This is part 2 of another collaboration with Isaac Arthur.
To see part 1 of this collaboration, and links to our previous collaboration about the concept
of uplifting , check out the end screen of this video or in the description below.
In Part 1 Isaac covered the idea of the Fermi Paradox, and how it may come to an eventual
end not because of alien civilizations, but our own colonization of the galaxy and what
might result from that.
In essence, as Isaac covered, our colonies would rapidly diverge until they no longer
recognized each other as having once been the same species.
Perhaps in time they might even forget they were ever related and explosion of intelligence
may be the end result for the Milky Way, all of it unaware that it began with one species
on Earth.
But there is another option, say everyone chose to remain human?
Or at least desired to maintain some form of a cohesive galactic human civilization?
One of the fundamental problems facing a galactic humanity are the distances involved.
The Milky Way is incomprehensibly huge, it takes light over 100,000 light-years to cross
it.
Given the science that we know right now, there doesn’t seem to be a way to travel
faster than light, and anything that might circumvent that speed limit usually requires
some form of exotic matter that we’re uncertain is even possible to create.
Assuming faster than light travel is not possible the limits of the speed of light don’t just
constrain travel, it also constrains communications times.
In this universe, information does not appear to be transmissible faster than light.
If that proves to be the absolute case, then any galaxy-spanning civilization would have
seemingly impossible issues to deal with when communicating.
If you are 50,000 light-years away from another group of humans you wish to talk to, and you
used radio for communications, you would need to send out your message and then wait for
them to receive it 50,000 years later, and then you’ll get a message back after about
100,000 years.
Not a brisk conversation at all.
And, barring any sort of advances such as uploading ourselves into machines, or extending
human life spans to thousands of years or more, this is probably a deal killer as far
as meaningful communications go.
Without advanced technologies that can change the very basis of who we are, our nature as
biological beings, communications would be arduous.
With advanced technologies this equation changes, but time is still a factor.
Human cultures can change very dramatically over the course of 100,000 years.
Look at our own civilization, that long ago we were hunter gatherers with very little
in the way of technology.
In the intervening time, we have learned to construct telephones, selectively breed plants
in order to turn a wild plant into something that can be grown in large scale agriculture,
or, ultimately launch a rocket, all of which have dramatically changed the cultures that
adopted them.
But imagine if we took one of those early humans from 100,000 years ago and showed them
a cornfield.
It would look like nothing they’ve ever seen.
Rows of plants that they probably wouldn’t recognize from the forms they might have known
them as back in ancient times, had they lived in the right part of the world where they
were indigenous.
Something so simple as tomato would be unrecognizable to a person in central America that knew its
predecessor, a jungle plant with berry sized fruits, much less someone born thousands of
miles away and wholly unfamiliar with the plant.
As Isaac and I mentioned in our previous collaboration on Uplifting, there are currently primitive
humans on earth that have no contact with the rest of the world.
We used the example of the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean,
who have rebuffed all attempts at contact, and reasonably so, they have had a bad history
with the outside world’s attempts at contacting them.
But the truth is, in a sense, they do have one form of contact.
Our flotsam and shipwrecks do show up on their shores, and they are thought to fashion arrowheads
and tools from them.
Perhaps they know more about us, then we do them?
But imagine showing them a rocket launch, something far removed from anything they’ve
ever seen.
It would be utterly incomprehensible to them.
Or take our antibiotic drugs that cure illnesses that they might have considered absolutely
fatal?
Would they consider them magic?
We simply would not be able to communicate to that person just what the rocket or an
antibiotic is because we are so culturally divergent.
And that’s assuming you can even understand their language.
Language tends to diverge when contact between peoples that speak it become isolated from
one another.
As example here would be the Roman Empire.
While that empire was never completely culturally homogenous, they had ethnic groups and local
languages, in fact huge portions of it spoke Greek, in the west large parts of it spoke
latin.
But by the time of the end of the Western Roman Empire, that latin had begun to diverge
locally and become what is now modern French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.
