#supercivilizations

This is a bit late in coming, but I like to post a link to my pieces that appear on Centauri Dreams; this appeared Friday 28 July 2017. I hadn’t gotten around to posting this link as I was preparing for the Icarus Interstellar Starship Congress 2017, from which I have just returned. When there is a link for my talk (which was recorded), I will post that too.

This post on Centauri Dreams, like many of my longer essays, began very small, as an addendum to my What Do Stagnant Supercivilizations Do During Their Million Year Lifespans? I began drafting it as a Tumblr post, then I moved it over to Wordpress as a longer piece, and then it grew to proportions that I offered it to Paul Gilster for Centauri Dreams. I have often found that seemingly very small and relatively simple ideas require considerable exposition, and in my attempt to give a clear exposition of a simple idea I have to repeatedly back up in order to proper account that is reasonably close to first principles.

So the core of this essay was the idea that, if a civilization persists in existence for a period of time sufficient that we would be inclined to call it a “supercivilization,” then that million- or billion-year-old civilization would have had the time to engage in interstellar travel even if it never developed any spacefaring technology considerably in advance of our own at the present time (and this in itself would be remarkable, because it would require a supercivilization to stagnate at a relatively low level of technological development). 

On the way to getting to this idea, I gave an account of Kardashev’s properties of supercivilizations, views on the impossibility of long distance space travel, the idea that humanity is somehow tied to Earth (whether necessarily, empirically, morally, or metaphysically), the implicit qualifications that may be hiding in claims as to the impossibility of space travel, the relationship of these to what I call the SETI paradigm, and other matters -- all of which I could have gone into in even greater detail. As always,this essay could easily have been twice as long. Or, as I often image it, any one of my Centauri Dreams essays could be the core of a short book that would give a thorough exposition of the many ideas considered.  

From writing this essay I derived a more useful sense of the role of suboptimality in the development of civilization, and I started to incorporate some of this sense into my recent Starship Congress presentation. I have written about suboptimality previously, but now I see it in a much larger context, as I now also see the SETI paradigm and humanity’s relationship to its homeworld in a larger context. I hope to give a more formal and metaphysical exposition to these ideas at some time in the future. 

In particular, now that I have a greater appreciation of suboptimality, I would like to consider the entire possible range of suboptimal civilizations, and this in turn would require parsing the idea of civilization itself in order to determine the ways in which civilizations might partially or selectively stagnate, even while other aspects of that civilization continue to develop. And this drives me back once again to an attempt to elucidate an adequate model for civilization, which was one of my central concerns in the Starship Congress presentation that I just delivered. So all of this concerns tie back to each other, and none of them can be satisfactorily resolved in isolation from the other. This makes the effort difficult, but also rewarding. Incremental progress has a way of feeling quite significant in this context.

The question I considered in Stagnant Supercivilizations -- whether such are possible, and, if they are possible, what they would be like -- can be given another formulation in light of what I have written recently about the structure of civilizations, namely, that a civilization is a social institution with an economic infrastructure, an intellectual superstructure, and a central project that integrates infrastructure and superstructure (e.g., in my recent post Eurozone Civilization I amended my working definition of civilization to include the idea of a central project: “... a civilization is an economic infrastructure and an intellectual superstructure joined by a central project”). A stagnant supercivilization would be a supercivilization with a stagnant central project.  

What could serve as the central project of a stagnant supercivilization? A stagnant central project? What could constitute a stagnant central project? How can we differentiate stagnant central projects from central projects that are still vital and living? Are central projects ipso facto progressive (or ought they to be)? Does the existence of a central project imply that a civilization has a natural teleology toward which it is converging? Or does not the very idea of a supercivilization point to a civilization that has come to full maturity, i.e., a civilization that has attained its natural teleology, and for which nothing more remains but to bear witness to this accomplishment and to stave off decline and dissolution for as long as possible? In other words, a supercivilization may be a civilization that has exhausted its possibilities and is, by definition, stagnant. With its central project realized, that central project is, at the same time, dead.

It all depends on how you define a supercivilization. I believe it was Kardashev who introduced the term “supercivilization” (I don’t know that for certain), and we know that Kardashev defined supercivilizations in terms of their energy resources. Carl Sagan re-cast Kardashev’s civilization types, and often wrote of million-year-old and even billion-year-old civilizations, which might well be considered supercivilizations simply in virtue of their longevity. I have speculated in several posts (cf.Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project and The Globular Cluster Opportunity, as well as the above-referenced Stagnant Supercivilizations) about the possibility of very long lived civilizations that never become technologically advanced (and, presumably) never attain “technological maturity,” which is the idea that Bostrom uses to define existential risks). It would also be possible to define supercivilizations in terms of the volume of space that they occupy, much as we identify a terrestrial superpower in terms of its ability to project power globally. Are there other ways to define a supercivilization? Possibly so.

A supercivilization defined in terms of energy resources, longevity, or spatial extent could then be defined as non-stagnant if the defining quantity were non-stagnant, presumably growing (though a declining non-stagnant quantity would presumably define a supercivilization in dissolution). Thus growing energy resources, lengthening history, or increasing spatial extent could all be taken as definitive of a non-stagnant supercivilization. Each of these scenarios constitutes a particular exemplification of the Expansion Hypothesis: expansion in energy, time, or space. But a definition of a supercivilization in terms of a central project allows for the characterization of supercivilizations without implicit reference to any expansion hypothesis. The question is not whether a supercivilization is expanding or shrinking, but whether its central project is vital or moribund.

Whether or not the central project of a supercivilization was moribund or not might be a matter of interpretation. Say that we take as our terrestrial example of a stagnant civilization the Byzantine Empire, which, I have noted elsewhere, has been called, “a machine for getting people into heaven.” Thus the central project of Byzantium was soteriological, and this could be continued indefinitely as long as new souls to be saved were being produced. However, should the Millennium come, the soteriological project would turn into an eschatological project, and, once the eschatological project had come to fruition with the return of Christ, Byzantine civilization would have been over, and replaced by the something much greater, and also different. Thus the central project of Byzantium transcended measures of space, time, and energy and extended throughout a mythological reconstruction of cosmic history. We might interpret this central project either as being vital until the end of the world, or as perpetually moribund, without essential novelty, and it would be relatively easily to imagine a supercivilization parallel to Byzantine civilization.

We need not ask if the central project of a supercivilization, whether vital or stagnant, is anything of interest to human beings, since by the time a supercivilization derived from contemporary terrestrial civilization comes into being, if any such do come into being, humanity will have been long extinct by that time. The question, then, is whether there is any conceivable intelligent agent for which a central project holds any interest. Could a stagnant central project hold the interest of any intelligent agent into the indefinite future? For that matter, could even a vital central project capture the interest of an intelligent agent indefinitely? If a supercivilization ever comes into being, these will be relevant questions for a social order effectively made immortal by technology. It may be impossible for any civilization, whether supercivilization or not, to be anything other than stagnant over the long term, i.e., over cosmologically significant periods of time.