When envisioning highly advanced alien civilizations and what they might be like, there is a temptation
to think in certain paradigms that may turn out to be false.
This is because all you have to work with are assumptions, and our own sampling of one
as far as civilizations we know about.
But what we do may not be applicable to aliens, our motivations may be vastly different than
theirs, and thus they might look very different from how we envisioned them as a civilization.
That we do not know what alien civilizations look like may easily account for the great
silence and solve the Fermi Paradox.
A good example of paradigm thinking in this regard is the Kardaschev scale.
The basis for this scale is energy use, in other words envisioning the energy needs and
lengths civilizations would go in order to get energy.
This assumes that there is no upper limit on the energy needs of a civilization, based
on us, all we do is consume more energy as each year passes.
It also assumes this will always be the case, forever, and we will eventually consume the
entire energy of our planet, or type 1, then type two as we consume all the energy of our
star, and finally type 3 where we consume the entire energy of our galaxy.
But these may be completely off base and turn out wrong in reality, and we may see that
in our own future.
And there are wildcards here.
One would be the advent of viable fusion energy.
If you can produce as much energy as you want from things like hydrogen or helium 3, then
you may not need to build a dyson sphere around your star.
It may be that very energy intensive things like planet destroying nicoll-Dyson beams
are both impractical and have no use in the universe.
As a result, just because of fusion, the energy needs paradigm the Kardaschev scale is based
on may not be the right metric.
But then there is highly advanced technology itself.
We can’t envision everything that will be invented, but there are some low hanging fruits
in futurism that we can comfortably bet will happen, such as increasingly capable artificial
intelligence.
Another is nanotechnology.
We are actively in the process of miniaturizing our technology, and we’ve been doing it
for decades.
A computer that once took up an entire building at a university campus is now small enough
to fit in a phone case, and is orders of magnitude more powerful than computers in the 1950’s
were.
This trend seems like it’s not going to stop and ways to miniaturize it further seem
eventually viable.
This scales down even to the atomic scale itself.
We already can arrange atoms to function as mechanisms, such as gears.
So some form of true nanotechnology seems in the human future.
Now what this will look like is an open question, you can do a lot more with this than build
gears.
Things like nanotechnological assemblers are on the table as something that’s possible,
but in practice may be very different than science fiction and speculative science envision.
The big problem with nanotechnological assemblers is heat.
They’d generate an enormous amount of heat and melt themselves if they assembled too
quickly, so the reality is that if you program your nanotechnological assemblers to build
a widget, it may take weeks or longer for that widget to appear.
Worse, if you asked for an apple, the apple might rot before it was finished if the nanotechnology
didn’t maintain what it already printed.
But in everything from medical science to materials science, the utility for true nanotechnology
seems obvious.
This should work for aliens as well.
If they are space faring and detectable technologically, they will probably have invented these same
technologies such as fusion or nanotechnology because what enables those technologies are
properties of the universe that are, for lack of a better word, universal.
How far this goes is anyone’s guess, extremely advanced nanotechnology could take the form
of a hive mind for example, where the alien civilization doesn’t exist in biological
form, but rather uploaded into a cloud of nanotechnology functioning as a supercomputer.
And that’s where this gets tricky.
Such a cloud civilization existing in space, cold is always good for computation, would
probably be indistinguishable from sub micron natural dust.
So say the nanocivilization very heavily occupies a star system and we look at it.
We would detect the nanotechnology through differences in the wavelengths of light it
absorbs from its star.
But we would see that as simple dust and have no reason to suspect it was artificial.
So naturally, if the dust was sufficiently weird to say it wasn’t normal dust, like
what you might have in a protoplanetary disk, you might point a radio telescope at the dusty
system and see if you get a signal of artificial origin.
The problem here is that nanotechnology very likely would be low energy, it may communicate
with itself using RF, but at very low energy because nothing stronger is needed.
Thus you’d have no hope of picking up the RF at a distance, so thus is not a viable
technosignature.
And that’s where it ends.
All the data possible to gather seems to fail, you could look in infrared but nanotechnology
and dust both emit infrared if they’re close enough to their star.
This type of civilization or a variant of it is so highly advanced that it becomes indistinguishable
from nature, as strange as that seems.
You would only have a population of stars with weird dust, and guess what, we have exactly
that.
We first started seeing dust in some weird juxtaposition around a star with KIC 8462852
or Tabby’s star.
Since several astronomers have found further examples of dipping stars very similar to
tabby’s star.
This is not surprising, when you see something happen in the universe, you can reasonably
expect it’s not the only time it happened and you see other examples readily.
But the weird thing here is that maybe the technosignature of a nanocloud isn’t in
what you see, but what you don’t see.
With something like KIC 8462852 it’s always most likely that it’s of astrophysical origin.
It’s natural dust that’s in some strange position around its star, and it’s just
not yet readily evident how it got to be that way.
But one of the strangest features of the dust at Tabby’s star is that it emits no detectable
infrared.
Had infrared emissions been found, that would have been it for this star, it would be fully
consistent with dust in a star system and an alien explanation would have left the table
for lack of a need to invoke it.
But the lack of infrared constrains just what the dust could be doing.
Specifically it means that the dust must be cold.