It was only a matter of centuries before separation caused distinct, stand alone languages to
form out of latin.
In an age of technology, this does not happen so rapidly because of how interconnected everything
becomes.
But when one introduces the levels of separation you would have on a galactic scale, this all
may become a problem again and languages between colonies may begin to diverge quickly.
At some point, they will no longer be mutually intelligible, and with enough time could become
indecipherable.
So how do cultures separated by tens of thousands of years in time understand each other at
all?
The only way would be some form of intentional social cohesion built in from the start.
But worse off than language is any hope of galactic governance over a distance.
You can’t wait 10,000 years for a legal ruling or political directive from Earth.
Or worse, you can’t wait for funding from earth to arrive to cover your emergency asteroid
deflection project.
As a result, it’s hard to envision any kind of empire that could ever span a galaxy, but
rather a rule where all governance must necessarily be local.
But with that comes varied laws, where chewing gum might be illegal on one world, or may
be compulsory on a another world that manufactures chewing gum.
We see this here on earth, where every country has different laws, some of them very different
from one another.
But there have in the past been attempts to create law codes that cover multiple lands,
such as English Common law, or the various imperial legal codes of the past.
This could hypothetically be applied to a galactic humanity, where certain situations
such as uplifting animals to be more intelligent is banned galaxy wide for ethical reasons.
Or the creation of dangerous machine superintelligence which might then threaten the entire galaxy
should anyone create it.
Perhaps there are technologies so dangerous that such a system to control them must be
put into place, making some form of contact an imperative.
Perhaps this could be accomplished through a network of von Neumann probes that wander
the galaxy performing inspections for some central authority.
Perhaps they sit in all human systems from the moment the colony is established in order
to EMP that civilization back to the stone age should they try to pursue certain banned
technologies.
Such a probe could also serve as a kind of galactic law code, along with preserving an
official language.
Or it could be beamed out via a radio beacon just to keep a unifying galactic reference
point going for the cultures within it, even though those cultures may no longer be in
direct contact with each other.
You might position many such beacons at strategic intervals so that the entire galaxy is covered
to act as a sort of galactic constitution that’s set during the period of initial
colonization, and then adhered to indefinitely once the colonies have matured.
That might help prevent dangerous technologies from arising.
But what of wars between the human colonies?
We’re humans after all, and whenever humans from different groups came into contact for
the first time, wars have tended to break out.
By creating a standard on how to moderate disputes between neighboring star systems,
a kind of galactic United Nations could be set up that can locally moderate disputes
without the need to consult planets thousands of light-years away.
Or perhaps even a standardized law code kept on artificially intelligent computers that
cannot be altered, and always issues sound judgments.
But would humans even still go to war in space?
As I said earlier, the Milky Way is enormous, and that may change the equation for conquest
and warfare.
In past wars, conquest was usually over a border dispute or a desire to expand.
This may not be the case for space, especially when one factors in the problem of population
and colonizing the Milky Way.
Predicting what population will do in the future is tricky.
It can go up, and currently is, but it can also go down.
If it goes down for us at some point over the next century or two, and the rates of
growth are indeed showing a decline, then we cannot physically colonize the galaxy at
all because, frankly, we don’t have enough humans.
The current population of earth, about 7.4 billion people, is utterly insufficient to
colonize a galaxy made up of 100 billion stars.
When you have so much real estate, far more than anyone can use, would there be a need
for warfare?
One would hope not.
The idea of things like arms races involving superintelligent machines, Nicoll-Dyson beams
and self-replicating berserkers are unsettling at best.
Entire colonies destroyed by grey goo nanotechnology by another colony that they’ve been in slow-motion
conflict with for thousands of years.
Whether possible or not, those kinds of scenarios do not constitute a positive human future.
But that brings up another thing that we humans certainly like to do.
Trade.
What would trade look like should we colonize at least part of the Milky Way.
The answer could possibly be not much.
Crossing great distances, light-years, just to trade scrap iron between star systems with
no shortage of iron of their own makes no sense.
