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.

Deliberate Speciation - Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deliberate Speciation – Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Goals of an Alien Civilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Life Need a Large Moon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Genius Gene Great Filter – a Reprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of Exploitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solar Systems with Two Alien Civilizations Part III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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