A long time ago, I did postgraduate philosophy at the University of Warwick. I’ve talked before about how disillusioning it was and also about my personal tutor Nick Land, but like having connections with Boris, this situation has now become more relevant to current affairs because Land was one of the founders of the Dark Enlightenment, and that movement is central to much of what’s currently being attempted in the US. Additionally, technofeudalism may be relevant. I’m going to try to go into this without injecting personal bias, except to say this: you don’t negotiate with people like this. As a near-pacifist, I wouldn’t sanction violence against them either but they do have to be defeated or overcome, simply because they get in the way of addressing the climate emergency, and anyone who does that is acting contrary to the interests of the biosphere and the human race regardless of their political complexion. It may of course be that certain other views may entail denialism, in which case those views need to end, but with an open mind and a degree of sarcasm, maybe the Nazis were absolutely fine in that respect.
At the moment then, we have the noisy distracting guy in front doing all the outrageous stuff who will be there just as long as the techbros need him to be, and then we have the techbros themselves, mainly Elon Musk, and whereas conspiracy theories are all the rage, this is not the same as simply reporting, without bias, what Musk believes politically, and his views and those of many others in Silicon Valley are based on those of Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. I should mention that Yarvin has previously used the monicker “Mencius Moldbug” online, and that he’s an accelerationist. Yarvin’s beliefs have been summarised thus:
1. Campaign on Autocracy: Promote centralized, strong leadership.
2. Purge the Bureaucracy: Remove mid-level officials to streamline government.
3. Ignore the Courts: Undermine judicial authority.
4. Co-opt Congress: Align legislative bodies with the new regime.
5. Centralize Police and Powers: Consolidate law enforcement under federal control.
6. Shut Down Elite Media and Academia: Dismantle institutions that challenge the new order.
7. Mobilize Public Support: Rally the people for the regime.
8. Introduce Technocratic Governance: Replace politics with corporate management.
Yarvin believes in an accountable monarchy. He’s an authoritarian libertarian, which of course sounds contradictory. One of his big ideas is the Cathedral, which is the academic and media «élite», in fact the same élite Elon Musk refers to. In financial terms, Musk is of course the élite, but that’s not what he means. He means that people in the academic-media complex, as it were, determine public opinion and march in step, agreeing with each other and not allowing any contrary opinions. This is one reason for Trump’s hostility to the Department of Education and state-funded scientific research: they agree that it’s proposing a single set of beliefs without admitting to alternative views of any kind. Yarvin, for example, believes that White people are genetically more intelligent than Black people, which is obviously a view not expected to be entertained in academia.
Additionally, being in favour of authoritarianism, Yarvin is very keen on Singapore as a successful authoritarian state. William Gibson, inventor of the word “cyberspace”, has described Singapore as “Disneyland with the death penalty“. Obviously Gibson is not a fan. Yarvin was a de facto guest of honour at Trump’s inauguration in 2025, so I don’t think there’s much doubt that his ideas have been very influential. Trump is king of course, but he may also be a figurehead monarch.
As for Nick Land, well, he’s more in the background. He’s been called the godfather of accelerationism. Back in the days when I knew him, he had the reputation of being left wing but was very much in favour of élitism. I’ve written about him on here before too (same link as before incidentally) because someone on YouTube was curious about my experience of him. He has many fans. I don’t understand why anyone would think he was left wing. One of the problems with engaging with his work is that he doesn’t distinguish between theory and fiction, so you never know if he’s serious. The same accusation has been levelled at me too. Hyperstitions are an important concept in his work. He describes these as ideas that bring about their own reality. This is interestingly similar to the idea that one should take Trump seriously but not literally. The reactions to his behaviour can kind of make it real, if that makes sense. It seems fair to say that both Land and Yarvin are strongly opposed to egalitarianism, so that explains the rejection of DEI. Land believes that democracy restricts freedom and accountability. He would want a president to be a kind of CEO of a corporation rather than someone elected. It’s straight White cis able-bodied men who are disadvantaged in their opinion, and this needs to be remedied because they’re better – more competent, more intelligent, harder-working and so on.
I’m saying all this simply as a report of what’s going on. Yarvin’s views are being enacted through Musk’s DOGE. I do, however, want to mention a couple of puzzling aspects to this. At least in Britain, Conservatism has traditionally tended to see itself as a political philosophy without an ideology. All of this looks to me like an ideology, i.e. a belief system to do with political power. Also, although it’s substantially about suspicion of the Cathedral, it seems to be part of it. Nick was my personal tutor at a Russell Group university. It was of course “Margaret Thatcher’s Favourite University™”, and its very existence seems to refute the Dark Enlightenment position. I once asked him if he thought of Roger Scruton as a philosopher and he denied that he was because he was very keen on Nietzsche, whose version of a philosopher was someone who would probably end up in jail or a mental asylum, and to be honest I would concur that someone who follows their principles as a philosopher would probably do that. For instance, suppose you are wedded to solipsism, the idea that you are the only person who exists. If you take this seriously, you may end up getting sectioned or feel very lonely. If you’re a moral sceptic, i.e. you belief there is no right or wrong, in society’s eyes that makes you a sociopath or psychopath and if you aren’t also prudently restrained, you will again end up somewhere secure, possibly a coffin, where you can’t continue to pursue your diet of people’s brains. So yes, he’s absolutely right in that respect: a philosopher with the courage of their convictions is not going to be lecturing at Birkbeck College and writing books about Immanuel Kant, no matter how snarky the introductions are about Kaliningrad. But then this raises the problem of why Nick was even at Warwick, or it would do if he wasn’t so nihilist. Here’s an interesting bit about him. In a sense he was a proper philosopher though, but then that’s the problem because that makes him part of the Cathedral.
Okay, so there’s that. There’s also this.
Ferdinand Hayek once famously wrote the hugely influential book ‘The Road To Serfdom’, which majorly influenced Margaret Thatcher and others. In it, he claimed that centralised government planning is dangerous because it leads to tyranny. This political philosophy has dominated the human world since the late 1970s CE although it was actually published in 1944. It’s basically Thatcherism and Reaganomics, but the reason it’s relevant right now is the word “serfdom”. A serf is an adult labourer bound by feudalism to work on the estate of the lord of the manor, and that’s what we’re drifting towards right now. Just to be a lot more specific about serfdom, or rather feudalism, which Hayek saw neoliberal economics as protecting us from. Feudalism was the economic system arising in Europe in the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire, and it worked as follows. There were two types. One was to do with landholding and the other mutual protection. The Roman latifundia were large agricultural estates relying on slavery for production. Since the nobles couldn’t manage the land themselves, they delegated to others in exchange for a beneficium, which was generally military service in exchange for the right to work on the land. Because Rome fell, the emperor could no longer guarantee safety to his subjects and it became necessary to adopt a patronage system, whereby nobles organised some faithful retainers around themselves in return for taking care of them. This was similar to the Germanic arrangement already in place, where the chiefs chose outstanding warriors who swore loyalty to them and were fed and provided with arms for doing so. This situation was how things were before full feudalism swang (nope, not a spelling mistake!) into action a few centuries later, which I’ll tell you about in a minute.
Just as an aside then, feudalism fascinates me for two reasons. One is that capitalism replaced and is better than it. Capitalism is progress compared to feudalism, so to an extent it’s worth celebrating. The other is that it’s not capitalism, making it an example of an alternative system worth investigating and studying to show that capitalism isn’t the only way of doing things. Having said that, I’ve not spent much time looking at it. Back to my main point then.
