Seven Levels of Civilizational Comparability
I have created a couple of diagrams in an attempt to capture some of my intuitions about civilization, and especially about the relationship of exocivilizations to each other (which, in my terminology, constitutes the disciple of astrocivilization). I will try to explain a little about these diagrams, and I leave it to the reader to say whether they illustrations are enlightening or confusing.
I have been using the term "peer civilization" and "peer species" to indicate the possibility of other civilizations (exocivilizations) and other sentient species that are, roughly speaking, our equals. What do I mean by another civilization or another species being our equal? I don't mean this in a moral or political sense, but in a sense specific to civilization.
In Existential Risk and the Developmental Conception of Civilization I suggested that it is possible to think about civilization in developmental terms. In this spirit I have formulated the above illustration. If we take ourselves, i.e., our present stage of civilizational development, as the center of the diagram, so that any other civilization is our peer in so far as they correspond to this stage of developmental attainment, then the trajectory described by the red arrow shows the possibilities for an exocivilization or ETI in relation to our own civilization.
These possibilities include, but are perhaps not limited to:
A non-civilized ETI (pre-civilization or proto-civilization) lies outside the scope of the zone of proximal development of civilization
An ETI in the early stages in the development of civilization -- and by "early" I here mean "prior to the industrial revolution" -- is comparable as a civilization, but is not a "peer"
An ETI that has established an industrial-technological civilization, and is therefore capable of understanding itself and other civlizations (exocivilizations for its point of view, which would include us) might be counted as a distant peer or a near peer, even if it has not attained our level of technological sophistication
A peer civilization, sensu stricto, would be an ETI-based industrial-technological exocivilization with a technological development roughly equivalent to our own -- say, for present purposes, a minimal space flight capacity and computing capacity
Continuing to follow the red arrow, an industrial-technological exocivilization that had developed its technological capacities somewhat beyond our own would still be a peer, but it would be a near peer or even a distant peer if its technology were significantly more advanced than our own. However, we would still be able to recognize these technologies as technologies, as we would recognize the industrial-technological civilization as such, and as a more advanced instance of our own civilization.
A sufficiently advanced ETI and its industrial-technological civilization would begin to pass beyond our ability to understand the technologies involved. This represents a stage of development that some writers sometimes call a supercivilization. in Cosmos, Carl Sagan often referred to the possibility of civilizations millions of years old and greatly in advance of our own civilization. As with comparing ourselves to a pre-industrial civilization, we would here both be comparable as civilizations simpliciter, but clearly not peers.
An ETI that had developed beyond anything recognizable as a civilization, and had passed over into post-civilizational institutions, would no longer be comparable to us as a civilization, and would cease to be even a peer. This would be like comparing ourselves to a non-civilization ETI, as in (1) above. (For a fictional example, this might be like comparing ourselves to the "Overmind" in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End.)
In the diagram below, I wanted to try to show how peer civilizations widely separated in spacetime cannot "see" each other until such time as the future light cone of each civilization intersects. Thus numerous civilizations might inhabit the hypersurface of the present without knowing about each other, but, perhaps more importantly, without even being able to know about each other.
Such a diagram represents something of our current understanding of the geometry of spacetime, but a distant peer or non-peer civlization, as in (6) or (7) above, might have passed beyond this to a science no longer recognizable to us as science, and may thus not be subject to strictures of impossibility that seem to follow from our present understanding of spacetime geometry.
There is much more to say about what is implied by these illustrations, but I will leave further commentary for a later time.
