has yet other differences from a star-planet-satellite trio, and it deserves a separate post or two or ten. For an example, assume the planet has about ten times Jupiter’s mass, and the satellite has about Earth’s.

There are many major differences between a planet and a satellite of the same size and composition. One is in the source of heating. Gas giant planets by definition do not have thermonuclear fusion, even of deuterium, the easiest isotope to fuse, but they do have heating from gravitational contraction. A gas giant of ten times Jupiter’s mass would be radiating this heat for a long time, and any satellite around it would be receiving some infrared radiation from the planet. There is also gravitational heating from the variations in gravitational pull on the satellite, depending on how much it deviated from a circular orbit in the planet’s equatorial plane. The star might be contributing a bit of gravitational heating as well, depending on its size and the distance from it to the planet. The smaller the star, the closer the orbit, and the larger the stellar tidal forces.

It is not necessary to presume that a large planet would be orbiting a large star. There are examples of all types of mismatches between the masses of binary stars, and there does not seem to be any reason why a large planet could not form around a small star. The question arises about the longevity of the orbit, if there are more than one large planet in the solar system. Let’s assume there is only one, and the other planets are small.

A likely situation is that the satellite is tidally locked onto its planet. This is vastly more mild in effects than for a tidally locked planet around a star. The solar heating is still diurnal at everywhere on the satellite except at the poles, assuming that there is some alignment between the orbit of the planet, the orbit of the satellite and the axial tilt of the satellite relative to its orbit. Unusual situations are very surely possible, but with tidal locking, axial tilt should be small.

With a large planet and a large satellite, the orbital period may be long, meaning the day would be long. The temperature differences that occur during a day would be greater than that for a quickly rotating planet. The effect of the eclipsing of the planet during part of the day would likely not be significant, providing there was an alignment between the orbit of the planet and the satellite. As an example, Titan is eclipsed by Saturn once for four days during a fifteen year period. Obviously this amount could have a wide variation on exoplanets.

If the planet, via thermal radiation and tidal forcing, is providing a significant part of the heating to the satellite, the star is providing less by way of photons that can be used in photosynthesis. Furthermore, the heating would not be as concentrated diurnally, as there are in effect, two days for the satellite, one from the planet and one from the star. This means less temperature variation during a day. If tidal forcing is providing some heating as well, the overall diurnal variation would be less yet.

There could be more tectonic activity, owing to the strength of the gravitational field variation on the satellite, meaning perhaps more sources of outflows in an ocean where chemotrophs could both originate and thrive. Possibly this would mean that the time needed for life to originate would be shorter, other things being equal. Lower photon intensity would mean less impetus to switch to photosynthesis, so the time shortened in achieving multicellular organisms via chemotrophy might be lost due to a slower emergence of effective photosynthesis.

Life out of the ocean would depend on the ability of the planet to hold onto an atmosphere. There would be more tidal forcing on the atmosphere, and more opportunity for atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere to escape, owing to the pull of the planet. Whether this is significant depends on the closeness of the satellite to the planet.

Once land creatures have evolved into existence, intelligence may be predicated on a particular environment to exist, such as a forest, where there would be opportunities for both grasping appendages and materials for early tool use. Trees evolve in a competition for solar photons, as near the ground there is much competition. With a lower proportion of planetary temperature maintained by heating from solar photons, this might take longer to evolve.

If the day is significantly longer, this means that plant organisms have to rely on energy storage for longer periods of darkness, meaning that there would be a higher ratio of roots and stalks to leaves, which might compensate for the lower amount of solar photons. On the other hand, less photons may drive more organisms for height, which coupled with the need for more storage mass, trees might evolve into existence faster, once they had come into existence.

This same need for energy storage during the night hits animals. The development of fast-moving animals might be inhibited by the need to carry more weight for energy storage, and something like hibernation occurring every evening, rather than only during a season caused by orbital variation or axial tilt. This might inhibit the development of intelligence.

If the planet had some eccentricity in its orbit, so that there would be annual effects as well, the combination of long days comparable to the length of a season might make the overall variation on the planet larger than otherwise. Just exactly how animals would evolve to cope with this is not immediately obvious, but it could affect the development of intelligence. Some more thought is necessary on this topic.

Common Misconceptions – No Asymptotics

There are a great many misconceptions around about what an alien civilization might look like, and some of the characteristics of them. One of the most glaring is based on the same misconception as much other thinking here on Earth in many different fields. It is common among popularizers.

This misconception centers about which curve to use for trend extrapolation. If something increased by 1% over the last time period, day, week, month, year, decade, then by multiplying it by some length of time will provide an extrapolation of what the something might be after that length of time. This is known as arithmetic extrapolation. Like most methods of trend extrapolation, it is good for a short length of time, which is measured by the length of data. If you have 100 years of data, running out another year using linear extrapolation isn’t a bad idea. Running out ten years might be okay as well, but a bit more chancy. Running out a hundred years is absurd, and running out a thousand years worse than absurd. There is simply not enough data in the series to provide a good indication that a straight line is a good trend line to use.