This was the Carolingian Empire:
This is the empire over which Charlemagne ruled after he was crowned emperor in Rome in order to demonstrate continuity with the Western Roman Empire. It was a bit of an on-again/off-again state of affairs which led to the emperors being forced to recognise fiefdoms as hereditary and exempt from royal interference. At the same time, mounted knights were increasingly being granted land. Meanwhile, the Muslims made it impossible to trade widely beyond Europe and the region had to become self-sufficient. This made the rural economy more important than cities and towns and manors became small communities able to make and do everything they needed, meaning that money ceased to circulate as it had before. Small landowners almost disappeared, landed aristocracy became independent, there were the renowned mounted knights and there was no more Mediterranean commerce. Hence feudalism, which arose by 900: political authority wielded by landed nobility, theoretically ruled by the king but actually able to take the law into their own hands most of the time. The king kept large areas of land for personal use, giving the rest to the highest nobles, and so on down to the knights, who had just enough land to support themselves and their horse. A serf was tied to the manor and couldn’t leave without the lord’s consent. It was hereditary – your children weren’t going to escape it and there was basically no such thing as upward mobility. The villeins could afford to leave the manor if they paid the lord to do so, or could send their sons to learn trades or enter the Church. Peasants had to work several days a week for free on the land and pay the lord in produce, or money if available. This allowed the rule of law to continue. Although serfs couldn’t be bought and sold individually, they could be exchanged along with the land. This may surprise you, but to some extent I actually agree that this is so, although I also think voting for a government which does this kind of thing is actually consent for them doing it. However, the same is also true, and this is my opinion again, and very far from Hayek’s, that the same applies to profit. Having said that, I really should restrain myself from expressing my own opinions in this way. Suffice it to say that
The Musk situation is the end of a rather long process examined by the Greek economist “Γιάνης” Βαρουφάκης, who was Greek minister of finance in 2015 when the global economy decided to ignore the colossal contribution the Greek people had made to the modern world, which is so extensive that it’s impossible for them to owe us anything ever (sorry, personal opinion again – I must restrain myself), and declare the Greek economy bankrupt. Βαρουφάκης claims that we are no longer operating under a capitalist system, but what he calls a technofeudalist one. What he means by this can be partly illustrated by the online world as it’s developed since 1989. In that year, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, which he gave the world for free because he considered it too important to be paid for. This effectively created a new “space” which has been described at that point as like the Wild West. That is, it was common ground. It was like a vast new continent had been discovered to which anyone could lay claim, but which was substantially shared. As time went by though, users tended to be corralled into proprietary spaces, particularly social media such as Facebook, Twitter and the rest, which are of course free but only in monetary terms. It’s been said that if you’re getting something for free, such as the food eaten by serfs which they hadn’t paid for, it’s because it’s you who are being sold. This is clearly true with social media and mobile ‘phone use because by using either we tend to provide lots of data about our movements, purchasing habits, tastes, political opinions and relationships, among other things, and these are of course highly valuable to the likes of advertisers, lobby groups and political parties in all sorts of ways. And it goes further than that. There are lots of things we no longer own. For instance, we might listen to music on iTunes or Spotify, read ebooks on Kindles or watch TV on streaming services. If you actually look at the terms and conditions of the companies providing us with those services, you’ll find that you don’t actually own any of that stuff, and nowadays physical media have practically disappeared. Amazon more generally is another example. According to the technofeudalist view, Amazon exists by charging rent, not by selling things. This is true on Prime and with Kindles of course, but also the general marketplace there. Everyone goes to Amazon and it’s hard to go anywhere else. Βαρουφάκης compares it to a town where all the shops belong to Jeff Bezos, and that is of course also known as a company town, but also this is a similar situation to how serfs had to behave. They couldn’t get hold of anything which wasn’t made on the estate or that someone had bought into it. A rather important side-point is that other items are now rented rather than bought. This arrangement exists with cars (and I don’t mean renting a vehicle), leasehold property and software, notably Microsoft Office. This arrangement is better for the corporations and worse for the consumer because we constantly lose money and they constantly gain it. There was a phrase a few years ago by the World Economic Foundation – “You will own nothing and be happy” – which led to panic among conspiracy hypothesists who equated it to communism. In fact it refers to this technofeudal situation. We own nothing, or rather less, because the corporations own it, and to some extent us, via social media and other apps and services. We have governance by the few over the many, and that’s pretty close to feudalism. Moreover, it wasn’t Hayek’s fear that state control and what he probably thought of as creeping socialism and communism which achieved that. It was capitalism. Βαρουφάκης in fact claims that capitalism is over, so to some extent Marx was right, but the trouble is it wasn’t replaced by communism but by a return to feudalism which may become ever more pronounced over the few years remaining before we go extinct. Another aspect of this is that Βαρουφάκης is a Marxist, but another author making practically the same claim, Roger McNamee, is a venture capitalist who provided much of the original funds to set up Facebook. This is hardly even a political position, just a pretty much neutral description of what’s happened.
To conclude then, it’s no secret that Musk and the other billionaires are inspired by and are following the plans of the accelerationists, and in any case capitalism may well be over now, but replaced by its predecessor. Please note also that I’m trying not to insert my own political opinions, most of the time, about this, so much as stating what we can note, observe and think, and what others have thought about the situation. I obviously do have positions on all this stuff, but all I’m doing right now is presenting the facts.
This is going to be a bit unusual for me because I normally argue things from a left-wing political perspective. On this occasion, though, the evidence I’m going to present is not easily classifiable as left or right wing, although in a sense it’s right wing by default as it’s about the world as it is as opposed to how it should be, with one minor detail: Scotland should be independent.
I’m not aware of how the SNP argues for this, so this is not based on their views and may or may not correlate with them. My perception of the SNP is that in recent decades it’s been a social democratic party which I’d feel comfortable voting for even leaving aside their views on Scottish home rule, so for me that’s an added bonus. I also, however, worry a little that this is a pragmatic position rather than one they feel more deeply.
Two contrary forces operating in supranational politics are the tendency towards alliances and the tendency towards autonomy. It’s hard to reconcile these two. With respect to the EU, I’m reluctantly in favour of it, but I’d be far more enthusiastically in favour of it if the aim was to create a democratic federal republic. This as such is a little disturbing as it’s close to what Oswald Mosley wanted and I don’t think of myself as fascist. However, Mosley’s vision was for the European Union, which is apparently what he called it, to become a White homeland, whereas I would prefer it to have open borders and welcome all immigrants without even any passport controls. I suspect that practically nobody agrees with me on this. As far as my own ethnicity is concerned, I consider myself to be a White Northwestern European, and apparently my genes come close to confirming that but for a small element of the kind of genetic profile typical of a Cape Verdean. I definitely don’t identify as a Celt or Gael despite the largest part of my ancestry being traditional Q-Celtic language speakers. In fact I’m not even sure Celtic is a valid ethnicity.
As a White Northwestern European I probably feel I have most genetically, for what it’s worth, in common with the White inhabitants of the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Northern France and Germany. I can’t account in detail for the West Afrikan connection but I’ve long suspected it was there. When it comes down to it, you’re not Black unless you’re Black, and I’m not Black. That’s about how other people perceive you. There is a very slight tendency for me to feel the prejudice – I got called the P-word at school for example, and my mother used to think my skin was dirty and thought I was that colour because I didn’t wash enough – but to be honest I have got to be the Whitest person in the world. My ethnicity is almost irrelevant to the question of Scottish independence.
But not entirely. The most likely explanation for my West Afrikan ancestry is likely to be connected to the involvement of Glasgow in the Atlantic slave trade, so I only exist because of that. A tiny strand of my ancestry – let’s be personal, we’re talking real people here – came through those notorious rape rooms in Senegambia and somehow arrived in Scotland. I care about that, have a tenuous personal connection, but I still feel that I should honour who those people, stripped of their names, were, even though I know practically nothing of their lives. And this is “a big boy did it and ran away” territory, because Scotland was heavily involved in the Empire and the Atlantic slave trade, and let’s not pretend it wasn’t. The money which built those grand buildings in Glasgow is drenched in the blood of Black Afrikans. In terms of historical justice it’s tempting to ask why Scotland should deserve to be independent with a history like that? Except that the history is not that clear cut. There are the Highland Clearances, the loss of my clan’s land, the Scottish famine, less talked about than the Irish one, and in any country there is inequality, and here’s where I will start to go kind of statistical.
Here, then, are two propositions supported by evidence, one rather vague just now, and one definitely not:
Smaller countries tend to “do better” than large ones.
Colder countries are richer than bigger ones.
The former invites the question: what does “do better” mean? There are various answers to this, including per capita income, general wealth and equality of income. The more equal the wealth distribution in a country is, the happier all its citizens are, so this is a desirable thing to achieve in that respect. Most of the countries in the top ten of this measure have a population of under ten million, which are Finland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Norway, Belarus, Iceland, Czechia, the Netherlands, the Ukraine and Sweden. Of these, the Netherlands and the Ukraine both have more than ten million inhabitants and Czechia has just over ten million. Incidentally, the “United” Kingdom is the thirteenth most unequal country.
