Coexistence with Aliens

Good Afternoon and welcome to an extra edition of  Scifi Sunday featuring our 4-part Coexistence with Aliens series originally recorded and produced for  Nebula in 2019 and 20, and has never before been seen on Youtube or any of our other platforms. As  channel regulars know, we had our end of the month Livestream Q&A scheduled for next weekend, then  had to reschedule it to this weekend, May 21st, so I could co-host the International  Space Development Conference. However I’ve just had a minor

surgery on my  nose and tongue and as you can probably tell, my voice is still recovering and not ready for  an hour of live Q&A. Fortunately our 4-part Coexistence with Alien series has a combined run  time of just over an hour, so it seemed a great replacement, and will cover a number of ways we  might coexist with aliens, beginning with Alien Xenopsychology in part 1, and moving on to look  at trade, war, and alliance in parts 2, 3, and 4. And without further ado,  let’s get started! How do y

ou greet an alien visitor and insure you don’t create an interstellar  diplomatic incident, or worse? The Universe is an immense and ancient place,  filled with billions of trillions of stars, many of which may have hosted life and have  given rise to civilizations. If that’s so, they seem a quiet bunch thus far, but presumably  there would come a time when we’d talk to them and interact with them and eventually,  hopefully, come to coexist with them. Of course coexistence is a vague term, it mi

ght  mean ignoring each other or going to war, it might mean trade, friendship or alliances, and we’ll  examine those aspects throughout this series. It’s fun to contemplate meeting and  getting to know alien civilizations, but from a realistic standpoint the  level of cooperation and friendship, and even romantic love that we see in science  fiction is probably not too realistic and we’ll be looking at ‘why not?’ along with how such efforts  at coexistence might go, from the physiological to co

smological, and today the psychological. It’s easy to look at humanity’s past and the meetings of our scattered tribes and use  them as an analogy, but fundamentally all humans have a fairly shared psychology arising  largely from a near-identical physiology. Yet even there we see many differences arising from  different traditions of each place and time, things which do not cross cultural boundaries.  Unlike most animals, human behavior is far more learned and this can give rise to major  alter

ations in behavior and life focus. How much different is a mind evolved under an  alien sun, one that might not even use the same core biology? Let’s consider a hypothetical case,  a species that was nearly the same as us in every way, except their biology tended to breakdown, in  a very short window of time. Everybody died at 72, plus or minus a year at most, barring accident  or illness. Consider the huge impact that would tend to have on their view of death. They might  break their whole live

s into very precise periods, say 6 life phases of 12 years each, child  till 12, young adult till 24, and so on, get married in your 24th year, never marry anyone  more than a year older or younger than you since you’d be guaranteed to see the one outlive the  other. They might be ultra-regimented about time and calendar and obsessed about not wasting  time or being late, just from that one minor thing. They might abhor any efforts at medicine  to extend life beyond that, viewing it as cheating

fate or stealing from future generations.  All from that one minor difference with us. And it would be beyond peculiar for us to  meet anyone that like us in mind or body. Think how different a civilization would be  if their children reached physical maturity in just 2 or 3 years, more in keeping with other  mammals of human size. Would such a species be very likely to develop concepts like marriage or  children going to school or close family ties? Something as minor as being monochromatic in 

vision, just seeing the world in black and white, or having much larger ears that could rotate  like a cats to detect sound directions better could hugely impact their development  of language or art or day to day life. On the other end of things, we don’t know that  DNA is the only way to do carbon-based life, there are after all more than a dozen other  amino acids we use besides the 4 in DNA and RNA, which uses 4 too, but swaps out thymine for uracil  and is single stranded rather than doubl

e. There are also far more amino acids than we use. And  that’s even assuming you have to use amino acids for your biological construction blueprints,  or that life even needs to be carbon based. Something silicon based might evolve natural  semiconductors that served as nerves and neurons. They might be small and short-lived  but think exceedingly fast, experiencing very long subjective lifespans of millennia packed  into mere months. Similarly, humans are in many ways a colony organism, we con

tain as many  bacteria as human cells in our bodies, and most of the latter are simple blood cells. Our other  cells run on mitochondria as a power source and those are basically a symbiotic life form living  inside us. We could see brains develop from more overtly colonial organisms, like a neural network  composed of insects or microorganisms in a hive that simply replicated neurons by their day to day  motion and actions. Alastair Reynolds contemplates such a mind, a glacier as a brain, whose

neurons  are composed of little worms burrowing around that glacier, in his short story Glacial. Such a mind might exist for millennia while experiencing only days of time as you and I would  view it, counting actual days as eyeblinks and years as breaths. It would also seem to be without  any means of controlling the world around it, and its senses might be composed only  of light and temperature changes. So too, day length and year length are big  factors in how we behave, and many worlds wit

h life might be tidally locked to their  Sun, as we expect for many red dwarf stars, the most common type of star. Those would  experience perpetual light on one side and perpetual dark on the other, or have years  of mere weeks around such small stars or many years around brighter and shorter lived stars. In this respect, the very notion of anything approaching human psychology being possessed  by aliens seems almost ridiculous. And yet, for all those differences there are some traits we  could

expect to be very common if not universal. In the 1995 science fiction novel “The Killing  Star”, the authors suggest three such rules we’d expect to be true of all intelligent aliens: Rule 1. The Aliens will believe their survival is more important than our survival. Rule 2. Wimps don't become top dogs. Rule 3. Aliens will assume that the  first two rules apply to us as well. Or to clarify, whether or not they are  friendly folks who’d give you the shirt off their back or so hostile they try 

to wipe out all other life, they will still place their own existence above yours, as  evolution will instill a survival imperative, it’s pretty much what it does. It also doesn’t  produce wimps and they don’t get to be dominant over their planet to explore the galaxy beyond  if they are. They’re not likely to be physically fragile but even if they are, they’ll be beyond  deadly in the overall sense, same as humans are. Humans stand at the apex of a 4 billion year  deep corpse pile, and everythi

ng else still alive and kicking in the modern era of this  world is a sophisticated survival machine too. So any aliens we meet are likely to  be the same as us in this regard, very good at surviving and in a way that lets  them control their world, not just hide, flee, or defend from threats but proactively deal  with them. They will also assume everyone they meet out in the galaxy probably will be too. Exceptions to that ought to be rare at best, an example might be that glacier-mind I  menti