Dr. Boyajian’s original paper on the star hypothesized a situation of cold comets entering
from the star’s outer reaches and disintegrating forming the dust.
But this was found to be a problem because to account for the material, an implausibly
high number of comets would be needed.
So whatever the nature of the dust is, it’s cold.
And interestingly, again for efficient computation, cold is good for nanotechnology.
It would want to be cold.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Further mysteries about KIC 8462852 include that there is some evidence, though at this
point it’s somewhat weak, that the dust is orbiting within the habitable zone of the
star.
At that distance, it should be emitting detectable infrared, so that could be a really interesting
development if periodicity can be detected with orbit of the dust around this star.
Another is that the other examples similar to Tabby’s star all cluster in the same
area of space.
One thing that might shed light on this is to look at the other candidate stars and see
if there is any infrared.
It would be beyond strange if they all exhibited a lack of an IR signature.
On the other hand one aspect of Tabby’s star being of natural origin is that the dips
have progressively become more shallow.
Observers no longer see the huge 22 percent dips that were noted in the Kepler data, which
suggests that this dust was created by a collision and is dispersing.
But the size of the dust, which is something more like smoke instead of dust, may stand
against that.
And also, if the dust is in fact close to the star, it would need a mechanism to be
replenished, meaning ongoing collisions, or self-replicating nanobots.
But it remains very likely that whatever is happening at KIC 8462852 is astrophysical
in nature, and not alien.
But does serve as a way to think about recognizing highly advanced alien civilizations above
and beyond the Kardashev scale paradigm.
It would be beyond embarrassing if we had been staring at alien civilizations in our
sky surveys and didn’t recognize them until we ourselves built the same technology, or
perhaps we might never recognize them.
Another case of where doing things small is beneficial is breakthrough starshot.
Here a swarm of tiny light sail driven spacecraft are pushed by a laser beam to the nearest
star system.
This is technology we have now, and while not nanotechnology, they are tiny for what
they do.
If this scales further down, it may or may not be practical, you could station nanotechnological
probes in star systems that if inhabited, the indigenous residents of that star system
would have no means to detect.
You’d have an alien civilization maintaining a presence in your star system, or conceivable
even on your planet with you, and you’d never know about it if it was sparse enough.
And that’s scary.
If you had such a situation, sparsely dispersed nanotechnology spread across an entire star
system operating without your knowledge or ability to detect, you’ve just been made
subject to one of the most powerful weapons conceivable in the universe.
Nanotechnological clouds can do such things as create custom viruses, infect and cause
the extinction of whatever species they wish, alter the brains and perhaps hack and take
over residents of an exoplanet without their knowledge, thus giving the only viable hard
science fiction way for a zombie apocalypse to happen.
The could in principle make entire planets uninhabitable, or habitable depending on what
the case may be.
The point is, the last thing a civilization might see before its demise is a coalescing
cloud of malevolent alien nanotechnology forming up in space nearby.
But this also has the bright side that if something like that existed in our solar system,
it probably would have acted by now if it was going to.
And there may be unforeseen limits to just what nanotechnology can do in practicality,
preventing any of these scenarios.
There are going to be limitations as well as advantages just by virtue of being very
small.
You don’t need a nanotechnological hot dog, if your bun is normal sized for example.
And there may be huge pitfalls, some of which are already being suggested that may prevent
nanotechnology from fully maturing.
A good example here are environmental impacts.
What happens when you have a bunch of defunct broken pieces of nanotechnology invisible
existing in the environment.
Given our problems with microplastics, this might be orders of magnitude worse and harder
to mitigate.
But it’s hard to deny the awesome utility nanotechnology offers.
And this is where it gets odd.
Nanotechnology can assemble things on the molecular scale, including DNA.
The potential for altering or repairing DNA is enormous in medical science, but you can
also build DNA from the ground up and create ostensibly custom creatures.
This leads to the concept of panspermic nanotechnology, where life can be seeded throughout the galaxy
like panspermia, but with the virtue that it the life doesn’t have to survive the
interstellar medium but can be created in situ by a much more robust piece of nanotechnology.
In such a scenario, again, you’re left with no indicators as to it having happened.
If a nanoprobe seeded a planet with printed microbial life and then left it alone, with
the probe itself dying and disappearing or otherwise remain undetectable, then the civilization
that eventually arises on that world will not have enough information about its origins
to say how abiogenesis happened.
They would just know that seemingly weirdly, life somehow arose on their planet the very
first moment it possibly could.
Unless the alien seed civilization encoded a message in the DNA to be handed down indefinitely,
it would appear that life somehow, if unlikely, arose in the early days of their planet and
then evolved completely naturally from that point on, all evidence of the original primal
DNA long gone, replaced with a mess of mutations and evolutionary paths.
They might try to recreate the exact process of abiogenesis, but never actually have much
luck further than creating life’s building blocks in the lab.
Such a civilization might even envision never understanding the process that created life
on that world, and never nail it down.
Is this starting to sound familiar?
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently worried about the
nano hot dog.
I can see it now.
There’s your nanodog with chili and cheese, that’ll be 50 thousand dollars.
I don’t see anything.
Of course you don’t, it’s beyond microscopic, now pay up.
But I’m still hungry.
Mark my words, the coming age of the nanogrift is soon to be upon us.
Very disturbing and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer
and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting,
weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.