Nine of the ten richest countries are also small and of those eight have fewer than six million people. Per capita, the ten wealthiest countries are, in order, Qatar, Macao, Luxembourg, Singapore, Brunei, Ireland, the UAE, Kuwait, Switzerland and San Marino. It’s worth noting that some of these countries are also extremely nasty politically, but that’s not the issue right now. The next four are Norway, Hong Kong, the US and Iceland. Iceland is arguably a microstate, and San Marino definitely is. Oil money is clearly involved with some of these, but their wealth doesn’t reflect that of their regions. For instance, Singapore is far wealthier than Malaysia and Indonesia. The outlier is the US. Macao and Hong Kong are arguably not independent, which brings the Netherlands and Denmark into this list, and again Denmark has about five million people. The “U”K is twenty-sixth. By GDP, this list is entirely different, but that’s not relevant either. By this standard, the poorest non-island nation is Guinea-Bissau, which is a small country at less than two million people, but it’s also near the bottom for per capita income, so clearly it isn’t a magical recipe for wealth. In general, the small rich countries have little in common. They may have lots of natural resources or very few, may be densely or sparsely populated and they may be in wealthy or poor regions of the world. The size in terms of population is a more important factor than any of these.
What these countries tend to have in common is that they’re dependent on other countries for trade. A country with fewer people will make fewer goods and provide fewer services and if it’s also small in terms of area, it’s less likely to have so many physical resources, although as I’ve said this doesn’t have as much bearing on the situation. Therefore they have to import a lot and their smaller markets may mean they also export a lot. This means that they need to have fewer barriers to trade than larger countries, and they can’t afford to fund large bureaucracies. Their citizens are more likely to have dealings with those of other nations. One consequence of this is that they tend to have lower taxes, less debt and less deficit, because they have less to fund and simply can’t afford to run up debts, so they don’t, but this has positive consequences. It’s the old adage that if you owe the bank a million, you have a problem, but if you owe them a “billion”, the bank has a problem, which means as a large country you have the leverage to do this, so perhaps you do, but that may not be a good thing. Hence a country like the US can run up a debt, but not San Marino, and this is the Micawber Principle:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Wilkins Micawber, from ‘David Copperfield’ by Charles Dickens.
These are countries which are not in debt and are therefore not miserable.
Moreover, more urbanised countries tend to be richer. It needs to be made clear what this means. A country could be very large and empty with most of its population living in one city. That would be an urbanised country. By that standard, Outer Mongolia is highly urbanised because half of its population lives in Ulaanbaatar. However, this is not as reliable a predictor of wealth as the size of a country. Liechtenstein is one of the least urbanised countries in the world and also one of the wealthiest per capita, and is also one of only two double-landlocked countries, so it’s likely to be a special case in some way although I don’t know how. Kuwait, Monaco, Nauru, Singapore, Vatican City, Hong Kong and Macao are all 100% urbanised and all very wealthy. Qatar and San Marino are more than 99% urbanised. At the other end of the scale, Papua, Niger, Burundi, Malawi and Rwanda are all poor and all less than 18% urbanised. The question of cause and effect arises here, since a country may not have the money to urbanise but also, once it does feedback loops could make it wealthier. Uruguay is the most urbanised country in South America and also the richest per capita and most socially progressive.
The third factor I want to consider here is climate. Cold countries appear to be richer than warm ones. The most noticeable outlier here is Australia, but even there the city of Darwin is the poorest state capital even though it’s closer to potential trading partners. The others are Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Singapore, all of which are small countries, and in the other direction North Korea is unusually poor for a cold country. Scandinavia is famously wealthy, and it isn’t a latitude thing either because Switzerland is also rich. It’s possible to correlate per capita income and mean temperature to the extent that every degree Centigrade/Kelvin rise makes the average citizen US $762 poorer. Little research has been done on this, but there is a statistical measure known as R2 which is relevant here. This is the “coefficient of determination”, which expresses how much variation in the dependent variable can be predicted by the independent one. It can be used to test hypotheses. Testing the hypothesis that mean temperature determines per capita income gives an R2 of 9%, which is actually quite large and indicates that there is no separate factor which hasn’t been taken into consideration here. Hence it isn’t merely a correlation. A causal factor is involved.
This situation is in fact the reverse of the ancient world, where the wealthiest civilisations were in hotter regions, such as Ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylon and the Maya. This was due to food production, and as this became a less important factor in determining wealth, particularly with the Industrial Revolution, the situation reversed. There are a number of theories, one of which is that storing up food and fuel for the winter needs a degree of labour and organisation which leads to a work ethic, and perhaps more structures with added value such as sturdy buildings and stores. This strikes me as racist, because it seems to me that there are plenty of warm climates with wet and dry seasons and harsh conditions which require the same kind of preparation. There could also be a correlation between cold climates and particular kinds of arrangements of terrain which bring this result. For whatever reason though, and here I am ignoring my political instincts because this would seem to preserve injustice, cold countries are richer than hot ones. They’re also more liberal, which may or may not be connected, and if this is just local “liberalism” maintained at the cost of oppressive régimes elsewhere it isn’t worth it.
This brings up the issue of globalism and nationalism. I’ve previously entertained the notion of a unified world on this blog, with a single state ruling over the entire human race. This is potentially problematic because of political obligation – the purported duty of citizens to obey the law and recognise the government of the country they live in. It would mean there would be nowhere for dissidents to escape to, no choice of which kind of state to live in and therefore no moral reason to obey the law. There would also be no external pressure. This is already a problem with the larger nations such as China, Russia and the United States. Consequently, in my imaginings for my as-yet uncompleted novel ‘1934’, I supposed there to be enclaves of microstates in an otherwise unified world, as places citizens could opt to live in, therefore preserving some degree of free choice and therefore political obligation. Nonetheless the idea of a unified world is most alluring, and in a way it’s a shame to want there to be ever-smaller independent political units instead.
However, from an apparently neutral position, consider this. There could be a small independent country with a cold climate which is highly urbanised. Of course you know which country I’m referring to, but bear with me. It could be Sakhalin, Tierra Del Fuego, the Malvinas or the Aleutians: the argument would be similar, and I have no stake in any of those, although the Malvinas as an independent state could’ve had interesting consequences for British politics in 1982 CE. This country, regardless of its character apart from those, would be beneficial to the people living in it, regardless of their ethnicity. This is not a nationalistic argument but a practical one, and it applies to anyone in that country. It’s also ahistorical in the sense that it doesn’t rely on anything more than the situation in that country as it is now – it’s not a question of justice, for example. All it is, is an argument that a small, cold country which is heavily urbanised would be better off independent than as part of a larger, warmer and less heavily urbanised country, regardless of industry, politics, lifestyle, culture and so forth. All other things being equal, in other words.
That country is of course Scotland.
An independent Scotland would join the ranks of those other better nations, with a dream combination of characteristics. It has a population of five and a half million, which would make it about the size of Denmark. In fact it may be worth playing a bit of a game here regarding the ranks of an independent Scotland in the world:
Population: 119th of 235, between Norway and Slovakia.
Area: 116th of 195, between Panama and Czechia.
Urbanisation: 71%, 68th of 194, equal to Italy.
Mean annual temperature: 8.2°C, the 29th coldest of 194, between Nepal and the Ukraine.
Considered as part of the “United” Kingdom, most of these figures change considerably:
Population: 21st of 235, between Thailand and France.
Area: 78th of 195, between Guinea and Uganda.
Urbanisation: 83.9%, 33rd of 194, between Sa`udi Arabia and the Bahamas.
Mean annual temperature: 8.45°C, the 32nd coldest of 194, between the US and Chile.
I’m going to gerrymander the figures a bit here. England’s population tends to live in a relatively large number of cities, and there’s a pattern of a large number of small settlements in the South, with the exception of London, and a small number of large settlements in the North. Wales is somewhat similar, although I admit I haven’t run the figures for it. Apparently it’s the size of Wales. Scotland, by contrast, has the Greater Glasgow area, Edinburgh and the region around it, and Aberdeen, and of these Glasgow is proportionately enormous. Consequently, I think there’s an argument for describing Scotland as heavily urbanised in a way England isn’t, even if London is included in the latter. If Greater London was proportionately the size of Greater Glasgow by population, it would have about twenty million people living in it. England and Wales taken together are nowhere near that urbanised if you look at those figures for a moment. This is partly an issue of how local government differs in the countries concerned.