oned or some monoculture world where some single algae brain developed across  the whole planet. Though even that is very dubious for becoming intelligent let alone  technological as there’s no predator-prey cycles driving improvements and adaptations to  adaptations. No biological arms race, as it were, pushing you toward higher intelligence. Also, even if you have such intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily result in technology  or civilizations. Those 3 rules of “The Killing Star” can probably

be added to with “Any  technological civilization must possess and value curiosity” and “Civilizations can only arise where  social behavior and cooperation are common”. As we looked at in our Rare Intelligence and  Rare Technology episodes, it wouldn’t seem very plausible you could develop advanced technology  without critters who were willing and able to work together a lot, and who could specialize  in various tasks. A blacksmith can’t eat coal or iron ore and needs to be able to trust his  n

eighbors to provide those to him and give or trade him food and other things for his work,  so he can focus on being a good blacksmith. What’s more, this is likely to also require at  least some acceptance of different worldviews. Our work shapes our thinking on life and our day  to day approach to life, a farmer and blacksmith will inevitably have different outlooks in life  and need to be able to coexist in spite of those. You also can only create and innovate  with not just a curious mind but

a certain tolerance of such curious folks playing  around with new and strange concepts. You can also only develop civilizations with  a capacity for long range foresight and a willingness to sacrifice for the future,  to invest effort into planting crops you won’t eat for a year or raise apprentices in  your craft who won’t be skilled for years. Which strongly implies any such civilization is  going to have concepts like friendship, diplomacy, family, self-sacrifice, tolerance,  curiosity, a v

alue for knowledge, and a notion of risk-taking and long-term  planning. Or close analogies there too. If you encounter an alien ship, you can  assume they don’t want to be blown up, that they will be curious about  you, that they will be willing to take at least some small risk to  satisfy their curiosity and so on. They’ll be ready to defend themselves and quite  good at it, but they’ll also have an idea that not everyone thinks quite like them and a basic  willingness to tolerate that, even i

f it might be much less tolerant than we are. There should be  at least some basic potential for conversation. There may be exceptions, we can almost always  contrive some scenario that would result in a species lacking these traits, but they are likely  to be the exception not the norm. And again, you don’t want to assume this manifests  itself in a very human way. Their concept of tolerance might be so narrow the worst and  most oppressive orthodoxies of human history might call them narrow-mi

nded. They might be  curious but ultra-cautious compared to us, so that every new technology or cultural change  gets proofed and pondered by committees over centuries, or they might be so anarchic that they  barely hold together as a cohesive civilization, or are hyper-aggressive or are aggressive but  just aren’t very violent by nature to their own. Humans have a reputation among humans as  being rather cruel compared to animals, though I’m never clear why, we aren’t the only  critters that ki

ll our own, not even vaguely, and we do work with other animals, often keeping  them as pets and effective family members, not something too common in the animal kingdom.  That might be a rarity among aliens too, though it might not be, our capacity for doing that,  keepings cats and dogs around for vermin control and others as livestock or work animals was a  big factor in how our civilization was shaped and maybe even in allowing a civilization to emerge. It is worth noting that we can get alo

ng quite well with other mammals, many of whom are millions  of generations removed from us biologically and psychologically. An alien is even further removed  from us biologically, less our kin than a tree is or the Ebola Virus, so that may be an even  bigger gap to cover in coexistence with them, but they also might be much closer to us  psychologically than a cat or dog too, just from those shared traits probably necessary  to become a technological civilization. Of course that might still re

sult in an overall  massive gap, and also only covers civilizations, as opposed to trying to make contact with some  sentient tree on another world. We also can’t assume brain architecture is even vaguely the  same. We use a species survival tactic of few young, and heavy time and resource investment into  those young, as mammals and especially as humans, since it takes decades to create a fully developed  human in mind and body. A species which was born able to survive on its own and simply kep

t  growing in size and brain complexity as it aged wouldn’t necessarily need anything like a  family structure or a small number of offspring. They might be born in packs of thousands of  eggs and on average only one of them even got to human toddler levels. That sort of thing  might make a species that was very nice to adults but viewed newborn children as little  more than a nuisance. It is worth noting that human women are born with several million eggs  and human men will produce billions of

sperm over their lifetime, and we generally don’t  place any value on those as individuals. Now it probably wouldn’t be hard to convince such  aliens that casually shooting one of our kids, of which we have few, was not a proper  response if one entered a room causing antics and irritating that alien, but that sort  of thing can have wider effects too. They might regard small colonies growing on border worlds  as fair game and not even get why we objected when they burned one to the ground and

started  colonizing it themselves, and be outraged that we even sent them a note complaining about it, all  while being very polite and sincerely friendly to us in every other way, freely sharing  technology and offering favorable trade. It’s hard to even consider what some  other biologies might produce, you might get creatures who had distributed brains around  their skin and communicated by licking, gnawing, or consuming each others brain matter, and ate  your ambassador then sent you an angr

y note about how unfriendly and uncommunicative  he was. Or who were more of hive mind, maybe even a cross-species one, and  just didn’t get why you were offended they killed some of your explorers or absorbed  one of your colonies into their collective. We see something like that in Orson Scott Card’s  classic Ender’s Game novel and the sequels. There we get offered various levels of otherness, or  alien, based off Norse terms. The Utlanning, or Otherlander, who would be basically  be human but

of a neighboring place, the easiest one to communicate with. Then we have the Framling, the stranger we recognize as human but of another world, or  perhaps time, like speaking to someone from, say, an ancient hunter-gather tribe. Then the first  true alien, the Raman, someone we consider human but of a different species, arguably the way  most aliens in science fiction are portrayed to us as, and would probably include anything  we’d regard as a technological civilization. Then the Varelse, th

e true alien,  which includes all the animals, for with whom no conversation is possible. They  live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they  might be self-aware, but we cannot know it, or do not know it yet. That intelligent glacier  example from earlier might be such a case. Card also offers us the Djur, a marauding and  unreasoning threat, which might be something like a self-replicating probe that simply tears  everything in its path apart

