Is Time Us, Space Them?
(This post co-authored by Robin Hanson and Katja Grace.)
In the Battlestar Galactica TV series, religious rituals often repeated the phrase, “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.” It was apparently comforting to imagine being part of a grand cycle of time. It seems less comforting to say “Similar conflicts happen out there now in distant galaxies.” Why?
Consider two possible civilizations, stretched either across time or space:
Time: A mere hundred thousand people live sustainably for a billion generations before finally going extinct.
Space: A trillion people spread across a thousand planets live for only a hundred generations, then go extinct.
Even though both civilizations support the same total number of lives, most observers probably find the time-stretched civilization more admirable and morally worthy. It is “sustainable,” and in “harmony” with its environment. The space-stretched civilization, in contrast, seems “aggressively” expanding and risks being an obese “repugnant conclusion” scenario. Why?
Finally, consider that people who think they are smart are often jealous to hear a contemporary described as “very smart,” but are much happier to praise the genius of a Newton, Einstein, etc. We are far less jealous of richer descendants than of richer contemporaries. And there is far more sibling rivalry than rivalry with grandparents or grandkids. Why?
There seems an obvious evolutionary reason – sibling rivalry makes a lot more evolutionary sense. We compete genetically with siblings and contemporaries far more than with grandparents or grandkids. It seems that humans naturally evolved to see their distant descendants and ancestors as allies, while seeing their contemporaries more as competitors. So a time-stretched world seems choc-full of allies, while a space-stretched one seems instead full of potential rivals, making the first world seem far more comforting.
Having identified a common human instinct about what to admire, and a plausible evolutionary origin for it, we now face the hard question: do we embrace this instinct as revealing a deep moral truth, or do we reject it as a morally irrelevant accident of our origins? The two of us (Robin and Katja) are inclined more to reject it, but your mileage may vary.
(This is cross-posted at Meteuphoric.)
Added 9Feb2025: I finally comfirm this hypothesis re what people prefer in a poll.
The time-extended society is preferable to me because each generation will have more opportunity to study, learn from, and build on the discoveries and inventions of the past, allowing them to reach higher in their achievements, and to more enjoy the process of discovery and invention. In the time-extended society, each person has more opportunity to be one of a small number of the best of their generation at a given specialty, craft, or art, and to stand out among their contemporaries. If I compare myself to Newton or Einstein, I don't feel so bad because I can tell myself that they had low-hanging fruit to discover. If I lived in a world with a trillion people, and a hundred people as interesting as Robin Hanson, and a hundred times as much scientific literature being produced each year, I and many others might feel discouraged that there are no interesting intellectual topics left to contribute to, no way to do anything new.
Personally, I'd need to know a bit more about the mechanisms of:
a) Cultural replication
b) The extinction event.
With regard to the time-extension civilization--I think that a lot of people need to pay more attention to what goes into making such civilizations "sustainable." On earth, as Jared Diamond notes, the island nation of Tikopia was sustainably run for like a thousand years with virtually the same population. However, this sustainability wasn't just all hippy rainbows and unicorns. In reality, it practiced very strict population control that involved serious instances of infanticide on a regular basis--as well as instances when any accumulation of "excess population" was told to build some boats and row off into the ocean with the hope that they might find some land to settle on.
In other words--it was sustainable because it accepted the orderly elimination of what was an "unsustainable" population.
Now.. if you add that into the mix--which seems rather necessary given our biology and cultural habits--then I'm not sure the time extension civilization seems quite so appealing as before. Yes, it lasts a long time--but it does so in a rather brutal manner.
Of course--you can argue that this 100k civilization is not like that at all and it has perfect technology and social habits and the like--and it is just living in eden for a billion years--but then it seems like the deck is being stacked...
Yours,tricstmr