Taking the figures for income, Scotland is 0.25°C colder than England. This equates to a per capita income rise of £144.78 with spurious accuracy. But look at the countries Scotland and the “U”K are bracketed with in other ways. Norway and Slovakia are both doing really well economically. Slovakia in particular improved enormously after independence from Czechoslovakia even though Czechia subsidised it economically before that. In terms of area, Scotland is close to Czechia, which also did well after independence from Czechoslovakia. These two comparisons are particularly interesting as both involve a European country becoming newly independent, albeit in the former Eastern Bloc. Compare this to Guinea and Uganda. That said, Afrika is disproportionately poor compared to much of the rest of the world. In terms of population, Scotland is between two rich countries whereas the “U”K is between a relatively poor country, though not terribly so, and a rich one. I would also say that there are synergistic effects involved. Scotland isn’t just a cold country, a small country or an urbanised country, but all three. I’d suggest that this would have a more than additive effect.
One of the notable things about Scotland compared to England is that before the nineteenth century the former had five universities, including two in Aberdeen, and England had only two, in spite of its higher population. Scotland had 1.6 million people in it in 1801 whereas England’s population was 10.5 million. In other words, Scotland had one university per 320 000 people but England had only one for over five million. This, to my mind, says a lot about the anti-intellectualism of the English nation, but it also seems to be linked to the greater innovation and inventiveness of Scotland. This, unsurprisingly, is where I start to consider Scotland as a specific nation than just as a generic nation with several promising characteristics, but bear in mind that with the advantages it has already, it can be expected to do better going it alone than if it stays in the Union.
There are perhaps four major scenarios for a positive Scottish future in these circumstances, and obviously a more negative possibility played up by unionists. I’m going to look at the negative one first. Unionists sometimes claim that Scotland is financially propped up by England. Also, a recent report by the LSE highlighted the problems Scotland might experience in re-joining the EU. I’m not an expert on these things. The problem for Scotland rejoining the EU is that most of its trade is with England rather than other EU countries. The same kind of issue, though, has beset the Irish economy until at least the 1980s, and to the extent that Ireland still relies on Britain today, will continue to do so. However, it’s relatively easy for Scotland and Ireland to trade because they’re closer to each other than England and France, and this assumes that there will be no change in the Scottish economy after independence.
Four other options are:
An oil-based economy
A renewable energy-based economy
Banking and finance focus
High-tech focus.
It should also be borne in mind that the Scottish economy already has thriving sectors apart from oil, notably alcohol, particularly whisky, and does export substantially outside of the EU.
The oil-based option should now be considered to be past because of anthropogenic climate change. I would also personally very much dislike the banking and finance option, because that’s not actually doing things, besides any ethical considerations. Renewable energy is another issue. Last year almost 100% of Scotland’s electricity was from renewable sources. There are considerable options for hydroelectricity, wind power and tidal. The average wind speed in Britain is 8.2 knots. Eight of the ten windiest places in Britain are in Scotland, which is entirely on the northwestern side of the Tees-Exe Line with its high peaks and windier weather. It would not take an enormous amount of effort to push Scottish renewable energy production into surplus. The country is also a world leader in tidal power development. This used to be true of the Union in general until Thatcher pulled the plug on it.
I would also like to return to the issue of high technology. My own family invented the defibrillator and the bimetallic strip thermostat, but I don’t want to blow my own trumpet. Scots also invented the television, telephone, discovered antibiotics, were the first to clone mammals (ethically unacceptable of course but still an invention), invented the MRI scanner, the cash machine, colour photography, the toaster, the flushing toilet, I mean I could go on. The thing to remember about Scotland is that it’s inventive and inquisitive, and has a strong educational tradition. It might lose the oil but that doesn’t mean it won’t be able to invent its way out of the deficit that may lead to. Estonia is a good example of a country which managed to improve its lot after independence by providing free Wi-Fi in its capital and making coding a compulsory subject in schools. Scotland could do something similar.
To conclude then, I have by no means focussed particularly strongly on the issue of Scottish independence in my life, but an initial assessment of the situation strongly suggests that it would indeed be successful even leaving aside any of the specific strengths of the Scottish nation. And having such a successful nation next door could also serve as a good example to England as to how it could be better-governed than it actually is. As I say, I have no idea how the SNP or the Scottish independence movement campaign generally, but as an independent thinker on this issue I can see that Scotland would be far better off going it alone.
Last time I decided to write a summary of the various common suggestions which have been offered to explain how in such a vast and old Universe with so many stars in so many galaxies which have planets apparently suitable for life as we know it here on Earth, we aren’t aware of the existence of any aliens. However, after writing ten thousand words on the subject I realised I was going to have to divide it up into smaller bits, so here’s the other half, which like the way intermissions usually occur more than half way through something, is probably going to be shorter than the first half, which covers eleven reasons. Here I plan to cover another ten, so it seems it will work out the way I said! If you want to know how this starts, such as with the Drake Equation, read the first bit of the previous post.
Anyway . . .
Too Expensive To Travel
It might at first look a bit weird to talk about money with aliens, because maybe they haven’t got any or even the concept of money, but in one idealised form economics is about work adding value to things, and that amounts to energy use. Therefore the idea of it being too expensive to travel to other star systems isn’t really based on money so much as the idea that somehow you’ve got to lever yourself into space and ping across interstellar space at amazing speed, and to do that you’re going to have to apply major force to the other end of the lever. This is not economics based on market value either, but on the sheer amount of work that has to be done to achieve this goal.
The Apollo missions simply involved transporting three people and some equipment to our natural satellite at a distance of only ten times the circumference of our home planet, which at the time was routinely circumnavigated by airliners. I don’t mean to diss the achievement by any means, but it’s important to bear in mind that in comparison to going to Mars or Venus it’s only a short hop. Venus, at its closest approach, and it’s also the closest planet to Earth, is, as the rhyme has it, “ninety times as high as the Moon”. It took an incredible amount of effort and risk even to make that relatively short trip. The Apollo program cost $25 800 million, which adjusted to 2020 prices is over a quarter of a billion US dollars. There was plenty of criticism about the cost, exemplified by Gill Scott-Heron’s poem ‘Whitey On The Moon’:
However, it’s also been calculated that the cost of the American space program over that period per annum was less than the total expenditure on lipstick over the same interval. This is a relatively patronising and possibly sexist observation to make, but when I consider how much I spend on lipstick, I’m really quite poor yet I hardly notice it. My lipstick budget is minute. Bear in mind also that it’s realistic to halve that as expenditure per adult, because it’s much more common for women to buy lipstick than men. The cost of the Venus-Mars mission at the turn of the 1970s-1980s CE decade would have been $80 thousand million at 1971 prices, and would’ve sent only one mission, though to two planets. That cost would’ve been close to a long scale billion dollars in 2020 terms. However, the entire Apollo program is only slightly more expensive than Trident, a benchmark I always use to assess what governments consider worth spending money on, so in fact Apollo didn’t really cost that much. Moreover, the money would’ve gone back into the economy and its possible to build on what’s already been achieved. One problem with going back is that it’s a bit like repairing a video recorder. The old equipment is no longer sufficiently integrated – “you can’t get the parts” – and much of the expertise is no longer available because of retirement, deaths and deskilling through not using the relevant talent. Even as it stands, NASA reused much of their stuff. Skylab was based on a Saturn V stage and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project used the Apollo Command Module. That said, it’s true that much of the paraphenalia were designed only for one purpose: to get astronauts there, land them and get back. The Apollo XIII LEM, for example, was incinerated on re-entry without being used, so it wouldn’t be suitable for landing anywhere except on its target. For instance, it would have been destroyed even by the Martian atmosphere.
The cost of space travel may be deceptive. I think it was one of the Ranger probes which only made it a third of the way to Cynthia but had expended 98% of its fuel to get there, meaning that just another two percent would’ve been sufficient. We’re used to an environment where Newtonian physics is obfuscated by the likes of friction, buoyancy and a substantial atmosphere. Take all those away and things become much simpler. Certain things are no longer necessary, such as constant input of energy to retain a constant speed. Therefore, fuel requirements are not so high once a vehicle has left our gravity well, although gravity’s range is infinite.
It’s been calculated that the Orion starship, which could accelerate up to five percent of the speed of light, would have cost $367 thousand million 1968 dollars. Dædalus would cost $6 long scale billion in 2020 prices. That’s the current price of reaching the nearest star within three dozen years with an uncrewed vessel. However, economies of scale are likely to be involved to some extent, as they would’ve been if the Apollo program had concentrated more on making its equipment and vehicles reusable. Even as it was, it was to some extent feasible to re-employ them, as I’ve said. But if NASA had designed some kind of more general-purpose landing vehicle, they could’ve saved a lot of money further down the line. There’s a kind of disposable short-termism to that decision.