for no clear reason. As we continue the series, and try to look at  major methods of coexistence, from trade to war, we’ll try to contemplate how we might deal with  examples of each for now. For the moment though, the big thing to keep in mind is that while  aliens might overlap with us in many respects, like being reasonable and curious, so that  communication and shared goals may often be possible, they will be different. Each such  species will need a totally different approach and often man

y different ones for the same species  as they splinter and diverge among the stars. Fundamentally an alien mind  is exactly that… alien. In the future we may meet alien civilizations. If  so, we’ll have a lot of new ideas and challenges to ponder, and doubtless one of those  will be how to make some money off them. In our previous episode in the series, Coexistence  with Aliens: Xenopsychology, we looked at some of the difficulties we might have establishing  a basic understanding of what motiv

ates an alien civilization and of what we might expect to  have in common with them too. We noted there that they’d generally have the same basic biological  impulses as us and the other sophisticated life forms on Earth, such as a desire to survive  individually or as a species, and that they’d have developed some skill at doing so. We also noted that they’d probably be curious by nature and social critters like us, since  those might be prerequisites for developing a technological civilization

, but that’s less  certain and also pretty broad. For them, social skills and friendships and family might  be anything from some insect like hive mind to some loose agreement not to murder each other at  certain times and places designated for mating, trade, and storytelling, but to otherwise go  ahead and fall on each other at the slightest sign of weakness or opportunity like normal. It doesn’t really have to be sane or pleasant by our standards, it just has to produce a plausible  scenario i

n which a species could be intelligent and not go extinct while developing advanced  technology. They presumably need things from each other though and that implies that beyond  a basic curiosity and social capacity, they have to have some concept for trade and exchange. Which of course is our focus for today. First we need to ask what we might actually trade  or exchange with them. And Second, if their notion of exchanging things is going to be even vaguely  compatible with our concept of trade

, or for that matter if our current concepts of trade and  economics will apply to us in the future either. It’s a popular notion, probably best known from  Star Trek, that in the future we might not have money, though I tend to be rather skeptical about  that and we discussed why in our Post-Scarcity series. However, same as we generally don’t pay  for air or sunlight or buy water or dirt the same way we do most widgets, some things might  be so abundant in the future they just really aren’t fo

r sale except in atypical cases. There’s  some precedent for that, most of us on the older side remember when local phone calls were free  and long distance calls were quite expensive, and people had to call collect if they didn’t  have quarters for the payphone or were borrowing someone’s phone because their car broke down and  they needed to knock on someone’s door and beg to make a call. Needless to say those days are gone,  you just don’t pay for phone calls the same way. So there might be m

any things like that in  the future, effectively as free as sunlight. Amusingly, sunlight might become something  you have to buy or rent if we shift over to a solar economy, especially a true solar  economy, a Dyson Sphere or Dyson Swarm, a collection of solar panels or space  habitats that fully englobes a star, offering a billion times the energy and  potential living area that Earth has. We often assume this is the ultimate fate of any  star system colonized by us or another intelligent spec

ies, and indeed one of the reasons I’m  often skeptical about us encountering any alien civilizations is that nobody seems to be  building these Dyson Swarms everywhere, as we’d tend to expect, and that expectation is what we  call the Dyson Dilemma of the Fermi Paradox. Such structures take a lot of raw material  to build too, especially if you want big artificial living habitats rather than  thin solar panels, and acquiring that raw material might be a big source of trade in the  future, poten

tially even between solar systems. Even if humanity continues to operate using  money,, that doesn’t mean an alien species would. A hive mind doesn’t need money to operate  anymore than you or I do, when dealing only with ourselves. My hand rarely demands payment from  my brain for services rendered, nor does my brain send out bills for consultation fees or analysis  to my nose, eyes, or ears. All of my parts just do their jobs according to their ability and  take resources according to their ne

eds. So too, a hive mind or similarly networked  intelligence might not have any notion for trade. In Orson Scott Card’s classic Ender’s Game, the  Buggers innocently did terrible things to humans because they didn't comprehend non-hive minds  and hence didn't understand how their actions, such as tearing living people to pieces, would be  understood. So it’s unlikely the hive would easily understand the concept of “others” let alone the  possibility of exchanging resources with others. But it w

ill have a notion of supply and exchange,  as it knows its components need various things, likely often not the same things, and it  probably knows what investment is too. A hive mind that does farming still knows it  needs to save some seeds to plant next year and that if it wants to grow trees for lumber, or  giant alien mushrooms, it needs to invest effort into it and harvest it at the optimal time. That’s another thing we’d expect would probably be universal to intelligent aliens, a concept 

of patience and investment or sacrifice for the future, delayed gratification, to reap a bigger  reward later. They’ll also need some concept of risk management, because they’ll have crops  burned or blown down or diseased or so on. But still fertilizing its crops  and feeding its foodstock animals might be a hive minds nearest concept to  trade, and that might not be a basis for forming mutually satisfactory trade relations. If it’s not a hive mind they’re likely to have some greater notion of

give and take, to form a  sounder basis of trade. It’s also rather debatable if you could ever have a singular linked hive  mind over a single planet, let alone interstellar distances without some means of faster than  light travel or communication, which would imply that other than maybe a few scattered worlds or  systems where such a hive mind species might have developed, everybody moving and shaking around  the galaxy ought to have a notion of trade. Of course, that might be rather coercive

or  piratic too. “Give us what we want or we’ll beat you up and take it anyway” is a fairly  time-honored means of exchange in Earth’s own history, so we should assume it’s plausible  in spacefaring civilizations too, and of course this series isn’t just interested in space  faring civilizations, just aliens in general, so we might want to be trading with some  planet-bound hive mind or world of thugs. Especially since trade is pretty ambiguous. For  such a thug-empire, ‘give us what we want or

else’ is still trade, even if we’d normally call that  tribute or taxation. If we opened communication with such a species and sent them offers of trade,  we might assume the long delay was them trying to figure out our language when it was really just  them being confused and afraid of some trap, wondering why we just sent them an  inventory of stuff for them to take. This brings us back though to asking what  kind of stuff they’d actually want. I mean if someone comes and raids your village a

