We moderns like to join factions associated with ideologies, and many of our most inspiring stories are of great conflicts between ideologically-affiliated factions. We like such stories more when they have more morally-intense ideologies, bigger conflicts in space, time, and social scope, more impressive combatants, and more real and well-defined events.
If there is no faster-than-light travel, or FTL communications, then control of colonies ranges from very difficult to impossible; depending on the distance to each colonized system. A central government might try to place a governor in each system, accompanied by a substantial garrison. But if the colonized system is only 25 light years away, then there will still be a serious lag effect in communications. Also, since the deployment of governors and garrisons is probably permanent and replacement and re-supply is going to take generations after any request, why should they obey orders from a distant authority?
I'm on team grabby. Who here isn't and wants to pick a conflict with me? What would move you to join team perpetual lockdown? The fear that somewhere in spacetime a tyranny will emerge? Just for comparison, the country with the strictest emigration restrictions is North Korea, and yet thousands per year escape. What kind of supertyranny would it take to bring that number down to zero per forever?
Both sides in such a conflict in human civilization can use C. S. Lewis's phrase "God's quarantine regulations." One side wants to quarantine potentially-grabby civilizations and the other side wants to quarantine the governments that might restrain them.
Stupid decisions that hasten extinction don't just sometimes happen, they appear to happen regularly enough to be a major factor in why a human world-state didn't emerge centuries ago.
Money isn't nature's maximand (and I didn't claim that it was, I very specifically said "economically-net-negative"), but inclusive fitness isn't the default human maximand. The default human maximand is status (or something like it), which explains why some of the least constrained decision makers in human history (Roman and Chinese emperors; claim made relative to 99.99% of people who've ever lived not specifically different political system leaders because that's a harder analysis to do) opted to hasten stagnation and extinction just to be able to reduce risks to their status. For conscious minds, the chain of reproduction is a chain at constant risk of an individual defecting, since the methods that our genes have to enforce compliance are laughably primitive.
If you posit that increasingly centralized control is likely in the future (plausible, given the massive increase in the power of centralized decision-making over the human species 10,000 BC to present), then you likely need just one cycle of sufficiently powerful nihilists to attain leadership positives to drive humanity into extinction.
Even more likely, if colonizing other star systems is hard and costly, all it takes is for the "reproduction number" of stellar colonization to be below 1.0 for life to remain trapped in tiny slivers of the universe.
The default view would be to expect selection pressure over many alien species to result in *some* winning the natural selection process and reshaping the entire galaxy. But we *don't* see this, so something's wrong with the basic model somewhere.
Robin Hanson's sketched out one possible explanation for the facts at hand, "next-level physics makes the hot visible universe economically worthless fly-over territory visited only by tourists" is another. Both compete with the default "actually there are no aliens within visible range, life is rare enough that none have (so far) beaten the odds to become an expanding zone of newness" hypothesis.
We started in a water moon. Technology was not easy, and we spent hundreds of thousands of years as a hunter forager species, only gradually transitioning to farming when it became as easy as manipulating the multitude of currents around us. We had no industrial age, only a gradual increase in the knowledge you call chemistry. Top Chemist built the first balloon, leading to the first explorations above the waves, and for ten thousand years the elite among us lived in giant airquariums built of the strongest carbon fiber.
Only then were the first Astronomers born leading to our science based religion. Astronomers guided our path to first interplanetary migration, and then the stars. That is not to say we were entirely peaceful, and the first great civil war of our species was between the Chemists and Astronomers. The Chemists won, for their craft of the physical gave them every advantage, and from then on expansion was seen as something that must be controlled and efficient, lest space for new Astronomers be yielded.
The real world has at least one example of a non-grabby civilization that managed to thwart every attempt by much larger, much more technologically advanced grabby civilization from grabbing it: Afghanistan. Since at least Alexander the Great, all the way to modern day URSS and USA, the place has remained strictly unconquerable, to the point some have nicknamed it "the place Empires go to die".
The reason for that is that Afghani people are usually content when others let them be, but the moment someone steps on their toes they have traditionally become vicious to the point of causing nightmares to conquerors, and all by means of the relatively simple expedient of increasing the amount of violence to such an extreme level, then keeping applying it consistently year after year after year after year non-stop, that conquerors give up.
So, while far fetched, it's at least possible that a non-grabby civilization might have just enough technology, and the cleverness to use it effectively enough, to make it non-cost-effective for a grabby civilization to grab them. Their little pocket of non-grabbiness might still end up surrounded by the larger grabby one, but with they themselves left alone as simply not worth the effort.
Or that Dyson-like technology is not as efficient as black hole technology, or there's an advantage of concentrating Dyson-like technology to a specific area, or allowing Dyson-tech is too close to the abilities of a Nicoll-Dyson beam to allow, or our motivations don't properly extrapolate across 25 orders of magnitude when it comes to how to use and generate power, or...