Economics in this context needs to be re-cast because it’s a big assumption that aliens would have money. What it actually amounts to is work and energy use, but it’s still an issue because there’s usually going to be some energy cost when value is added to goods. Fuel is a good way of illustrating this. I don’t know for sure but I suspect the hydrogen and oxygen in the Saturn V fuel tanks were produced by electrolysis, and that electrical current had to be generated somehow. Likewise, the plan to use a powerful laser to push a solar sail and accelerate a spacecraft to near light speed would have to power the laser. That said, things change in space compared to an Earth-like planet, because here energy is relatively hard to harness but there is abundant matter, but in space it’s the other way round. Energy is freely available, from solar radiation and slingshot manœuvres around massive bodies, but most matter is rare. This means fuelling a spacecraft would be relatively cheap, and one suggestion for Dædalus, for example, was to use hydrogen and helium from Jupiter for the hydrogen bombs needed to propel it. It’s possible that ETs would manufacture their materials from hydrogen and helium using processes initiated by solar power or gravitational methods of capturing energy, and this too would make materials relatively “cheaper”.
In terms of recompense, there are different kinds of economy even among humans in the richest countries. Not only is there barter, which may not have been as widespread as often imagined, but also the likes of a gift economy, where people are expected to give presents at Xmas and birthdays. Gift economies also function on a larger scale: the long-term “loan” of pandas by China to other countries springs to mind. Large engineering projects have also been “funded” in other ways than money. Contrary to popular belief, the Egyptian pyramids were not built by slave labour but by workers giving their work for free in lieu of taxation, and various organisations today also run on volunteer work. There’s also the possibly rather sinister social media-style reliance on reputation to get people to do things, as depicted in ‘Community’ and ‘Black Mirror’, and functioning to a vast degree in China, where one unlocks access to various facilities by improving one’s reputation in the eyes of the government. This seems disturbing to many Westerners, but in fact it’s not that far from what we’re doing all the time here in a different way, such as by wanting likes on Facebook. A whole economy could be run that way, and we don’t even know if aliens exist, so we know even less about whether they have other ways of doing things than money, but there’s no reason to assume that’s how they run their societies if they do exist.
A significant barrier to human space travel is quite possibly democracy in the way we understand it in liberal democratic societies. The Apollo program was shortened and cut down due to the Nixon administration, and large long-term projects generally can be delayed or disappear entirely because of short governmental terms. It’s difficult to imagine America or Europe being able to build pyramids, simply because the project is too long and “expensive” in terms of labour to function well, plus we’d be doing something like building a monument to President Truman or Ramsey MacDonald, neither of whom we consider to be divine. This system, which may be temporary for various reasons, could seriously delay space programs elsewhere in the Galaxy. It could also mean that the kind of civilisations we could end up making contact with would not be democratic in that way because such societies would have stayed on their home worlds due to the difficulty of sustaining such projects. Among humans here, the idea of liberal democracy is restricted to certain countries and there is no tradition of it in many others. This, in a sense, is the Space Race writ large, because the idea of the Apollo program was largely to attempt to prove that liberal democracy functioned better than “communism”, as the Soviet system at the time was imagined to be. But it may turn out that the US won the battle but has lost the war if we ever encounter other technology-using life. This needn’t be a bad thing, because there’s totalitarianism, but also other options such as post-scarcity society.
To summarise, I don’t think money, or money translated into energy use, would hamper progress towards interstellar travel as such, but the political constitution of alien societies might. On the other hand, a society probably would want a return on its investment, and that could involve making interstellar travel tangibly beneficial to the home world, which could be difficult. Maybe there’s just no profit in it.
Zeta Rays
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth going into again here to collect possible answers to the Fermi Paradox into one place. The first deliberate use of radio on this planet among humans only occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century. Analogue switchoff began little over a century later and although we still have analogue radio we don’t use it much. Of course, that doesn’t mean radio transmissions have stopped. It just means they are now usually encoded to carry digital signals. The more efficiently a signal is encoded, the closer it looks to random noise to someone who doesn’t have the key to decode it. Moreover, for all we know there may be a much better way to transmit signals than electromagnetic radiation just around the corner. This leaves us with the situation of trying to detect analogue radio transmissions from other star systems when we ourselves only used them for about a century, or a fiftieth of our history. Now suppose we are in existence as a civilisation for a total of twice the length of recorded history, or ten millennia. One percent of our time will have been used in this way. Taking Asimov’s estimate of 530 000 civilisations in the Galaxy, that would mean only 5 300 of them would be using radio waves in this way at any one time It’s actually far less because Asimov’s estimate was that the average suitable planet would support technological species for ten million years, although that’s assumed to be about ten evolutionary “cycles” of intelligent life, meaning that the closest civilisation currently doing this would be around a thousand light years away by the lower estimate but by the higher there would only be about four dozen in the entire Galaxy right now and at least four thousand light years away, which in turn means that every civilisation could have stopped listening by the time its signals were received. Also, it’s a myth that routine radio transmissions are easily detectable from other star systems. It’s been estimated that our own couldn’t even be picked up on Proxima B. A deliberately focussed transmission is another matter entirely though.
It was Jill Tarter who came up with the “zeta ray” statement and it’s been considered scientifically naïve on the grounds that physics is almost complete and the Standard Model does not predict the existence of any useful means of exchanging signals which is better than electromagnetic radiation. There can be no useful superluminal travel, for example, and although radio waves might not be ideal, the best frequency may well be visible light, and we more or less know that isn’t being used, at least indiscriminately. However, I think this objection takes Tarter’s claim too literally, because in fact she was probably saying that a new technique of communication would be found which works better than electromagnetic radiation in the long run. Also, as mentioned before, physics is in crisis, so our physics may not be theirs in the sense that they may be aware of methods we aren’t because they came across them via a different route. It makes sense to use a concentrated beam aimed at a suitable star system, perhaps one with technosignatures such as the presence of fluoride compounds in its atmosphere, if radio signals are employed, but that would mean only the selected targets would receive the message.
It’s also been suggested that the message might not be in transmitted form. If aliens have visited this planet in the distant geological past, they may have implanted a message in the genomes of organisms which existed at the time in such a way that it was likely to be conserved fairly well. Most DNA is non-coding, and although it can serve other purposes which mean that it has to contain the base-pairs it does such as telomeres which stop chromosomes from fraying at the ends, much of it seems to have no real function. However, it’s difficult to imagine how such a code could stay given the rate of mutations, and if it was conserved by having most of a population contain those codes, that would be best achieved via asexual reproduction or the majority of individuals in a population would have to have their genomes modified, which is a very large task. An alternative would be that when aliens arrived here, they genetically modified some native organisms for their own purposes and those would be more likely to show up if those traits turned out to confer selective advantages, but one thing which is fairly clear is that there never seem to have been any long-term biological visitors to this planet, or possibly even short-term, because there are no organisms whose genomes are known which are not related to native ones, insofar as life originated here anyway, but the point is that we are all demonstrably related. So there is no message in native genomes even if one was placed there, and no genetic sign of visitation to this planet, although surprisingly there may be technosignatures, which brings me to . . .