Other people prefer to use geometric extrapolation. They substitute multiplication for addition. So, in the previous example, instead of saying that each extrapolated period increases by 1% of the last value with data, they multiply each successive period by 1.01. Not much difference by the second period, which is 1.0201 times the last data point instead of 1.02. At twenty time periods beyond the last data point, changes begin to be significant, being 1.22 of the last data point instead of 1.2. The curve generated by this process is called exponential, and the growth is called exponential growth, instead of linear growth.

Both of these trend extrapolations run into the same problem, known as infinity. They are based on the idea that infinity is a reasonable value for whatever it was that was being extrapolated. Almost nothing has no limits. That means these two methods must fail at some point, and without knowing where, they are surely going to lead to errors in conclusions. These methods are solely mathematical, and can be done by anyone without the slightest idea of why the growth might be limited and how that could happen. The alternative to these is trend projection based on the idea of finite limits, and everything pretty much has them. To know where they are and how growth tapers off when they are approached requires some specialist knowledge of the thing that is being extrapolated. This can be erroneous, of course, and extrapolation based on faulty conceptions of limits can make the opposite error, of predicting too little growth instead of too much, which is what the first two methods are guaranteed to do, sooner or later.

The growth of something, anything at all, that has a maximum value is called asymptotic extrapolation. The simplest way, as to the mathematics that are used, is to use a logistics curve for the extrapolation instead of a straight line or a exponential curve. The mathematical term logistics curve is use, sometimes specifically for a particular formula, or sometimes generically for any curve that looks like a squashed S. There are dozens of these curves that have been used in various trend extrapolations by people who understand that something has a limit.

The shape of the curve is a smooth climb between two parallel horizontal lines. One is the lower limit, perhaps zero, and the other is the upper limit. The curve slowly leaves the lower horizontal line, starts rising faster and faster until it reaches somewhere around halfway between the two limiting lines, at an inflection point where it has the steepest slope, and then it reduces its slope as it comes closer to the upper limit, eventually trailing off just below it, getting closer more and more slowly.

This is the shape of the logistics curve.

Population of bacteria in a situation where there is a finite food supply is a typical example. The bacteria count can start off at one, and the growth rate is proportional to the number of bacteria, initially, as long as the number of bacteria is small relative to the food supply. When the number begins to become a sizable fraction of the food supply, like 10%, growth stops as the bacteria soon find difficulty in finding food at a fast enough rate to promote growth at the maximum biological rate. As they grow even more, the numbers will approach the amount tolerated by the food supply rate. They reach an asymptotic value governed exactly by the food supply rate.

The areas where this type of extrapolation commonly occur in discussing alien civilizations concern intelligence, technology, energy sources and resources, to name the most important. When someone writes about alien civilization being a million years old, they extrapolate our improvements in computer intelligence by a hundred thousand times and discuss the fanciful ability of an intelligent machine of that era. But intelligence is a finite quantity, no matter how you define it. It can’t grow a million times in areas that are useful. Processing power can increase greatly, but that is not intelligence. One of the faults of extrapolating is to do it on something which is not accurately defined, and then make projections that sound like they are beyond all comprehension. They are beyond comprehension because they make no sense.

Technology is another poorly extrapolated concept. However you define it, the generation of new technology, theories, ideas, inventions, discoveries, will only go on a short time before it reaches the state of knowing everything important. People who do this sometimes have a very poor image of what science is, and confuse knowing how many grains of sand are on a planet in another galaxy with knowing the fundamental constants of nature. One is useless data, the others are critical parameters.

Energy and resources are also finite. A large population of aliens cannot live forever on a planet, even with a high degree of recycling, as the losses eventually use up the supplies. There are finite supplies, such as the minerals available at affordable costs in a solar system, and finite sources, like the energy falling on a planet’s surface from its sun. These are limits which cause linear and exponential extrapolations to fail.

Conclusions drawn from non-asymptotic extrapolation simply need to be re-thought. By using reasonable methods of extrapolation, many more insights into what alien civilizations must be and must do become available. These conclusions may be less exciting to write about, but they make more sense.

Revolution in Alien Civilizations

Revolution was discussed in an earlier post in connection with intellos, which are intelligent servant creatures created after the genetic grand transition. The deliberation resulted in a conclusion that, although it would make a great movie script, intellos would not revolt. They are not a species and are designed to be docile although clever. They do not have a sense of identity, which is a necessary precursor for revolution. Revolution happens because one faction sees their current social condition as unjust or untenable, and they depart from social norms to use force to accomplish a change to something they see as better. Intellos are generated by industrial means, designed to perform certain tasks. They are not natively intelligent creatures, with a sense of identity and a sense of group, who are compelled to do tasks they would prefer not to do. Intellos are designed to want to do what they are designed to do.

