A Description of the Terrestrial Technological Adolescence Case

Guillermo A. Lemarchand

Centro de Estudios Avanzados and FCEN, Universidad de Buenos Aires; C.C. 8 Sucursal 25; C1425FFL Buenos Aires, Argentina, lemar@correo.uba.ar

We present an empirical study of the long-term evolution of several social indicators (e.g. human population growth, statistics of deadly quarrels, diffu-sion of democratic systems, etc.). We assume that the human species emerge, develop and become extinct with similar evolutionary patterns that other terrestrial species. We propose that the long-term indicators are show-ing some sort of macro-transition in their long-term behavior that we defined as “Technological Adolescent Age.” We present an estimation of this period. Assuming the “Principle of Mediocrity” and using the Drake Equation we calculate a lower threshold for the number of technological civilizations in the galaxy.

Key words: SETI, Technological Civilization Lifetime (L), Human Popula-tion, Deadly Quarrels, Evolution of Democracies, Drake Equation.

1. Introduction

Human beings have broken the ecological ‘law’ that says that big, preda-tory animals are rare. Two crucial innovations in particular have enabled us to alter the planet to suit ourselves and thus permit unparalleled expan-sion: speech (which implies instant transmission of an open-ended range of conscious thoughts) and agriculture (which causes the world to produce more human food than unaided nature would do). However, natural selec-tion has not equipped us with long-term sense of self-preservation. Based

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© 2006 Springer.

457 V. Burdyuzha (ed.), The Future of Life and the Future of Our Civilization, 457–467.

in our previous works (Lemarchand, 2000, 2004), here, we will show that the human species is facing a new type of macro-transition: the techno-logical one.

Sagan (1980) defined the Technological Adolescent Age (TAA) as the stage in which an intelligent species has the capability to become extinct

by the misdistribution of physical, educational and economical resources (difference between the degree of development among developed and de-veloping societies) that may cause the collapse of the civilization due to the tensions generated by the inequities among different fractions of the global society.

Here we present a semi-empirical approach to estimate the period of time that may last with this new macro-transition. Our humankind needs to pass from the TAA into a Technological Mature Age (TMA), in which we would learn how to live in harmony with the members of our species and the environment, and learn how to manage efficiently the increase of our power over nature at their different dimensions. The comprehension of the evolution of these long-term social patterns may help us to design different strategies to avoid the self-annihilation. The last is an imperative require-ment needed to extend the lifetime of the present civilization.

The so-called “Principle of Mediocrity” proposes that our planetary sys-tem, life on Earth and our technological civilization are about average in the universe, and that life and intelligence will develop by the same rules of natural selection wherever the proper surroundings and the needed time are given (Hoerner, 1961). In other words, anything particular to us is probably average in comparison to others. From a Lakatosian epistemo-logical point of view19, this hypothesis is within the “hard core” of the re-search programs which main purpose is the search for life in the universe (e.g. exobiology, bioastronomy, astrobiology, SETI). If we considered “average” all the steps that let the appearance of our technological civiliza-tion in the universe, we may also assume that this TAA transition may be a typical evolutionary stage for all the hypothetical galactic civilizations.

19 According to Imre Lakatos (1922-1974), within the “hard-core” of any “Re-

search Program” are those hypotheses, that the community of experts in the field,

of an experimental or observational test (see I. Lakatos, Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974).

458 Guillermo A. Lemarchand

due to technological misuse (e.g. global war), environmental degradation of the home planet (e.g. global warming, overpopulation, etc.), or simply

assume – consciously or unconsciously – as valid, without the explicit requirement “

”

In 1961 Frank Drake (Pearman 1963) proposed an equation to estimate the number of technological civilizations in our galaxy. Several estima-tions assigning different values to each factor of the Drake Equationshowed that the number of technological galactic civilizations (N) has a strong dependence with the last factor of the equation, L, or the lifetime of a technological civilization in years (Kreifeldt 1973; Oliver 1975). A tech-nological civilization is the one that has the technological capability to communicate, in any way, among interstellar distances. Less than seventy years ago, our species has reached the last stage, only when our first strong radio transmissions left the terrestrial ionosphere into outer space. Most of the authors, using the Drake Equation, would agree that the possible num-ber of technological civilizations in the galaxy, would be close to N ~ ( f x

f

f <10.A systematic study of the relevant indicators of the long term behavior

of our technological civilization will be useful, not only to make an estima-tion of the possible value of N, but most importantly to identify which are the most relevant variables that we should encourage to improve and change, in order to optimize the life time of our present global civilization.

In the following sections, we present some preliminary results that show the long-term evolution of several social indicators and we applied those results to estimate the value of L and N.