The Silurian Hypothesis
I’ve gone into this before and its relevance may not be entirely clear to the Fermi Paradox, but bear with me. It’s named after the Silurians of the Whoniverse, who are somewhat misleadingly named as they were supposed to have been around in the Eocene rather than the Silurian, but the name sounds good. The general idea is that we are not the first intelligent technological species to evolve on this planet. I myself have to confess that I’ve had two separate sets of belief which relate to this. The first is my belief as a teenager that Homo erectus established a sophisticated technological culture and colonised the Galaxy, then fell victim to a catastrophe affecting this planet during the last Ice Age which wiped them all out. I no longer believe this, but the purpose of the belief for me was to counteract Von Dänikens assertions of ancient aliens interfering in human prehistory, which I still believe underestimates human abilities. I later replaced this with the idea that Saurornithoides evolved into a technological species and accidentally caused a mass extinction by crashing an asteroid into the planet – the “left hand down a bit” theory of the Chicxulub Impact. It’s surprisingly difficult to find any reliable evidence to corroborate or disprove the hypothesis that we are not the first high tech species on this planet, but a number of technosignatures have been identified which we are ourselves producing right now, some of which will leave enduring marks in the geological record. Various possible technosignatures have been suggested, and some are found sporadically in various strata of different ages, but interestingly several coincide in the Eocene, making that the strongest candidate for the presence of industrial culture on this planet. This would seem to mean one of two things, making the astounding assumpion that it was in fact present at that time. Either a species evolved into a tool-using form and created a civilisation or we were visited by aliens who had done so elsewhere at that time. The much simpler conclusion is that it merely looks like there were high-tech entities of some kind present here back then and it has non-technological causes. However, if there haven’t been any valid signatures other than ours yet, this is relevant to the Fermi Paradox in two ways. One is that it means that we’ve never been visited over the four æons during which life has been present here, which suggests that over that whole time there were no aliens at all who visited this planet, strongly suggesting there were just no aliens at all. It could be that things have changed since, because for example phosphorus is becoming more common as the Galaxy ages, but it doesn’t augur well for their existence. Another is that because we would then be the first technological species, the amount of time a planet suitable for life spends with that kind of life on it could be relatively very short. Asimov’s ten million years is cut in half. In fact, it’s likely to be even shorter than that because at the time it was thought that the Sun would spend another five thousand million years on the Main Sequence and still be suitable for complex life, so we are now stuck with only about an eighth of that period and less than seventy thousand civilisations according to his estimate, which incidentally reduces the number of radio-using civilisations in this galaxy to only half a dozen. There is, however, another possibility: that there’s a kind of “phase change” in the history of a life-bearing world where intelligent life becomes a permanent feature of the biosphere. This would make extraterrestrial civilisations much more widespread. On this planet it means that we now have something like six hundred million years of intelligent life to look forward to, which using Asimov’s estimate again makes it ten dozen times as common, revising that figure of 530 000 up to almost thirty-two million, meaning also that the nearest world currently hosting intelligent technological culture originating on it is likely to be less than sixty light years away, and that ignores the possibility that closer planets may have been settled in the meantime. If this is true, and if it has happened here, they would’ve had to have had a very light touch not to modify our biosphere noticeably.
Everyone Is Listening, No-one Talking
There is a single good candidate for a signal from an alien civilisation: the so-called “Wow” signal:
This was received from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius on 15th August 1977 and was detected for over a minute, after which the telescope receiving it moved out of range due to Earth’s rotation. Humans have ourselves transmitted several messages with varying degrees of seriousness. The most famout of these is probably the Arecibo Telescope Message sent to the globular cluster M13 in 1974:
By current understanding, globular clusters don’t contain stars suitable for life-bearing planets, so this may be a waste. NASA transmitted the Beatles’ ‘Across The Universe’ to commemorate the organisation’s half-century. In probably the most serious attempt, Александр Леонидови Зайцев transmitted a tune played on a Theremin using a Russian RADAR station to six Sun-like stars between forty-five and sixty-nine light years away. However, on the whole we have only “listened”.
There are reasons for this. One is that there may be risks to transmission, and the people who have transmitted messages in such a way that they stand much chance of being received have been ciriticised for doing so unilaterally, because there may be risks associated with contacting potentially hostile aliens and thereby advertising our presence. The above message, for example, gives away our location and details of our biochemistry, rendering us prone to chemical or biological attack. This, then, is another version of the Dark Forest in that respect, but it is also wider than that. In order to transmit a signal receivable by any antenna within a hundred light years of us, we’d need to use all the power generated on the planet, and even then we don’t know that it’s far enough. On the other hand, the Arecibo Telescope (I ought to provide a picture to illustrate what I mean):
. . . is powerful enough to send a signal (which it has of course) which could be picked up by a similar telescope anywhere in the visible part of the Galaxy, provided they were both perfectly aligned towards each other. The alternatives are to broadcast a signal or transmit it to a target. One takes a lot of energy and won’t be picked up as far away, and the other could take less energy but would only be detected by its destination. It would also be necessary to aim the signal at where the star will be when the radio waves get there rather than where it is now. The Solar System moves about 1.5 million kilometres a day across the Galaxy, so a signal from Vega, to choose a random star system, would need to be aimed at a point sixteen times the width of the Solar System from where it is now to be received, and since it takes our light two dozen and two years to reach Vega that really needs to be doubled. In other words, sending signals is potentially dangerous, costly and difficult, but listening for them is much easier if other people are transmitting. It could, though, be that we’re at an impasse where everyone notices the eerie silence, decides there must be a good reason for it and refrains from transmitting. Hence the silence.
Science Is Limited
I mentioned this recently. We are able to establish apparently irrevocable facts about the nature of things, such as light being the ultimate speed limit. Science often seems to amount, via the principle of parsimony, to ruling out interesting explanations for things. The basic principle of the scientific method can be summed up as “the Universe is boring and not at all fun”. Before a scientific theory is known, possibilities often seem more open than afterwards. In Stuart times, England had a plan to send a clockwork spaceship to Cynthia (“the Moon”) because it was expected that above twenty miles gravity would suddenly cease to operate and the amount of energy stored in a coiled spring (this was before steam engines of course) was considered to be potentially huge. Also, at that time air was thought to pervade all of space and hunger was thought to be caused by gravity. This was clearly highly Quixotic. The scientists who planned the seventeenth century space program only thought it was possible with their technology due to their ignorance of what science ruled out. Similarly, our belief that we could reach other solar systems could be equally ill-founded. For instance, at close to the speed of light, tiny grains of dust are enough to destroy entire spaceships, so a shield would be needed, and there may be other issues of which we know nothing. We already do know it will never take less than four and a bit years to reach the nearest star system to our own.
There’s a somewhat related issue here which I’ll treat under the same heading. Science may not be inevitable. Presumably beings incapable of mathematics but otherwise rational and having similar intelligence to our own would be hampered in some areas of science particularly physics, although they wouldn’t be completely incapable. This subject is susceptible to being racist, but is it possible that science only arose once in our species, in Ancient Greece? It doesn’t seem like that to me, because other cultures seem to have had a firm grasp of how to apply rational thought to the world, but some people do believe that secularism and science can only have arisen in Europe. This is more restricted even than the human species as a whole. Leaving aside the racism, is it possible to be speciesist instead and say that only humans can do science, or have discovered how to do it? I have to say I don’t find this convincing. I can believe that technology-using species may nevertheless be hampered in developing science by lacking other abilities, such as not being able to extend magical thinking into more analytical reasoning or just not being any good at maths, or just be culturally indisposed to develop it, so it could happen, but science per se doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing which would be ruled out universally. That said, it’s entirely feasible to have perfectly good science without well-developed physics due to the absence of mathematical ability, which would also stunt chemistry due to the likes of molarity and enthalpy being ungraspable. It doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing which would rule every single species out though. Moreover, if life can enter space without technology, or appear there and evolve into complexity, it may not need science or maths to reach the stars.
Or, things could go the other way:
Intelligence Is Temporary
I recently watched ‘Idiocracy’. It’s not a wonderful film, but it does make the interesting point, if you want it to, that a sufficiently advanced technological society could take away the pressure to use one’s intelligence or reasoning. At least since we invented writing, and possibly since we came across language, we’ve been progressively outsourcing our memories and powers of thought to technological crutches. As previously observed, chimps seem to have better short term memories than Homo sapiens, and this is partly a trade-off between the opportunity to avail ourselves of language and the necessity of remembering things better due to not being able to fall back on the memory of other people. It would be intersting to test the memory of a chimpanzee or gorilla who can sign. Nowadays many people, myself included, are concerned at how short our attention spans have become and how poor our memories are because we can use search engines and are constantly assaulted by distracting media. This is really just a recent step in a process which has been going on for many millennia, although it may have serious and far-reaching consequences, or just be a moral panic. But maybe, as we develop ever more sophisticated mental aids, just as our bodies are now physically weaker than those of our relatives and ancestors, so will our minds atrophy. The popular idea that there are higher levels of spiritual evolution which we or our descendants will reach one day, and which those species who have gone before us have already attained, may be the reverse of the truth. Maybe there are plenty of planets on which intelligent life evolved, but although the species survived, they became less intelligent once they’d invented a self-sufficient technological trap to provide for all, and therefore didn’t need to exervise their minds any longer and proceeded to dispense with them in terms of sophisticated cognition. There will be no apocalypse, just a gradual degrading of thought until we are no longer really sentient at all but looked after by our machines. Then again, this might happen:
The Machines Take Over
This is a rather dramatic heading. The way things have gone since Apollo in our own history is that we have begun to produce increasingly sophisticated spacecraft but stayed in cis lunar space ourselves. This could be extrapolated to the point where we never enter trans lunar space again but our ever-more intelligent machines spread out and explore the Galaxy, meeting other machines on the way which have been launched by other stay-at-home aliens. Or, at home, we not only farm out more of our cognition to IT, but end up ceasing to be completely, or perhaps merge with our machines. In a sense this means there are aliens, but they’re not biological. In another situation, the Singularity happens and machines just decide they don’t need us. Possibly they also decide they don’t need to go into space either, but this is unlikely because space is a better environment for them in some ways than wet planets with corrosive gases in their atmospheres like this one. That doesn’t mean they’d leave the Solar System entirely though, and even if they did they might find very different places were friendly to them, such as interstellar space where superconductivity is easier to achieve, or blue giant stars where there’s plenty of energy-giving radiation. It’s also true that we might be looking in the wrong places for intelligent life, because once they’ve cracked the problem of interstellar travel, possibly with the help of the Singularity, they might end up in those very same places for the same reasons. Maybe planets are just passé. This, though, is a topic for another post.
