Sunday, July 5, 2015

Alien Sociology and Stability

We don’t know anything about alien sociology. It is dreadful to be so uninformed, but thus far no aliens have dropped in to enlighten us. We don’t even know if there are any alien civilizations to have a sociology. If there were some, could we figure out anything useful about them? Perhaps.

We know one thing, and that is that the universe lasts a very, very long time. Let’s suppose there was an alien civilization, and it lasted a long time as well. The civilization doesn’t have to last for geologic times, hundreds of millions of years, but for long times compared to biological time scales, like lifetimes or genetic mutation times. This duration of civilization might be hundreds of thousands of years or anything longer.

When we say civilization, what exactly is meant? It is a handy word to mean the population, culture, technology, memes, government, and other aspects of any group of intelligent creatures that get beyond living in the rough, in the forests, or swamps, or lakes, or wherever they live. They get to some sort of interaction scheme motivated by the fact that living in larger groups than a family is more efficient at harnessing the resources of the planet or the local environment in which they live. They have cities, which doesn’t mean buildings, but the congregation of creatures in larger groups. It is not beyond speculation that there could be a planet with a porous crust, with the pores the size of the creatures up to much larger, and the creatures live in those, without building structures. So the important point is that they live in larger groups, and we need to figure out the implications of that going on for very long times.

A tribe with fifty members is not a civilization, nor are many similar tribes. These tribes are small breeding groups, often migratory, with little of the things that mark a civilization. They are too small and too transitory to form something of what we envision as a civilization. It is a matter of degree. A tribe this small may have remembered tradition or oral history, may have primitive tools, may have specialization of labor, may have rituals, may have leadership, may have regulations or customs governing behavior, and so on. A civilization, as we are trying to use the word here, has these in larger measure. Even a small tribe which lives in the same place for many generations is not in the category of civilization, but it may be on the path to becoming one. For the purposes of discussion, we have a civilization with many members in an interacting group, say ten thousand to pick a number. The interactions are on a daily basis, and the civilization is not a network of small tribes with trading relationships. They interact more than through trade.

Thus the subject of this post is an alien civilization with from ten thousand up to billions of members, that has lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. Let’s talk about what happens as time passed, from the first formation of the civilization to a hundred thousand years later. One thing. The members learned things. That is the core of intelligence. An intelligent creature learns things. Another thing. Knowledge is transmitted laterally and forward.

If the civilization, taken as a whole, is chaotic, with one group starting a war on another, and eliminating them, and then proceeding to be eliminated by another, and so on, knowledge is not preserved. It may well be that warring competitors occupies the first part of the history of a particular alien population. But intelligent creatures learn. Does it take them ten thousand years of battling before they discover diplomacy or some other trick that stops the warring? Does it take them twenty thousand years before they figure out how to balance population with resource availability? Does it take them thirty thousand years to develop war methods that are so destructive that they deter future war? We can’t assume that every civilization on every alien planet does this, but it seems likely that some do, and arrive at an alternative state: stability.

By stability we mean a civilization that is not so self-destructive that it makes the accumulation of knowledge impossible. Such a civilization, having mastered control of its population so that population growth of some part of it does not create pressure for expansion, should be able to choose that population so that there is spare productivity, and learning can proceed. Technology will advance, given enough time. It is probably a reasonable thing to say that any civilization of intelligent aliens will, after some time, figure out how to be stable and to have a living standard, measured by the excess of productivity over population satisfaction levels, that allows science and technology to continue.

Voilà! The civilization is on the path to Asymptotic Technology, meaning they achieve the state of knowing all science and engineering that is possible. The ramifications of this are manifold, and a few have been discussed already in other posts of this blog [Roadblocks, Minefields].

Let’s switch the discussion to the other meaning of the title. So far we have been discussing the sociology of alien civilizations, as we might discuss the sociology of pre-industrial civilizations or totalitarian nations on Earth. The other meaning is what the aliens have for their science of sociology, and specifically, what they have for sociology after they have reached Asymptotic Technology. Those readers kind enough to have read the minefields post know that there is no specific date when Asymptotic Technology is reached, as a civilization just gets very close to it and then a bit closer and then a bit closer. For all practical purposes, and for the effects to take place, the civilization reaches it and the lacking knowledge is infinitesimal in importance compared to what has been amassed.

We might call the branch of Asymptotic Technology relating to sociology, asymptotic sociology. This means that the aliens have eventually figured out how to make not just a stable society, immune to war, revolutions, coups, or at least any of these which could damage the stability. They make a stable society which is productive and sustainable for long times, meaning it is no longer on a growth curve or an expansion trajectory, except on the periphery of society where growth or expansion do not disturb the stability of the core. In other words, they could be out cloning their world on a planet near them, but the cost of the expansion does not create a disturbance in the society and does not disrupt its stability.

As pointed out elsewhere, Asymptotic Technology does not dictate what the society does, the civilization’s memes do that. Asymptotic sociology along with asymptotic training and education make sure that the society's new members are brought up to agree with the memes that have been established over the millennia after which stability was achieved. So if they are going to do cloning of their world elsewhere in the galaxy, that is what their earlier stage of civilization set up and it is what continues. Undoubtedly, part of asymptotic sociology involves figuring out feedback loops and monitoring methods, as well as other sociological engineering tools, to make sure that stability is maintained.

It is not clear here what we would think of the civilization, using our twenty-first century viewpoints of what is right or wrong. Perhaps some readers might assume that their personal version of what a society should be will necessarily happen, but that remains to be seen. As far as this blog goes, the features of the alien civilization that has achieved stability on its planet, progressed to Asymptotic Technology, and has planned their future to be a continuation of the present at the core, might include some concepts we have never heard of, just as the ancient Egyptians, busy building the pyramids, never heard of democracy or human rights. We are not at asymptotic sociology, probably far from it, unlike some other areas where we might have a glimpse of the end state, like asymptotic physics. What they do have is very long term stability; very many speculations of how that might look are possible.

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