Infinitistic Historiography and Terrestrial Eocivilization
notes from a lecture delivered by Joshua Lederberg
Okay, so my title is quite a mouthful -- infinitistic historiography and terrestrial eocivilization -- but I will try to make the relationship between the two sound not only comprehensible, but obvious.
In my post The Terrestrial Eocivilization Hypothesis (which could be abbreviated as TEH) I identified this hypothesis with the claim that terrestrial civilization is the first and earliest civilization in the universe. In other words, the solution to the Fermi paradox is that there are no other technological civilizations.
The prefix "eo-" in "eocivilization" simply means "early," and I have taken this over from Joshua Lederberg's use of "eobiology" in order to indicate the earliest biology on Earth, which is now studied in origins of life research, which falls under astrobiology broadly construed.
In previous discussions I noted that Lederberg, in making a distinction between eobiology and exobiology, wanted to contrast the origins of life in the universe to the destiny of life in the universe; similarly, with eocivilization and exocivilization we can contrast the origins of civilization in the universe to the destiny of civilization in the universe. The complications arise from our limited knowledge of life and civilization in the universe. We don't yet know if we are alone or not, and this means that we don't yet know the structure of astrobiology or astrocivilization.
Given an infinitistic historiography, however, an extrapolation of what we know to date regarding astrobiology or astrocivilization -- that is to say, that there is at least one planet in the universe that is potentially the source of life and civilization, even if life and civilization have not emerged elsewhere -- suggests that even if we are alone in the sense of cosmic loneliness, we need not necessarily always be isolated in this way.
If we allow a finite point of origin both for biology and civilization (i.e., there is a time in the past prior to which there was no biology or civilization) but history is understood infinitistically, at our present state of knowledge and scientific method, we can say little about the apparently sterile past, but the future lies open to infinite development. Technically, we should say of life and civilization, given 1) the finite origins of both, and 2) infinitistic historiography, that they are sempiternal, or, more narrowly yet, that they possess future sempiternity.
The possibility of the sempiternity of terrestrial life and civilization is related in an interesting way to what I recently wrote about The Technological Frontier. In that post, I suggested that one way to understand the technological frontier is as the exploration of the technium. Taken in the context of infinitistic historiography, however, this immediately highlights a distinction between the technological frontier and the technium. The technium as we know it today, associated exclusively with the technology of terrestrial eocivilization, is as finite as the origins of that civilization. However, the technological frontier, as a frontier and not as a finite fait accompli, is finite in a sense that the technium is not infinite.
At very least, the technological frontier is potentially infinite, and to say more would require an inquiry into the applicability of the concepts of the transfinite to the concepts of historiography -- something that I hope to take up in the fullness of time, but which I will not yet attempt to develop at this time. But given only the potential infinity of future sempiternity, already interesting consequences follow.
In the context of future sempiternity, terrestrial eocivilization (as well as terrestrial biology, and astrocivilization may be understood as an extension of astrobiology) takes on a special significance of being the source of life and civilization in the universe. In the potentially infinite future. life and civilization can go on to be the origins of both throughout the universe. There being time enough, terrestrial biology and civilization could expand to other worlds, lose touch with their terrestrial origins, evolve into something entirely distinct, and be rediscovered in the farther future, thus fulfilling our most fantastic science fiction dreams of encountering a universe filled with exotic life and exotic civilizations.