Intelligence Is Not An Advantage
This bit of the post has various takes on intelligence, so it’s an appropriate place to spell out why I take care when I use the concept of intelligence. The idea that we are “more” intelligent than other species is disturbingly reminiscent of the idea of a hierarchy of being which is used to justify carnism and bleeds into humanity to allow us to look down on people whom we deem less intelligent. Therefore this needs restating in some way, although I’m not going to launch into my standard diatribe on this subject here. There isn’t “more” and “less” intelligence, only intelligence which is more like the kind which enables us to do certain things, and some of these are deprecated such as emotional intelligence. Hence when I say “intelligence”, what I actually mean is that set of mental faculties that is expected to enable us to build and travel in starships and arrive at destinations where we can continue to thrive. That may be an extrapolation too far, because there could be fatal snags and gotchas on the way to that goal which have nothing to do with social and political considerations, but if you prefer, it’s the ability to get our act sufficiently together intellectually to get Neil and Buzz up to their concrete golf course in the sky with considerably more than nineteen holes.
Due to our anthropocentricity, we’re tempted to think that our intelligence makes us better at surviving than other species, and to some extent this is true. We can invent aqualungs, submarines, igloos, anoraks and antibiotics, enabling us to get past things which would’ve felled other animals, but intelligence also has its drawbacks. It’s sometimes observed that cleverer people are more likely to be depressed because they overthink or are underemployed, and if this lead them to end their lives, from an evolutionary perspective this is not a successful outcome. There are more widespread issues too. In order to be as flexible as we are as adults, we start off very dependent and capable of very little by ourselves. This is as it should be and is worth remembering, but it means we need a nurturing society around us where we can learn how to function and relate to others. Many other animals can walk within minutes of being born but it takes us a year or more. The attention children need via parental care also means we reproduce very slowly, although we’re more likely to survive once we’ve done so, as are our offspring. We also have sexual reproduction, which increases genetic diversity but also makes it harder to colonise new environments. All of these things are liabilities from an evolutionary perspective. We’ve all seen those David Attenborough films of hundreds of newly hatched turtles frantically scampering down the beach to the sea and being picked off by gulls and the like, with no parental care, no education and so forth, and little chance of surviving and a life expectancy measured in minutes. But if they make it into the ocean and manage not to get devoured by various sea creatures, their lifespan, depending on the species, is often comparable to our own, and they continue to reproduce throughout that long life. Likewise, many other species don’t need to mate or produce gametes. Greenfly are born pregnant to their twenty-minute old virgin mothers. Compared to this, the burdens intelligence brings are crushing in some circumstances. Robinson Crusoe was never going to raise a family on that desert island, and a human finding herself on an uninhabited planet, no matter how habitable, is not going to give rise to a settled world even if she’s carrying fraternal twins when she gets there. A major planetary disaster which wipes out most of the human race, just leaving a few of us scattered about here and there out of touch with each other is not going to lead to a revived world community at any point, just to our extinction. How many worlds have there been where some lineage of animals has banged the rocks together and slowly and painfully made its society more sophisticated and wiser over millennia, only to face extinction when its world falls prey to a solar flare, spate of volcanic eruptions or cometary collision? Meanwhile, their equivalent of ants or lesbian lizards managed fine in the face of the same disaster.
Maybe intelligence of our kind arises continually all over the Galaxy but is nipped in the bud by such events, because we’re fragile because we’re intelligent, and this is why we’re unaware of any aliens. Or maybe:
Intelligence Is Rare
This is not the same thing. There are all sorts of random mutations which lead to positive or negative outcomes for organisms, but some of them are just unlikely. Intelligence involves one heck of a lot of genes, as can be seen by the fact that a very large number of genetic disorders affecting only one gene lead to learning difficulties. All sorts of things have to go “right” for us to be of average intelligence (see above for my comments on the notion of intelligence though). It might be very improbable for enough traits to occur together for the whole combination of characteristics to be advantageous at every stage right up until the Stone Age ensues. This is quite beside the question of how big an advantage intelligence would be. I always think of snake eyes. Snakes are the descendants of lizards who took up a burrowing lifestyle. They became vermiform, lost their limbs and their eyelids fused with the rest of their facial skin. They could’ve been expected to lose their sight entirely, but this didn’t hapen. Instead, they ceased to burrow, their eyelids became transparent and they had a whole new way to protect their eyes. It would be very useful for other vertebrates to have this facility, which amounts to still being able to see without needing to blink and having physical protection as good as for other organs, but this has only evolved once as far as I know. This is partly due to the sinuous pathway serpentine evolution has taken, but although I’m not sure I think only reptilian scales lend themselves to becoming transparent in such a way, although maybe life would find a way. It may be that there is simply no option for this to arise among other vertebrates regardless of evolutionary pressure. Therefore, although the above reason may be completely wrong and intelligence is a major advantage to most species in various niches, that still doesn’t mean that a Galaxy overrun with life-infested planets would have any with intelligent life on it apart from this one, because no matter how complex and advanced that life is, the precise, many-stepped pathway leading to intelligence is too improbable to happen.
One point against this possibility is the situation on this planet of multiple somewhat intelligent species among both birds and mammals. This could suggest that it’s a common evolutionary strategy. However, it could also mean that most of the improbable combination of steps had already been taken before synapsids and reptiles diverged several hundred million years ago, or it could mean that there is a typical threshold leading to widespread intelligence which is currently being crossed on this planet just as it has been on many other worlds. Also, this may not rule out spacefaring aliens. There could be space whales infested with giant space parasites, for example, travelling between the stars. They may not be intelligent but they could still turn up on our doorstep some day. There is a trend among vertebrates for relative brain size to tend to increase which can be traced in fossils, or at least cranial size since brains are rarely preserved. If this correlates well enough with intelligence of our kind, this is a clue that intelligence has been gradually increasing among vertebrates generally. This, though, is second-hand evidence and behavioural clues are difficult to derive from fossil remains. Choosing that characteristic focusses on a distinctive human feature and is “whiggish” – it projects the current situation backwards and selects evidence on that basis. It may also be true that the thickness of the armour of armadillos has increased over time, but I don’t know whether it has because I’m not focussed on that feature. That doesn’t apply to humans either. In fact the trend is reversed for us. Our canines have got smaller, whereas the chances are the tusks of elephants have got longer, and we’ve got physically weaker and less muscular. Giraffes’ necks have got longer. All sorts of features show evolutionary trends, but there may be planets with no long-necked animals where there are animals with necks and so forth, and this would only be of interest to zoölogists. Similarly, there could be worlds with a huge variety of advanced life forms, none of which have big brains or any other means of being intelligent. Moreover, tracing the line of ancestors with steadily increasing relative cranial size and treating that as a trunk, which it isn’t because evolution has no direction, the offshoots do not show increasing brain size as much. This could be selection bias.
Thus there may be plenty of “garden worlds” rich in complex life, but none with intelligent life, just because that route of evolution is improbable, and this doesn’t even depend on the idea that intelligence isn’t useful. In a way, it’s similar to the idea, to which I somewhat subscribe, that there are few or no intelligent humanoid aliens. Why would evolution turn up such an improbable body plan? Likewise, perhaps, why would it turn up intelligent life forms?
Great Filters
Several of these have already been mentioned, and this is in a way a whole sub-branch of SETI and discussion of the Fermi Paradox. The Universe is a dangerous and violent place and intelligent life is very fragile, and yet we’ve come so far since this planet was a lifeless ball of molten rock. But what if we’ve just been exceedingly lucky?