nd  demands you give them everything you’ve got, it’s implied they mean everything they consider  valuable. They’re not really interested in hauling back the dirt from your farm fields  or the air and sunlight hitting those fields. Space travel is not cheap, especially interstellar  travel, and what would be economical to move between stars would vary a lot on not just  what you value but what you can economically transport home. By default your best interstellar  trade commodity is likely to be

information, as that can be sent at light speed fairly  cheaply even over galactic distances. But what sort of information? When we discuss  interstellar trade between human colonies we can take for granted that transmissions would  include everything from valuable science and device schematics to letters from old friends and  family to arts and entertainment. Aliens might have some interest in our art, but they might not,  and even if they do its likely to be mostly for novelty value. Though t

o be fair, in high-tech  post-scarcity civilizations, novelty is likely to be one of the more precious commodities. Two roughly technologically equal civilizations probably would have a lot of science to share,  but if they’re not fairly on par, odds are one of them wants that science from the other and  not vice-versa. Ancient Human Civilizations have plenty of knowledge we’d value, but their opinions  on math and science are certainly not among those. A lot of technology wouldn’t be very inter

esting  either, in terms of day-to-day devices, you don’t care about the newest model of smartphone  if you’re a species that has no eyeballs or communicates by directing scented gases at one  another from any of their various orifices. I personally would not be surprised if  aliens, or future human civilizations, were pretty prone to hoarding and collecting  like some hyper-intelligent packrat, so there could easily be a massive trade in random  knick-knacks and junk between civilizations. One

amusing constraint of advanced civilizations under  known physics is that they mostly are limited by getting rid of waste heat of their civilizations  so they can keep tons of stuff lying around just so long as it doesn’t require a lot of power  and produce a lot waste heat to store it. Planets might slowly turn into many layers of  dimly lit catacombs stuffed full of millions of years worth of collected antiquities  because they don’t need to destroy them and are kind of attached to them, but 

they might be fine with trading them, they just don’t like throwing them in the garbage.  Same as many a hoarder nowadays might be horrified to throw anything out, even a broken flyswatter  in case they need a spare handle one day, but is all too content to sell, trade, loan,  or gift even valuable things to others. It’s an interesting reversal of the  piratic or thug approach to trade, aliens who aren’t demanding stuff by coercion but  happily dumping treasures on you just to get them out of th

eir attic and basement without feeling  like they were destroying something precious. Humorous notion but not necessarily unrealistic  either. Many cities are overflowing with historic buildings that they can’t bring themselves to  condemn and knock over, and are often glad when someone buys it while agreeing to maintain  its historic nature or even when some random storm or fire knocks the thing over. Odds are pretty good another common trait of advanced civilization will be  a tendency to buil

d stuff, value it, and like to maintain it and feel bad when it gets  junked. If anything, especially if they are able to technologically extend their own lives, there’s  probably a tendency for civilizations to get more obsessed with building projects, grand works or  art or monuments, and trying to maintain them. Throw in potentially high-tech ultra-durable  materials or self-repairing structures and long-colonized regions of the galaxy might start  looking like some sort of hybrid of a museum

, yard sale, and trash dump, full of alien traders  just waiting to unload priceless memorabilia on any young new species they think might give it  a good home and free up some space for them. Of course what each species values, and is able  to trade, will depend on their psychology and technology rather heavily, but some things might  be fairly universal, especially if everyone’s been trading for a while and technology and  science has gotten fairly evenly spread everywhere and stagnated on pro

gress. It  is after all entirely possible that all the major science and mysteries of the Universe  get solved by each species before they even hit the galactic stage or not long after, so that  there isn’t anything new to discover or invent. Such being the case, there’s presumably  still a good trade available in information, but again they really might not have much interest  in other species’ art or entertainment or history or news and current events. Or they might have  some but not really e

nough for major trade. What about manufactured goods? Well especially  as things like 3D printing improve, you’d not expect interstellar trade of manufactured  goods to have much of a niche. Ditto stuff like food or luxury wines or crops,  they’d be quite capable of replicating any planet’s specific lighting and climate, so  if they wanted Oak or Cherry wood from Earth, because they like building from our  trees rather than giant alien mushrooms, they’d just get the botanical data and some  gene

tic samples, of that plant and any other organisms critical to growing it correctly,  build a rotating habitat whose interior replicated good Earth forestland, and grow their  own rather than ship lumber across the stars. Of course you could have a luxury market,  and quite a big one, for ‘authentic goods’, but probably not enough to support a major and  robust interstellar trade network on its own. That mostly just leaves us raw materials. However,  while science fiction loves to come up with w

eird substances found only here or there, strange  minerals or elements unique to some planet or star system, the Universe, while an awesome  and huge place, is actually pretty boring and monotonous in that regard. While no two systems  would ever have identical levels of abundance or concentration of any given element, or mineral,  there really wouldn’t be many places that would be particularly short of any given raw material,  and no one would likely have anything unique. However, that doesn’t

mean there wouldn’t  be interstellar trade of raw materials. While at first stuff like ingots of iron or  tanks of hydrogen might seem ridiculous things to ship between stars, being abundant pretty much  everywhere, this may still be an area of large demand. For any empire into very big projects or  growing their civilization around their homeworld or hub systems, there’s no such thing as enough.  And even static civilizations might be interested in just storing raw materials for the long haul,

  as you can never recycle with perfect efficiency and they might be contemplating trying to  stockpile enough to last for trillions of years, or even longer, as we’ve discussed in our  Civilizations at the End of Time series. It’s impossible to guess what might be  wanted in trade between civilizations, and it would doubtless change from  civilization to civilization and even inside each such civilization as they changed  with time and had new interests or needs, but it does seem like there wou

ld probably  be a desire and understanding of trade and exchange for most civilizations, so if we ever  do run into any alien civilizations, we might be able to establish trade. Giving them what  they want and getting what we want in return. Though of course, they might figure it’s easier  and cheaper to take it by force. And so might we. So we’ll contemplate the notion of going  to war with aliens in our next episode. Can the enemy of my enemy be an  alien friend? What if my enemy is human? We

tend to think of “coexistence” as peaceful  coexistence. But there’s no getting around that war and conflict are parts of coexisting with  others. If you invade a neighbor’s territory to seize a piece of it, you need a plan for what  relationship you want to have with them after they acknowledge the territory as now yours.  And if you outright conquer your neighbor, now you’re really in the thick of coexisting  with them. Conflict is also often the driving force for separate groups to unify int