At the time of the big bang, the statistical chance of there being a technological interstellar civilization is zero. As time goes on, the probability becomes non-zero. The first occurrence of such a civilization is by definition a miracle, as it would require a series of unlikely events, perhaps an odd combination of supernova and planetary formation.
We know technological life took approximately 4.5 billion years on Earth, but given the sheer numerical quantity of opportunities, I do not think it unreasonable to consider an early possibility for Civilization A.
The second such civilization, call it Civ B, will happen a time after that. If the time between A and B is large enough, then B will only emerge under the auspices of A.
I believe you have your reasons why this should not be an early-universe phenomenon, but the change in astronomy in the last 20 years that shows high-levels of metallicity even in early galaxies makes me believe that any potential conflict between civs will be an early-universe activity, and largely resolved by present day.
In my more hopeful moments I like to imagine that JWST imaging of early-galaxies might show evidence of overlapping spheres of control, which could appear as rings.
This blog post reminded me so much of this great 2013 essay by Dr. Steve Fuller. I thought you all would appreciate it as an addendum. I for one look forward to taking up the starry black banner of upward grabbiness. Cheers! :)
Well, stupid decisions that hasten extinction can sometimes happen. Re: "colonization and expansion will almost always be net-economically-negative from the perspective of the home star system, just like children are net-economically-negative from the perspective of first-world parents." That's if you do your accounting using money. Money isn't nature's maximand - instead, nature maximizes something like inclusive fitness. Do your accounting that way and children are not a net negative.
Coherent civilizations can and have chosen total stagnation, though, especially when they feel like they have no external rivals.
Imperial Rome at the height of its power chose to stop expanding because expansion produced rich popular generals who were threats to the Imperator.
Even more extremely, Ming China built some of the largest fleets the world had seen up to that point, toured Indonesia, India, and the east coast of Africa, then decided "well that's enough of that." In the latter case, the Ming devoted substantial resources to becoming isolationist, since it involved relocating many communities out of the coastal zone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Note that if speed-of-light is a binding delay, colonization and expansion will almost always be net-economically-negative from the perspective of the home star system, just like children are net-economically-negative from the perspective of first-world parents.
Failing to spread and expand leads to extinction faster. That would seem to be a widely applicable rule. How many resources to devote to expansion (instead of consolidation) is a more realistic issue - though one with rather less dramatic potential.
If there is no faster-than-light travel, or FTL communications, then control of colonies ranges from very difficult to impossible; depending on the distance to each colonized system. A central government might try to place a governor in each system, accompanied by a substantial garrison. But if the colonized system is only 25 light years away, then there will still be a serious lag effect in communications. Also, since the deployment of governors and garrisons is probably permanent and replacement and re-supply is going to take generations after any request, why should they obey orders from a distant authority?
I'm on team grabby. Who here isn't and wants to pick a conflict with me? What would move you to join team perpetual lockdown? The fear that somewhere in spacetime a tyranny will emerge? Just for comparison, the country with the strictest emigration restrictions is North Korea, and yet thousands per year escape. What kind of supertyranny would it take to bring that number down to zero per forever?
Both sides in such a conflict in human civilization can use C. S. Lewis's phrase "God's quarantine regulations." One side wants to quarantine potentially-grabby civilizations and the other side wants to quarantine the governments that might restrain them.
Mountains in general are hard to conquer, for example, Switzerland.
Stupid decisions that hasten extinction don't just sometimes happen, they appear to happen regularly enough to be a major factor in why a human world-state didn't emerge centuries ago.
Money isn't nature's maximand (and I didn't claim that it was, I very specifically said "economically-net-negative"), but inclusive fitness isn't the default human maximand. The default human maximand is status (or something like it), which explains why some of the least constrained decision makers in human history (Roman and Chinese emperors; claim made relative to 99.99% of people who've ever lived not specifically different political system leaders because that's a harder analysis to do) opted to hasten stagnation and extinction just to be able to reduce risks to their status. For conscious minds, the chain of reproduction is a chain at constant risk of an individual defecting, since the methods that our genes have to enforce compliance are laughably primitive.
If you posit that increasingly centralized control is likely in the future (plausible, given the massive increase in the power of centralized decision-making over the human species 10,000 BC to present), then you likely need just one cycle of sufficiently powerful nihilists to attain leadership positives to drive humanity into extinction.
Even more likely, if colonizing other star systems is hard and costly, all it takes is for the "reproduction number" of stellar colonization to be below 1.0 for life to remain trapped in tiny slivers of the universe.
The default view would be to expect selection pressure over many alien species to result in *some* winning the natural selection process and reshaping the entire galaxy. But we *don't* see this, so something's wrong with the basic model somewhere.