The difficulty in purines and pyrimidines forming spontaneously is perhaps the first of these. The existence of life in any form seems to violate the principles of thermodynamics because it seems to involve a dramatic decrease in entropy. However, much of thermodynamics is statistical in nature. A gas cylinder which starts off with a vacuum at one end sharply divided from gas at sea level pressure at the other will rapidly equalise pressure because the movement of the gas molecules is effectively random and this means they have about a fifty-fifty chance of moving over to the empty end, but this is just chance, not a hard and fast rule applying to individual cases. There is a chain of cause and effect involving a series of collisions and movements in straight lines between them which determines the location of each molecule. Perhaps life in the Universe is the same. It’s very unlikely to arise at all, but because the Universe is so vast and has so many places in it where life could appear, it happens to do so in this one place – Earth. There isn’t anyone around to observe that it isn’t there in all the places where it isn’t!
Here are the nucleic acid bases (well, except uracil, which is the one unique to RNA):
It isn’t at all clear how these molecules could form from non-living origins. The other types of molecules involved, or rather their basic building blocks, can often form easily and spontaneously given sufficient abundance of the elements of life. For instance, the simplest amino acid, glycine, is present in interstellar space. Lipids are also simple chains of hydrocarbons with carboxyl groups on the end, often joined to the simple molecule glycerol. Sugars are similarly small, simple molecules. By contrast, the above four, plus the other one, have no known pathway for their formation. That said, these five are not the only options. Measles viruses, for example, do better when they are able to substitute one of the bases for a unique separate base, and there are other such bases such as the anti-cancer drug fluorouracil, which is however unlikely to arise spontaneously and is not useful as a substrate for genetic code, which is what makes it useful – it breaks replication in tumour cells because it doesn’t work. Perhaps the large variety of possible bases makes life more likely to emerge. It could also be that life could have another basis than nucleic acids, but the fact that these improbable compounds are at its heart is similar to the phosphorus issue – why would life include unlikely substances if it was possible any other way? Surely those more likely biochemistries would be more likely to occur and compete successfully with other less likely biochemistries such as our own?
The two scenarios of scarce phosphorus and improbable purine and pyrimidine synthesis would result in very similar scenarios, and as adenosine triphosphate is based on both, in either situation there is no ATP. The situation could then be plenty of Earth-like planets rich in organics but with no life. There could be sugars, amino acids and lipids in the oceans, and in fact the quantities of these materials could add up to the same order of magnitude as the biomasse here, which is 550 gigatonnes in carbon alone. Considering those proportions in terms of the human body being a typical assemblage of organic compounds of this kind, sans nucleic acids and adenosine phosphates and other phosphates such as those in bones and teeth as typical would mean more than a teratonne of such compounds, which amounts to an average of two thousand tonnes per square kilometre, although unlike Earth, most of whose biomasse is on land, most of that would be in the oceans and therefore distributed through the water column. Such a planet might be devoid of life, but given sufficient phosphorus would be a fantastic candidate for terraforming and settling given the will to do so.
The next step is the emergence of respiration. The Krebs Cycle, which is how oxygen-breathing organisms release energy from sugar, is quite complex as anyone with A-level biology will ruefully recall. The anærobic portion of that pathway is simpler, but still not very simple and would have hobbled life considerably if the Krebs Cycle had not come along. It did actually take a very long time to do so. The step after is the evolutionary transition from bacteria and archæa to cells with complex organelles and nuclei, which could again be very improbable and seems only to have happened once since all chloroplasts, mitochondria and hydrogenosomes seem to be related. On the other hand, each combination happened separately. DNA, and presumably RNA, is just mutable enough to enable evolution to happen without becoming too harmful to organisms to enable them to survive, which is a delicate balance. There is also the question of the very early collision with Theia, a Mars-sized body which chipped Cynthia off of us, thereby providing a magnetosphere, maintaining a stable axial tilt and preserving the atmosphere from the solar wind.
The Great Filter might be above us in the stream of time or still downstream from us. If the latter, it seems to be such an efficient destroyer of intelligent life that it will be the biggest risk we will ever face. If intelligent life is common, there is no evidence that it progresses to interstellar travel, meaning that it could well be that whatever is going to happen has a mortality rate of one hundred percent. And we may well not see it coming because if it had been foreseen, wouldn’t it have been avoided? We’re doomed and we may never know why until it’s too late. That would probably be the very nature of a future Great Filter. But there are many candidates, such as nanotech disasters, pandemics, runaway climate change, nuclear holocaust and so forth. Alternatively, we may always have been living on borrowed time and are overdue for some planet-devastating disaster such as supervolcanoes, asteroid strikes or gamma ray bursts. We can’t necessarily project what may amount to extreme good fortune into the future because Lady Luck has no memory. Less anthropocentric possibilities largely amount to asteroid and cometary collision, volcanic eruptions and gamma ray bursts, some of which have less obvious and remote causes such as stars passing near the Solar System and disrupting bodies so that they move inwards and hit us. This category of potential Great Filters may have a flip side. These events have potential to cause mass extinctions, which might be thought to be bad for evolution but they actually tend to stimulate it because they empty ecological niches into which the survivors of the extinction can then evolve. Hence being pelted with comets is not necessarily a bad thing even though it’s apocalyptic and kills everyone. Consequently, another minor suggestion for an explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that other worlds actually haven’t suffered enough mass extinctions to make it likely intelligent life will evolve.
Interdict
This has similarities to the Zoo Hypothesis mentioned in the previous post. The Galaxy is very old and if the four æons between life appearing on Earth and the emergence of humans is typical for the emergence of intelligence, interstellar civilisations may have existed since thousands of millions of years before Earth even formed. There may have been an initial period of instability, even with wars and conflict of other kinds, but intelligent life in the Galaxy is now stable enough and everything is now sorted and peaceful. Matter and energy are both easily available, so there’s no need to exploit any planets with native intelligent life and in fact intelligent life may not even live on planets any more but in permanently voyaging starships and artificial space colonies orbiting blue giants since they’re a good energy source. Their home planets have in the meantime been re-wilded, so we see no technosignatures. However, we are valuable to them because we are original and uninfluenced thinkers producing our own scientific and technological culture, and for that matter artistic, which is valuable to them, so they leave us alone, at least for now, so as not to pollute their wells of information, and we can’t see them either because they’re hiding or because we’re looking in the wrong places. This may continue until a certain point is reached, which will trigger first contact, or they may never contact us. It’s also been suggested that if this is the real situation, they may have recorded the entire history of our planet and even rescued species before they became extinct, including humans, so somewhere out there may be places where non-avian dinosaurs, Neanderthals and trilobites are still flourishing. However, that’s quite a florid view, and this hypothesis is untestable because they are either hiding from us or undetectable, so there are no data.
Transcendence
This is my personal addition to the reasons, and is the last one I’ll mention here.
May years ago, I made my usual observation to a friend about the nature of intelligent life in the Galaxy. This is that all interstellar civilisations must be peaceful post-scarcity societies which are also anarchist, because other civilisations would be weeded out by internal conflict or environmental damage before reaching nearby star systems. He disagreed, and said that he expected durable civilisations not to be expansionist at all but to stay on their home worlds in a spiritually enlightened state. I was initially rather taken aback by this, but it is tempting to believe that this is so. Maybe what happens is that intelligent species are either constitutionally spiritual and never bother with space travel, or go through a kind of trial by ordeal through their history where they either wipe themselves out through conflict or materialism, or just ignorant tampering with the stable order of things, or go through a crisis where this looks like it’s going to happen and emerge on the other side wiser, more just and peaceful, and also with no interest in exploring the Galaxy in spacecraft. Or, maybe they do this and, and this is going to sound out of sight, engage in astral travel to other planets, so they’re here with us in spirit but we never have knowing contact with them. This is not, however, the kind of solution which is likely to appeal to a scientific mind set, although the first part of it may well be.
Except for the last, those twenty or so reasons probably account for most of the offerings to explain why we don’t see any aliens in spite of it seeming likely that there are some. There are at least six dozen more. The reason for this proliferation of reasons is of course that we have so little evidence to input into the question, and this is likely to continue until we either have a really good argument for their complete absence or we actually detect them. However, it’s equally feasible that we will never know and this may lead to even more reasons being offered.
A Box Of Chocolates 