It’s simply too energy costly to trade in the sense of goods like that.
One exception to this however might be cultural goods.
If someone were wealthy enough and wanted a certain painting or object from another
human colony, and was willing to pay tremendously for it, it can hypothetically be done of course.
But real trade would likely remain confined to the transmission of information, perhaps
newly developed technologies or the schematics for the latest asteroid blaster from a colony
a few tens of light-years away.
Future trade could be more about what an object means, rather than what it’s made of.
But what facilitates that trade?
Would information flow freely, or would you have to maintain an electronic currency system
so people can obtain the latest galactic best sellers and be sure the author is paid?
What would back that currency, or would it simply be fiat currency backed by the governments
of the colonies?
Or, should population end up being an issue, do we ultimately choose to be a stay at home
civilization, colonizing only the solar system itself, either because there is no need to
do more, such as if our population were low, or that it’s simply too daunting of a task
to colonize much past a few close star systems.
In that sense, the solution to the Fermi Paradox is simply that alien civilizations never need
to become Kardashev Type III civilizations that are easily visible.
Rather they may be more compact, and much harder to spot.
So far, we’ve taken this from the perspective that we are alone in the Milky Way.
But a further question to ask would be what if we aren’t, and we begin to run across
other intelligent civilizations looking into ways to integrate into our expanding galactic
civilization?
Perhaps we find them stranded on an ocean planet that they can’t escape, and we uplift
them from bad physiology?
How would we interact with them?
Would they wish to obtain cultural artifacts of us?
Would obtaining alien artifacts be worth the energy to bring them back to earth?
In other words, maybe we will solve someone else’s Fermi Paradox as we fill the galaxy
with our civilization.
The human race might be the great lawgivers of the galaxy, expanding and uplifting more
primitive civilizations than ourselves.
If the solution to the Fermi Paradox for example is that intelligence is not rare, simply that
intelligence that can escape its own planet is rare, then this might come to be the be
the case.
Or maybe this exists already, and we are like the Sentinelese of the Milky Way.
The aliens may not communicate with us simply because they don’t know how.
Perhaps contact is futile and expensive, and perhaps dangerous for us, as contact with
us is dangerous for primitive uncontacted tribes on earth due to a lack of immunity
to our diseases.
Perhaps other civilizations in the Milky Way simply stay at home, and only initiate contact
if it’s necessary to do so.
The solution to the Fermi Paradox here being that we simply aren’t valuable or interesting
enough yet.
What do we offer an advanced alien civilization?
If they’re more advanced it’s hard to imagine that we offer much of anything, especially
if we’re dealing with a machine civilization rather than a biological one.
But once we do offer something, or we run into such a civilization as we colonize, we
may get blindsided by communications.
And therein is a question, what happens if the first communication we receive from an
alien civilization is a code of rules and laws and the word conform.
Figuring out the basics of what would be needed to explore and colonize the galaxy is challenging.
While we haven’t yet seen first hand what the logistics of colonizing the galaxy would
be, as we covered in this video, this was but a taste of what we do know.
For a more in-depth look at the realities of exploring and eventually colonizing suitable
exoplanets, I’d recommend the course Astronomy - Worlds Beyond Earth over at Brilliant.org.
where you will learn in-depth through exercises how to calculate and determine the habitability
zones around stars where earth-like planets suitable for human colonization might lie,
and exercise and improve your math skills in the process.
You’ll also learn how astronomers discover exoplanets in the first place by exploring
the transit method and looking for the gravitational wobbles planets produce on their parent stars.
And finally, a segment covering the basics of interstellar travel to help you get a better
feel for the realities of exploring and colonizing the Milky Way.
Check that out over at Brilliant.org/JMG.
Thanks for listening!
I am John Michael Godier.
And I’m Isaac Arthur and we hope you enjoyed this collaboration.
And be sure to like, share and subscribe to our channels for more futurism, science and
whatever may await us in this amazing universe in which we live.