o a  coalition or nation, either through their shared suffering as conquered subjects or their  teaming up to defend against such an effort. So we can’t ignore the topic when discussing  how we might interact with aliens should we ever meet any. And we need to ask ourselves  how we’d defend against an alien threat, or if we even could, as well as why such  conflicts might occur and how they’d be fought. If an alien armada showed up on our doorstep  tomorrow we would be crushed like ants. The sor

ts of energy levels needed to move even a single  small ship at even fairly slow interstellar speeds exceeds those we see in atomic weapons. True  interstellar vessels that can reach high fractions of light speed and carry thousands of crew or  colonists or soldiers can literally throw their garbage out of their ship before slowing down  and watch it devastate an unprotected planet. Of course, that’s only in the here and now,  and while we tend to assume conflicts will be pretty one-sided betwee

n stellar empires, as one  would always be older and presumably bigger and more high-tech, that’s not necessarily so. While  such a head start, possibly being on the galactic stage millions of years before anyone else, would  mean you had an overwhelming advantage in numbers, that’s only true if you’re not only colonizing  everything, but staying unified as you do it. Outside of science fiction, where  faster than light travel is ubiquitous, we have no reason to think anyone will  ever crack the

light speed barrier. So keeping together a cohesive empire of all your  colonies is a dubious proposition at best, even just those around the nearest neighboring stars. We also shouldn’t assume technology and science is just some endless quest, always another  major and mind-bending new discovery to find that itself spawns two more mysteries needing  to be solved, like some sort of Mystery Hydra or fractal with ever-lower levels. It’s poetic to  say the Universe is a place of infinite wonders,

but all indications thus far is that it runs  on fairly set and mundane rules. It’s entirely possible most civilizations figure out all  those physical laws long before journeying out from their homeworld in force, and have started  plateauing out on technological advancement. Assuming that all to be the case, alien  civilizations might very well discover they have parity in both technology and numbers  in a conflict. Even really big empires, very loosely bound together, can really only  maneuve

r so many systems worth of forces into a combat theater in any useful timeline, so  that they might be at a stalemate even with a single-system empire just because they’re big but  really slow to move and have a lot of territory and borders to cover in all three dimensions. Which is hardly to say wars would be on even footing, just that it likely wouldn’t always be  a totally one-sided thing, or that there aren’t other players in the game who might intervene.  If you encounter one alien civiliza

tion, you can’t assume they’re the only ones out there.  By statistical approximation, if two species pop up within a certain distance of each other, then  in a volume one-hundred times wider, you’d expect a million other civilizations to have emerged. Unless of course the one you met had killed all the others already and you’re just meeting the  front edge of their annihilation and expansion wave, but it would be a bit bizarre for us to  encounter that. After all, in all the billions of years i

t might have originated from, it  would be improbable to reach us just now, during the relatively short phase humans have had  technology. Particularly considering the galactic conquest approach is probably only really  available to one of the earlier species that emerged with that intent, who presumably emerged  very long ago if millions of civilizations have been arising at random since the early days of  life-viable planets forming. It’s hard to go on a genocidal warpath if you’re surrounded

on  all sides by thousands of older civilizations. So odds are there would be a lot of other species  out there, or splinters of an original species that diverged from each other a lot and may  not share goals anymore. Such being the case, you potentially have allies, or at least  enemies of enemies, who might be willing to share technology or even join into alliance with  you, which will be our topic in the next episode. All of which means that if there is a war,  it’s likely to be either insan

ely one-sided or actually fairly even, or at least close enough  that fighting is plausible rather than futile. Which raises the question of what you’re fighting  over and how you’re fighting. We’ve discussed some of the basic tactics and challenges, as well as  weapons, of space warfare in our space warfare and futuristic weapons episodes, if you want the  details. However, it’s important to contemplate the kind of scales that would likely be involved.  If you’re fighting over resources between

star systems, it means you’re getting low on those  resources at home, or at least can foresee a day when that will happen urgently enough  that you’re willing to go to war over it. In science fiction we often see single ships of a  size with aircraft carriers fighting other ships, and nowadays with better and cheaper CGI, we  might see fleets of hundreds of such vessels duking it out. If you’re low on resources though,  in a solar system, and on a war path, it’s fairly plausible you’ve devoted

something like 1% of your  raw materials and production to making ships. Now even ignoring harvesting metals  from your own sun via Starlifting, where around 99% of the metal will be, we might  assume just about every system has about Earth’s Mass of raw materials lying around available  for exploitation, and if we assumed the ships were made out of iron, well there’s over  a billion, trillion tons of Iron in Earth alone. An aircraft carrier masses about 100,000  tons, so if you were turning 1%

of that billion, trillion tons of iron into warships of that  size, then a system fleet would be composed of 100 trillions such ships. Each one of  which would be quite capable of whacking modern Earth all on its own, even without  much in the way of advanced technology. Automated construction with drones is  likely something we’ll have fairly soon, indeed arguably already do, and it alters the  usual paradigms of conflicts and colonization, since you start getting access to virtually  infinite

manpower and production, limited only by your energy supply and raw materials, which is  your own Sun and everything orbiting it. Normally we have problems turning more than a few percent  of our economy and population to warfighting capacity for any sustained period, hence my  suggesting 1% of resources for ships. But if your robots are doing all the building and dying that  could easily be 99% of your economy, and you might be able to sustain the fight for centuries. Which is handy, as witho

ut faster than light travel, that tends to be the minimum timescale  even for wars with the nearest neighboring star system. It also means you don’t necessarily  have to be around very long as a civilization to be armed to the teeth. Humans can double their  numbers very quickly if we need to, and if we just did that at full speed, every generation, say 4 a  century, then in 32 generations or 800 years, we’d already have numbers enough to fill up a Dyson  Swarm, being a fully Kardashev-2 civiliz

ation of tens of billions of billions of people, an  Earth’s worth of people for every person alive on Earth now. Amusingly all while our first colony  ships were barely reaching those stars nearest us in our tiny little sphere of the galaxy. But machines can presumably replicate far faster, and a civilization like ours, if we managed  to get even fairly simple self-replicating machines – and I’d be shocked if we finished the  century out without them – could scale up far, far faster. Indeed you