Robin Hanson's sketched out one possible explanation for the facts at hand, "next-level physics makes the hot visible universe economically worthless fly-over territory visited only by tourists" is another. Both compete with the default "actually there are no aliens within visible range, life is rare enough that none have (so far) beaten the odds to become an expanding zone of newness" hypothesis.
It's more like the ESPN zone of empires: https://miscellanycentral.b...
https://archive.thinkprogre...
We started in a water moon. Technology was not easy, and we spent hundreds of thousands of years as a hunter forager species, only gradually transitioning to farming when it became as easy as manipulating the multitude of currents around us. We had no industrial age, only a gradual increase in the knowledge you call chemistry. Top Chemist built the first balloon, leading to the first explorations above the waves, and for ten thousand years the elite among us lived in giant airquariums built of the strongest carbon fiber.
Only then were the first Astronomers born leading to our science based religion. Astronomers guided our path to first interplanetary migration, and then the stars. That is not to say we were entirely peaceful, and the first great civil war of our species was between the Chemists and Astronomers. The Chemists won, for their craft of the physical gave them every advantage, and from then on expansion was seen as something that must be controlled and efficient, lest space for new Astronomers be yielded.
The real world has at least one example of a non-grabby civilization that managed to thwart every attempt by much larger, much more technologically advanced grabby civilization from grabbing it: Afghanistan. Since at least Alexander the Great, all the way to modern day URSS and USA, the place has remained strictly unconquerable, to the point some have nicknamed it "the place Empires go to die".
The reason for that is that Afghani people are usually content when others let them be, but the moment someone steps on their toes they have traditionally become vicious to the point of causing nightmares to conquerors, and all by means of the relatively simple expedient of increasing the amount of violence to such an extreme level, then keeping applying it consistently year after year after year after year non-stop, that conquerors give up.
So, while far fetched, it's at least possible that a non-grabby civilization might have just enough technology, and the cleverness to use it effectively enough, to make it non-cost-effective for a grabby civilization to grab them. Their little pocket of non-grabbiness might still end up surrounded by the larger grabby one, but with they themselves left alone as simply not worth the effort.
That's a stupid decision only from certain moral viewpoints. For some that's the smartest decision, check e.g:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Or that Dyson-like technology is not as efficient as black hole technology, or there's an advantage of concentrating Dyson-like technology to a specific area, or allowing Dyson-tech is too close to the abilities of a Nicoll-Dyson beam to allow, or our motivations don't properly extrapolate across 25 orders of magnitude when it comes to how to use and generate power, or...
At the time of the big bang, the statistical chance of there being a technological interstellar civilization is zero. As time goes on, the probability becomes non-zero. The first occurrence of such a civilization is by definition a miracle, as it would require a series of unlikely events, perhaps an odd combination of supernova and planetary formation.
We know technological life took approximately 4.5 billion years on Earth, but given the sheer numerical quantity of opportunities, I do not think it unreasonable to consider an early possibility for Civilization A.
The second such civilization, call it Civ B, will happen a time after that. If the time between A and B is large enough, then B will only emerge under the auspices of A.
I believe you have your reasons why this should not be an early-universe phenomenon, but the change in astronomy in the last 20 years that shows high-levels of metallicity even in early galaxies makes me believe that any potential conflict between civs will be an early-universe activity, and largely resolved by present day.
In my more hopeful moments I like to imagine that JWST imaging of early-galaxies might show evidence of overlapping spheres of control, which could appear as rings.
I agree this kind of story is powerful and inevitable, Robin. I know there is at least one screenplay nearing completion.
This blog post reminded me so much of this great 2013 essay by Dr. Steve Fuller. I thought you all would appreciate it as an addendum. I for one look forward to taking up the starry black banner of upward grabbiness. Cheers! :)
https://aeon.co/essays/left...
Well, stupid decisions that hasten extinction can sometimes happen. Re: "colonization and expansion will almost always be net-economically-negative from the perspective of the home star system, just like children are net-economically-negative from the perspective of first-world parents." That's if you do your accounting using money. Money isn't nature's maximand - instead, nature maximizes something like inclusive fitness. Do your accounting that way and children are not a net negative.
Coherent civilizations can and have chosen total stagnation, though, especially when they feel like they have no external rivals.
Imperial Rome at the height of its power chose to stop expanding because expansion produced rich popular generals who were threats to the Imperator.
Even more extremely, Ming China built some of the largest fleets the world had seen up to that point, toured Indonesia, India, and the east coast of Africa, then decided "well that's enough of that." In the latter case, the Ming devoted substantial resources to becoming isolationist, since it involved relocating many communities out of the coastal zone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Note that if speed-of-light is a binding delay, colonization and expansion will almost always be net-economically-negative from the perspective of the home star system, just like children are net-economically-negative from the perspective of first-world parents.
Failing to spread and expand leads to extinction faster. That would seem to be a widely applicable rule. How many resources to devote to expansion (instead of consolidation) is a more realistic issue - though one with rather less dramatic potential.