Just how long can a civilization live? It’s a key question, showing up as a factor in the Drake Equation and possibly explaining our lack of success at f
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.
