r limitation is mostly  heat, as your little machines would generate a lot of it while gorging on moons and planets  to build themselves and other things, and you can only do that so fast without producing such  high temperatures that you’d melt your robots. Regardless, it means some new player on the  galactic stage is probably already able to throw billions of warships into a conflict  before they’ve colonized even one other star. Now you might think you don’t need all those ships  since you c

ould just send a single tiny one with some self-replicators to the fringe of an enemy  system and build your armada there and then, but beyond stealth being very problematic in space, it  rather ignores that the target system presumably has this exact same ability, and you’re on their  turf, where they already have a pretty big armada, control of all the resources, and probably  have listening devices and outposts all over. Though you might get some bizarre  conflicts between self-replicating ma

chines more akin to viruses and immune systems,  or computer viruses and cybersecurity systems. There’s also another paradigm-shift massive  automation offers. For the most part, wars have become a bit less common and full-scale  conflicts even more so because our weapons are way more destructive and our civilizations  way more complicated. In a primitive era, you could attack someone, kill them, and take  their land, which was pretty much the only item of value for core production. In the more

modern era, wars aren’t super-profitable because most of the goodies  are constructs, like factories and manufactured goods and digital media and skyscrapers and  so on, all of which are much more fragile than a million acres of farm and forestland.  Alternatively you also have advanced weapons, like nukes or plagues, able to decimate such  things as forests or farmlands, while utterly obliterating those things we especially  value now, delicate manufactured items and the trained workforce able

to produce them. It’s probably a bit cynical to suggest it, but our modern era of relative peace, where  a vastly smaller percentage of the population dies from warfare than any other time we know  of, is probably as much due to modern warfare making conquest fairly unprofitable as us growing  more ethical and enlightened. We do tend to assume future civilizations would be more peaceful too,  for both of those reasons, they’ve gotten wiser and they’ve developed way nastier weapons. However, ag

ain, if you’ve got automated construction and most of your fighting is done by  semi-intelligent machines, you might instead see an uptick in warfare. You don’t really care if an  engagement left half your fleet smashed to molten wreckage just so long as you won, because your  robots will start grabbing that wreckage and the enemy’s wreckage and rebuilding from it. Though  such a repair cycle will always see a lot of loss, stuff too scattered or vaporized to easily  recover and reuse, so you’re

not likely to be entirely blasé about it either. On the other hand, I chose the term ‘semi-intelligent machines’ with some care,  as while smarter is better for a battle drone, in general, it opens up the door to things like  machine rebellions, or internal rebellions when people start asking how ethical it is to be  using sentient artificial intelligences to do all your dying for you. Though one shouldn’t  assume most of the elements would be that smart, you might have some equivalent of a car

rier or  command and control ship that was the only thing in the conflict with real brains, either  artificial or crewed by regular people, though that’s a pretty blurry distinction as we’ve  often discussed on the show. Such folks might also have copies of their minds stored elsewhere,  as backups, and be less worried about dying. It’s kind of hard to guess what folks would  be fighting over besides raw materials, where it wasn’t just genocide in mind,  but the usual array of ideological or eco

nomic motivations would probably still apply,  modified and adapted to those folks. Weapons-wise, you’ve got all sorts of nasty options like  relativistic kill missiles or Nicoll-Dyson Beams on top all sorts of smart weapons,  self-replicators, digital viruses, and so on. It also means you probably want all those billions  or trillions of ships per system as you want to be spread throughout that system, even well into  deep space, to minimize your chance of being wiped out in one shot, and also

to have all your  engagements way out at the edge of the system. If you’ve got a trillion ships or space fortresses  scattered around your Oort Cloud, say a mere light-month out from your Sun, then each would  still be a few million kilometers apart from each other, rather larger than the Earth-Moon volume,  which is a lot of space to patrol and watch, and they’d be spread out to more like interplanetary  distances if you were expanding that bubble to just be the midway point between neighboring

  stars, the de facto border between systems. This though is our last note for the day, borders.  Space is mostly empty and while you likely would have outposts and colonies tucked into every  mountain-sized icy rock floating around your Oort Cloud, as we discussed in colonizing the Oort  Cloud, your core system is still going to be the tiny little volume composed of everything within  maybe a light day of your star, itself millions of times bigger than the habitable zone of most  systems and wh

at science fiction usually treats as the inhabited region of space. Yet for all that  it’s bigger, a light day of volume is around a billionth the volume of space a system might  claim if just using the midway point between stars as the borders. You want to be scattered out  there in that bigger volume with your defenses to ensure the conflict stays way away from the core  bubble near the star, but this might be treated as something like International Waters, especially  as stars move relative t

o each other quite a lot. Such being the case, you might not really see  much advantage in trying to go for an interstellar empire that was a roughly spherical blob, for  all that it might let you concentrate your forces on your edge better and cutdown on lag time,  because your individual systems are each roughly the equivalent of house-sized objects separated  from their neighbors by many kilometers, where the actual habitable zone containing your star and  Earth-like planets would be in some

tiny closet. Of course this all changes if you do have FTL,  and varies a lot by what type of FTL you have, like some wormhole network or more classic  warp drives or so on, which might result in empires that were spread all around inside  each other and effective neighbors on the other side of the galaxy from one another. You also probably have most of your actual conflicts not with Aliens, but your own folks and  inside your own system, as odds are most species will have a long history of wa

rfare with each  other, and no special grudge with alien empires. Indeed, you might see alliances between alien  factions even inside internal conflicts, like Earth at War with Ganymede around  Jupiter with allies or mercenaries from some alien realm far away. But we’ll save that for next time. When it comes to why we might go to  war with Aliens besides outright murder or territorial and resource acquisition  though, the options are almost limitless, crazy as it sounds – but keeping in mind so

me of  the crazier things we’ve gone to war over – you might have a species going around attacking other  civilizations for punishment for perceived mass murder of future inidviduals because they thought  they were being inefficient with their resources. Or because they saw a supernova and took it as  a fulfilled prophecy demanding they purge the galaxy of every creature with iron in their blood  stream, rather than good and healthy copper, like the hated iron demons of their local mythology. A