This does not mean that alien civilizations would be immune to revolution, far from it. But the characteristics of it would be different for different phases of the civilization, depending on which grand transitions were already passed, or which one they were in. Revolution is some sort of convulsive change of status of a faction of an alien civilization. Change in status happens continually, as technological determinism shows that with changes in technology, there are changes in the hierarchical structure of the civilization, as well as in many other aspects of it. When the rate of change is abrupt, such as over the course of a small part of a generation, or even a tiny fraction of it, then this can be called a revolution. Violence in a physical way is not necessary, but might be more common than not.

Change happens abruptly because slower change is prevented by some social mechanisms that a faction is able to put in place. In only makes sense that such a faction would have to have some levers to control how the society changes, and these might be via the memes in a civilization living before the genetic grand transition, where intelligence becomes universally available, or it might be through force, if one faction had a near-monopoly on it, or it might be through access to economic factors, again if one faction had a near-monopoly on it. Such successful stubbornness against following the gradual changes in society dictated by technology provides a situation where there is a strong motivation for change, but a lack of options to effect it. So some revolution has to happen.

Other revolutions can occur solely because of weakening of this stubbornness, due not to technological change, but to its evolution under the positive feedback loops that are engendered by factionalism. Ruling classes often want more, and the exactions destabilize the civilization.

A revolution occurring before the industrial grand transition, the industrial revolution, means that civilizations are toppled and may cease to exist. An Earth example is the revolution in Copán, a Mayan city, which was one of the most advanced ones in Central America. Copán lasted as a major capital in the Mayan civilization for four centuries, ending around 822, when the population refused to continue to serve the theological rulers of the city, despite the continued promulgation of the theology. The city ceased to be populated, and the population, of all classes, returned to subsistence farming. The theology was used to justify the refusal to change, and when it became subject to contradictions, the city emptied very quickly. Nobles were not attacked, simply ostracized. The four centuries of civilization simply came to an end, never to be resuscitated.

Revolutions occurring after the industrial grand transition have the problem of maintaining the sustenance of the population. This occurs because it is no longer feasible for the large population made possible by the technological change to return to subsistence farming. So the character of the revolution must be different. A replacement of the ruling faction with others capable of maintaining the sustenance levels is the only path for revolution that does not lead to chaos and dispersal of people seeking to survive. The Russian revolution of 1918 was an Earth example of this. Farms, factories and other facilities were not abandoned, but taken over by committees comprised of former members of the lower and middle classes. The accompanying civil war did wreak havoc, but not because of an abandonment of technological progress.

A revolution during the genetic grand transition would be different yet. There are obviously no Earth examples to cite. With the diffusion of higher intelligence, the justifications for a factional hierarchy cease to exist, if they ever were true. The allocation of social resources to individuals in a hierarchy is not based on their contributions, no matter what justification is generated and promulgated. Individuals do not have such a wide range of capabilities. Any justification based on some unique knowledge or unique procedures for management would become transparently false when knowledge of all kinds becomes simply available to anyone wanting it, for use or for examination. Without such justifications, the factionalism becomes untenable, and the lower orders of the hierarchy would not continue to contribute to it.

Furthermore, with increased intelligence spreading through the population, there would be an inevitable questioning of the regulations society had erected to maintain the hierarchical structures. During pre-genetic grand transition times, these regulations can serve as some sort of justification for the hierarchy, but this justification would melt away as more and more individuals can scrutinize them and verify that they exist without any robust reason, and were simply put in place to serve as a pseudo-theology justifying the existence of the hierarchy.

At this point in an alien civilization’s progress toward asymptotic technology, productivity is more and more done by robotics and some early intellos, if the society chooses to generate them. Control of them is done automatically. This means benefits from this structure of the civilization are not the result of any individual’s actions, and a lop-sided allocation of these benefits will become more and more unconscionable to members of the society. Unless some sort of force is used to keep them in place, a leveling must happen. And if force is available to maintain the hierarchy, this would simply act as more of the stubbornness noted above, and make the final sudden change more upsetting. It would become more difficult to maintain the civilization at the same level of overall productivity during the revolution if it is delayed.

So there are at least three varieties of revolution that can beset an alien civilization. All three act to delay progress to asymptotic civilization, but not to derail it, except under some extreme circumstances. Revolution is therefore not likely to be a Great Filter, resulting in planets becoming plateau planets and never having the option of building starships to come and see us.

Goodbye to Species

It has been noted before in other posts that the genetic grand transition in alien civilizations is going to be the most revolutionary. All are revolutionary, and all have claims to be the most revolutionary, but for us at our stage of development, the genetic one may appear to be most impressive in the changes in the civilization it will entail.

