Midweek Chill September 26th, 2018: Naturally

By Slow Train Soul.

Galactic Scale Organisms: Part Two

The previous post on this topic had worked on the assumption that there was only one civilization spreading throughout a galaxy. But Forge of God and it's sequel went further with the idea by including other possible civilizations too.

So let's take a look at the implications. As planetisms spread out into the galaxy they'll encounter exo-planetisms with different forms of life and civilization.

The possibility here is for further evolution of one or more planetisms, either via cooperation, parasitism or competition. In essence it's the creation of a galactic scale ecology which, if it can stabilize, becomes a galactism.

Just as a planetism is a planet-spanning organism a la Gaia, a galactism is a galaxy-spanning organism with very large scale "metabolisms" and homeostasis. The size of a galactism would in fact be so vast that (assuming no faster-than-light travel is possible) its equivalent of breathing or a heartbeat would last on the order of a few hundred-thousand years to millions of years.

A topic like this is rather big and has a lot of ground for speculation, with that said the post ends here but I might return to these ideas in future posts.

Midweek Chill September 19th, 2018: Counts Dukes Strays

By Mocean Worker

Musings On Galactic-Scale Organisms: Part One

What if a galaxy itself could evolve into a lifeform? A novel that asked this question was The Forge of God written by Greg Bear, and it's a pretty interesting idea.

Before talking about it though, I have to talk about something called the Gaia hypothesis. The Gaia hypothesis originated from the ideas of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis and the general idea is that Earth's biosphere as a whole can be considered a living organism (note: I'm not going to go over arguments for or against the hypothesis or take a specific stance as to its truth or falsehood, this post will treat it as true for the case of speculation in this post only).

The Forge of God then asks a question: if a planetary ecology is itself a living being, what role does intelligence play for it?

Planets with an ecology (and therefore alive) but no intelligence can be considered analogous to a mule, living but unable to reproduce. In the planetary organism's case it's because non-intelligent organisms tend not to have civilizations and therefore no space programs. This dooms the planetary organism (or "planetism" as referred to in the novel) to die whenever there's a catastrophe in the stellar neighborhood or when its star ages.

But what about planetisms that have developed intelligent agents? In this case the planet could reproduce by these intelligent agents colonizing and maybe terraforming planets, moons, asteroids and building various kinds of habitats. In this sense the planetism spreads throughout the star system by virtue of its "seed pods" in the form of intelligent members of civilization.

Why stop at one star system though? Spreading farther afield into the galaxy proper would ensure its survival long into the future.

RSS is here

I found an article several weeks ago by Wired.

It's Time for an RSS Revival

So I added an RSS widget to the blog (look at the sidebar). I've been quitting certain social networks due to disagreeing with their policies. So I figured I'd make it easier for people to keep up with the blog without having a social network subscription.

Apes or Termites

It's the year 1950 and a group of scientists are on their lunch break at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The scientists are discussing aliens tongue-in-cheek -partly due to a New Yorker comic- when one of the scientists asks a question: "Where are they?" The scientist who asked that question was the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, and his question haunts many to this day.

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, some a good deal older than our sun, and most stars probably also have planets around them. So you'd expect that there would be at least one civilization far in advance of us out there, but evidence of such is lacking. So the question "where are they?" remains stubbornly unanswered.

I've been interested in Fermi's paradox (the name this problem has) for a number of years now. I'm not going to list ideas on this post but rather focus on a particular solution which briefly appears in the Stephen Baxter novel Manifold: Space.

Upon seeing the activities of an alien species, character Reid Malenfant remarks on how they resemble termites in a colony. Reid then speculates that most space-faring aliens will probably be cooperative (termites), rather than competitive (apes, or humans) in nature.

Think about what it means to be "ape" in nature. Much of our competitive spirit goes towards activities that are often destructive. Demanding bigger and more wasteful houses to keep up with the Joneses, building more nuclear weapons and placing them ever closer to an antagonistic country as a form of chest-beating, maximizing profit by lobbying against environmental protections, etc.

It stands to reason that a species that is "termite" in nature would be less likely to destroy itself in this way. Instead of carbon belching to "stick it to the libs" when resources are running low, members of the species would probably just consume less. The idea of nationalism would make no sense to them because it's anathema to cooperation. You see what I'm getting at.

Perhaps the truly long lived civilizations in the form of these "termites" simply don't need to explosively spread out into space. They might only deign to leave their planet when their home system is due for destruction, and then only stick to one colonizable body in a new system rather than exploiting every astronomical body in it.

I sincerely hope that this isn't the answer, it bodes quite poorly for our civilization if it is.

Midweek Chill August 29th 2018: Creation du Monde

By Vangelis.