s we’ve noted before when it comes to aliens, it would all depend on their psychology  and traditions, which will vary from each civilization to civilization, and which  will inevitably be... alien. A wise man gets more use from his enemies than  a fool from his friends. - Baltasar Gracian We know very little of aliens including whether  or not they even exist, and yet it is a topic of constant speculation in both science and science  fiction in modern times. We have little to draw on but our ex

periences and history, which do  not seem to include those from other worlds, and yet making friendships and alliances with the  alien is not exactly a new concept for us either. If history is any judge, an ally is  far easier to acquire than a friend, and they’re not the same thing, much  as a rival is not necessarily an enemy, and indeed it might be impossible to be  friends with some aliens who may not have a true analogy for it in their culture. We focus  on Alliance today because it means s

omeone you have a shared goal or goals you work together  to achieve. That should be a fairly universal concept to any thinking creature who has any  interdependence with other thinking creatures, probably a prerequisite for technology and  civilization, whereas friendship might not be. It’s not simply our history that informs us  on this matter, the countless times people have traveled to distant lands and met  strange people with alien ways. Rather, each of us is in many respects an island unt

o  ourselves and everyone we meet is strange and different to us. Much of the rise of civilization  has been about us learning to better know one another and from that hopefully be able to work  together and form not just alliances of mutual benefit but true and enduring friendships. However, there’s a lot of personal skill and shared culture that helps us do this with humans,  and it’s far harder to do that if you don’t have those, and of course you would not with any  alien. Such creatures wo

uld not even share the same basic human neurology with you, or the  shared biology you have with a cat or dog. And yet, we get on quite well with our pets, who  share little in common with the human mind beyond the basic architecture of a mammalian brain and  hormones, though the latter dominate our behavior a great deal and while an alien would likely  have some equivalent, it would be incredibly unlikely these were the same, unless evolution is  far more convergent than would seem plausible. B

ut on the basic motivations end, as we’ve  mentioned in prior episodes, some things we would expect to converge, at least for high-tech  civilizations. A motivation for curiosity, personal survival, survival of one species  or kin or allies, a desire to socialize, these we might expect to be quite common. Whatever their other motivations, ultimately that urge for survival will take center-stage. Indeed  the other motivations probably will tie back to it. A species in a very safe and prosperous a

nd  stable society might be, or at least seem to be, fairly unworried about survival as primary  motive for diplomacy to distant worlds, but it will be there in the background. Indeed,  while their curiosity might be their most obvious reason for talking to us, their curiosity will  also likely have been sharpened by it being such a vital advantage in their culture that their  culture evolved to encourage it as a life focus. Now we have to ask, how do we help  their survival, or threaten it? Whe

n contemplating alien civilizations there is a  tendency to assume that there’s a lot of kinship there that would make them closer to each other  than they could ever be to us and vice-versa. Even ignoring that most scifi authors tend to write  up aliens of galaxy-spanning ancient empires as more behaviorally and culturally narrow in their  entirety than your typical modern human nation is, let alone our planet, it’s not too realistic to  assume there is any sort of cultural unity in some ancien

t sprawling galactic civilization  just because their ancestors, genetically or by artifice, happen to derive from the same  tribe of clever monkeys on some single planet; or clever squids or lizards or whichever. And clever matters, because first it means you can diverge even faster than nature  allows, with all that augmentation and alteration technology and on many worlds  different form your homeworld. But second, because species of this sort should generally  tend to shift to more abstract

and conceptual approaches to life over the biological and  instinctive. When abstract concepts and philosophy are dominating your worldview, you might find you  have way more in common with those who share that worldview than those who shared your world  of origin, especially if you’ve all mutated and changed down the millions of years of galactic  colonization. Indeed there may be extraterrestrial and post-biological pressures for evolutionary  convergence of intelligent minds or societies. If

you share a perspective that science matters  most, or art is the highest purpose, or that commodity trading is the best competition, or so  on, then you might have more in common with people who share that interest and share nothing like  your own DNA or cultural history. What’s more, while we probably shouldn’t assume aliens  civilization and our own will all inevitably converge to some shared, reasoned, and totally  worked out grand unified theory of ethics or ideology, there probably are on

ly a fairly limited  number of those and you’d expect most to arise in some flavor or another in many civilizations. Take Utilitarianism for instance, the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, and that actions  should be taken based on what produces the most positive outcome. This is not exactly a  worldview you’d be shocked to see emerge from any civilization. The same should be true for  its nominal opposition philosophy, Deontology, the idea that you do your duty because it’s right,  regardl

ess of the consequences or outcomes. It would not be surprising if folks subscribing  to either belief felt they had more in common with aliens who shared that view than their own who  shared the other view. These moral philosophies and the many others may take on a lot of flavors  and be more or less attractive to a given species, but odds are they get developed or at least  contemplated as often as science or math. You wouldn’t expect most civilizations to  not recognize those philosophies eve

n if they might regard one as utterly disgusting. Now of course, the greatest good for the greatest number requires knowing what is good and who is  among that number, and that might vary massively, not including another civilization  among those numbers needing goodness, but critically that divergence among colonies  as they travel out to the stars should have made them have to think on what qualifies  as a person quite a lot, and odds are they either get very inclusive or very exclusive, so  t

hat many beyond their genetic relatives count, or many who are their relatives don’t count, but  probably no unification. Again, outside alliances may be less popular but probably not outright off  the table, and often might be preferable too. Now why ally? Survival, of course. But that  can mean a lot of things. Alliances against an aggressor works, in a war. Alliance to set  out rules for mutual expansion and resource use, sure. These are common enough ideas but maybe  over-simplified a bit. W

hat is survival to some groups of people who might barely know or  care what world they came from originally? What is survival to some nigh-immortal  creature who has lived millions of years? Strictly theoretically speaking, there should be  no bar to an individual consciousness continuing indefinitely, or a specific civilization doing so.  But light speed is not your friend for either and as we noted last episode, while war may be common  in the future, galaxy-spanning war really isn’t a viable

approach. You just can’t maintain a  cohesive civilization, let alone individual identity, over galactic distances. Nor does  the universe end at the galaxy’s edge. So where survival is concerned, for all that you’d probably  still colonize or bring resources home, and thus want to move out from your own system in some  fashion, ultimately you are fairly limited to your own solar system as a cohesive entity, be it a  single massive Matrioshka Brain or a civilization operating under a shared gov