The genetic grand transition involves understanding the genetic code and ontology well enough to create whatever type of organism is desired. Organisms will be conceived of with specifications, and then the genetic code designed to produce them. Gestation machinery or some generic biological gestation organism would be used to bring the designed organism from egg to birth, or hatching, or whatever the organism is programmed to do to initiate independent life.

Biological infrastructure appears to be possible as well. Biological factories were discussed, but a biological dwelling or pumping station or many other things are equally likely, and we do not have enough background to foresee what the limits of these might be.

Intellos, meaning intelligent creatures created to perform tasks in the alien civilization, are also clearly possible, and part of the revolution in an alien society would be to determine how to utilize these, and what rules would be needed to regulate their use, and creation and disposal. We are not used to thinking about intelligence as being decoupled from citizenship, but there would be no reason after the genetic grand transition to link these two. One is a result of genetic programming and the other a bestowal of rights and duties.

Deliberate speciation of the citizens themselves would be an option they could choose. After improving their species with naturally occurring genes and artificially created ones, they might find a chromosomal rearrangement is necessary to go further in providing capabilities or eliminating vulnerabilities in their own species. Then, there is a new species and the interaction of the new and the old will contribute to the turmoil that the genetic grand transition brings. They may have different species for different planets and satellites in their home solar system, or even different species on the same planet. The choice is theirs. What happens to the old species, the left-behinds, is also an interesting question.

One novel aspect that has not been discussed is that the alien civilization may leave the concept of species behind. Species is the method that evolution used to grade fitness and give some contestants a passing mark, while flunking others. More explicitly, different species survived for different periods of times in different locales and environments, and then went extinct, being replaced by other ones. It is a useful construct for evolution. After the genetic grand transition, aliens may choose to do something completely different.

We on Earth are quite familiar with the concept of chimera. This is a living organism that has non-uniform DNA coding. Humans occasionally have it, with the mixing of cells at an early stage of embryonic development between either fraternal twins or between the mother and the child. It raises havoc with DNA testing, but otherwise the person is often able to function without being detected as a chimera. Some animals have it as a matter of course. We graft trees, which is a very blunt way of making a chimera.

In some chimeras, particular organs have one type of DNA code while another has a different DNA code. This results from the embryo having cells with the different types of DNA mixed together, and a cell which is the first to differentiate into one organ carries with it its own DNA, resulting in the whole organ being of that type. Another cell may differentiate into a different organ, while carrying with it a different coding of DNA. Chimeras are made in biological laboratories now, as the resulting organisms are quite useful in experiments.

Animal chimeras cannot be made so easily as plant chimeras, by grafting, because the animal immune system, not having grown up with a particular type of cell, attempts to destroy it. But chimeras for animals done at the blastocyte stage or thereabouts do work readily.

Animal chimeras could be used by aliens for many purposes. It could be that an ideal combination of genes for one organ is not so ideal for another, and if the ideal combination was used for each of several organs, a chimera with even better characteristics could be created. This is simply carrying the concept of improving genetic coding to a further step. Instead of having the best genetic code for an organism as a whole, each major organ has its own optimized genetic code. It might be possible for the coding for one type of organ to be eliminated from the DNA for a different type of organ, meaning that the DNA for each organ would be highly simplified, and only contain the DNA for itself, and perhaps some DNA relating to the connections between it and neighboring parts of the body, or the body structural units, such as the blood flow, or whatever passes for blood in the aliens.

The construction of such a multiple chimera might be done industrially, with some creation of the component cells done separately, and then a fusing done when they are all ready to proceed to form an embryo. Alternatively, it might be possible to depart from the whole concept of species as it relates to reproduction, and find a way to produce such an embryo biologically.
There would be no reason that a plant organism could not be a chimera, but with the different DNA codings being inserted just after the seed stage, if the plant grows from seeds. Any multicellular organism with differentiated organs could be turned into a chimera by aliens when they are proceeding into the later stages of the genetic grand transition.

Assuming this genetic science work is successfully completed, it could be used to seed other planets by a star traveling alien civilization. If Earthlings ever decide to do this as well, and we make it to one of these planets, what we find will be quite distinct from what we would postulate from the normal course of evolution. We would already be past the genetic grand transition ourselves, and would understand how it was done, but it would be evidence left behind of another civilization in the galaxy.

On the other hand, we don’t know all that much about the limitations of evolution. We have one example, our planet, and now we can only assume that this is the way evolution works on all solo planets. It might not be true. Perhaps evolution is even more clever than we give it credit for, and chimeras are a standard item on most other solo planets, with ours being the exception where they do not exist. This understanding might also occur at the time of the genetic grand transition – which could be even more revolutionary that we thought before.