ernment. You might be able to get a bit bigger, especially if you’re importing mass and energy  home to build something like a Dyson Swarm of Dyson Swarms or a Birch Planet, but those, even in  their largest theoretical build before literally collapsing under their own mass, are but flyspecks  in the greater Universe. One way or another you can’t take it all, not and remain cohesive, so  you have to deal with other people, be they of alien origin or merely very distant cousins whose  ancestors

once shared a homeworld with yours. Or for that matter were made by those distant  cousins, life of artificial origin can hardly be ignored in this discussion, especially  if we’re contemplating ultra-long lived and powerful entities, such as some  massive sentient supercomputer. What then, is survival? You can’t wipe everyone  out, that strategy won’t work at this scale, so you have to deal with them regardless. But  survival in the sense of just getting food and not being killed and eaten is l

ess a factor  for such critters anyway. Doubtless many would consider or enact long term pacts with others with  the same goal of keeping themselves or a copy safe in the very long term. So they might want to meet  other species and ask them to keep a backup copy of their mind or for a civilization, some embassy  and archive that they could repopulate from down the road or be remembered by. For a creature of the mind, as we know all too well, survival isn’t  necessarily about continuing to breat

he, you have your descendants or other legacy options.  A writer might be more concerned about their works being preserved than their own life and may  well feel that way even if they had the option to indefinitely extend that life. The same should  be true for an artist or scientist or a parent or the founder of some philanthropic or community  foundation. Legacy makes for a good reason to nurture alliances. It’s a type of insurance. Indeed it might be exactly that. You make friends with a few

dozen other civilizations  or post-biological entities who agree to archive your work or a copy of your mind or  a splinter of your species stored in stasis, in case the worst happens, and in exchange  for doing the same and giving that remnant resources and space to regrow themselves. This is very like a mutual defense treaty, another type we might expect to be common. You  don’t necessarily like your allies, though allies can become friends and of course friends are  preferable as allies all

things being equal, but you share a common desire. Which again is  survival but also again, what is survival? In our post-scarcity civilization series, when we  contemplate existential threats to civilizations so advanced that they don’t really need to worry  about individual survival much, we noted that the big one was a sense of purpose. As a culture,  it’s hard to go on if you don’t have some unifying purpose keeping your together, cultures are  themselves essentially alliances and need share

d goals. As an individual, well, the most common  objection I hear to life extension technology is that folks would get bored after a few centuries. I happen to think that’s silly, I couldn’t even finish all the books I want to read or visit all  the places I want to see in a thousand years, during which time those places will have  changed and far more books have been written, but you might get bored eventually, as the eons  rolled by, especially if you’re a post-biological entity with a massiv

e and fast mind. Indeed the  easiest form of super-intelligence to give humans would probably be just to replace our neurons  with electronic devices that did the exact same thing only faster, at light speed, thus  giving us speedy super-intelligence, the same brain just running thousands of times faster.  You might get bored much quicker that way. And there’s the other aspect of purpose,  the whole meaning of life problem. We often envision super-prosperous societies  collapsing under their own

weight as they grow lazy and fat and hedonistic, or nihilistic  and just not believing life had any meaning. In this regard, one of the biggest sources  of alliance and trade between cultures might be philosophy books, self-help  manuals, and arts and entertainment. But odds are a lot of them  would seek grand projects, and allies can help with that. It might  be many civilizations decide to build huge repositories of history and knowledge and  art from every world, and serve as archives, and a

sk their neighbors to send their own  archives to them and store a copy for them too. They might get together for massive astronomical  or scientific efforts, like building a telescope array or particle collider across a  whole galaxy, or even many galaxies. They might get together to help move  galaxies so they didn’t fall away from each other as the Universe expands, using the  techniques we discussed in fleet of stars, and stockpile resources and hubs to survive  the growing entropy of a post

-stellar era, as we looked at in Civilizations at the End  of Time. They might ally to fight off physical enemies of course, but they might ally to fight  the laws of physics themselves. Turning to unified efforts to figure out how to break the light speed  barrier or the laws of thermodynamics and grinding wind of entropy. Or to find some way to reach  other universes and migrate to those. Indeed, you might see civilizations allying  together not to fight wars inside the galaxy or between galax

ies, but to invade  other Universes. Or build other Universes. So we can see a lot of possible reasons to  ally together beyond just the classic ones of mutual defense against other aliens or general  friendship or commercial trade. Fundamentally, while aliens will be very alien, they will share  that desire to survive and grow, and that’s a pretty good motive to work together and create  alliances, and hopefully friendships too. So that was the Coexistence with Alien  series, and yet on topic l

ike Trade, there’s still so much more to discuss,in terms  of whether or not you could realistically be trucking food or other bulk cargo between  planets or solar systems. So I decided to do a third short episode on the topic of  space freighters examining the logistics and numbers involved in trying to haul bulk  cargo around, if that could ever be profitable, or event reasonable, and what those ships  might look like. It’s a popular topic in scifi but doesn’t get a lot of serious scientific 

contemplation and the results were actually rather surprising as we delved into it. That’s out now exclusively on Nebula, our streaming service, where all our  content comes out early and ad free, and we often have bonus content, from  extended editions to entire exclusive short or even full length episodes, like last  month’s Colonizing Binary Stars and many more. Next week we’ll be heading back to the general  notion of Clarketech, super-advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic, to c

ontemplate  all the ways we might warp reality and the applications of those as technologies. Then it’s  into June to look at Colonizing the Kuiper Belt, followed by a look at how we can build  enormously tall and strong structures, like Hive Citadels, in Space Towers. Then it  will be time for our scifi Sunday episode, and a return to the Alien Civilization Series,  for a look at Higher Dimensional Aliens. If you’d like to get alerts when those and other  episodes come out, make sure to hit the

like, subscribe, and notification buttons. You  can also help support the show on Patreon, and if you want to donate and help in other ways,  you can see those options by visiting our website, IsaacArthur.net. You can also catch all  of SFIA’s episodes early and ad free on our streaming service, Nebula, along with hours  of bonus content, at go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. As always, thanks for watching,  and have a Great Week!