Several very long-term biological and ecological studies have shown that different species on Earth, emerge, develop and become extinct with simi-lar evolutionary patterns (Charnov 1993; Gurney & Nisbet 1998). Human species may be not an exception. Our hypothesis is that we are living in a very special moment of our species history, the transition from the TAA to the TMA (Lemarchand 2000, 2004).

In order to estimate the period of time of this TAA transition we have used three different societal indicators: (1) the human demographic transi-tion, (2) the distribution of deadly quarrels during the last five centuries and (3) the diffusion of democracies within nations during the period

459The Life-Time of Technological Civilizations

L), where is the product of: the rate of galactic star formation, the fractionof stars forming planets, the number of planets per star with environmentssuitable for life, the fraction of suitable planets on which life develops, thefraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligence appears, and the fraction of intelligent cultures which are communicative in an interstellarsense. The best present estimation of this product is 0.1<

Age Transition2. The Determination of the Technological Adolescent

1800-2004 (considering the “democracy” as a disembodied technology of government).

population). We have found that the temporal series analyzed for the first two social indicators follow a Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) system with a scale free behavior, a characteristic presented in most of complex systems (Bak 1996; Jensen 1998). On the other hand, the third indicator shows a logistic growth pattern, similar to those found in the diffusion of new technologies in a close market (Fisher & Pry 1971).

The data corresponding to the three indicators shows similar phase-transition patterns starting after the World War II (WWII) and ending by the year 2100.

Within this particular period of our human species history, we have de-veloped sophisticated war-technologies, so efficient, that we may become extinct at a rate of 500 million people per hour (nuclear war). We may de-stroy the natural balance of our biosphere by the industrial pollution, the greenhouse effect and other environmental degradation activities generated by the human behavior. We may cause a world population explosion that may rapidly exhaust the natural resources or we may increase the gap be-tween developed and underdeveloped societies in such way to generate the collapse of different regions of our home planet. All these examples may have a long-term description using several mathematical approaches that show the emergence of patterns very similar to those that appear in the ecological dynamics of other species.

3.1 The Demographic Transition

We have used a mathematical model of the world population growth that shows a blow-up and self-similar regime that was developed by Kapitza (1996). We found that this model and the available historical data of the global human population exhibit a SOC behavior (Lemarchand, 2004). Another intrinsic property of the model is the so-called DemographicTransition or the well established change in the pattern of growth of all populations, when they reach a certain stage and rate of development. This transition has been experienced by all developed countries; it began there at the end of 18th Century with the Industrial Revolution. At the present

460 Guillermo A. Lemarchand

The available temporal series come from a few hundred years (e.g. world democracies) to several thousand years (e.g. the evolution of human

3. Empirical Results and Data Analyses

time, we are at the height of the transition on a global scale. Following the mathematical model, the absolute rate of global population growth is ex-pected to peak in the year 2007, but the relative growth rate reached its

transition by 1960 and would end by 2050. After that a new reproductive regime is expected to appear, different to the previous one that dominated the dynamics of the last 12,000 years (since the emergence of agriculture and the cities).

3.2 The Distribution of Deadly Quarrels (1500-2000)

Richardson (1945) discovered that the distributions of wars over time fol-low a power-law (using data from 1800 to 1930). This is a characteristic of all SOC systems. In one way, this shows that the dynamics on inter-human violence is governed by the same type of processes present in the human population growth dynamics and in a great variety of other complex sys-tems examples (Bak, 1996).

Although there is a pattern in the dynamics of inter-human violence, fol-lowing a SOC system, we also have to take into account the evolution of the technologies of war against time. We have worked with a coefficient of lethality in order to normalize the evolution of weapon technologies from the sword in 400 B.C. to the atomic bombs at the end of the twentieth Cen-tury. We have also analyzed the distribution of wars for the period 1495-2000, extending the original Richardson work to 500 years of data.

We introduced a definition of intensity of a war, I, as the ratio of battle deaths to the population at the time of the war (Levy 1983). We have rep-resented the distribution of the number of battles Nc against the intensity I(Lemarchand, 2004). However, when considering distributions that may exhibit SOC it is preferable to use non-cumulative data. An equivalent ap-proach is to take the mathematical derivative of the cumulative distribution with respect to intensity dNc /dI. Here the fractal dimension resulted in 1.28. An alternative approach to the analysis of this data is in terms of re-turn periods T, the time we should wait to have an event of intensity I.When we consider these distributions of deadly quarrels using normalized values of technologies, we found a correlation between the coefficient of lethality and the slope of the SOC distribution. A rough extrapolation of

would need to wait between 30 to 500 years in order to generate a violent event at which the whole human population will disappear. These results are in agreement with a couple of auxiliary indicators of the war processes:

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planetary behavior – the human population started with its demographic maximum value of 1.7 per year in 1989. The equations show that – for a

this analysis shows that – using 500 years of deadly quarrels data – we

(a) the distribution of the destructive power available in nuclear arsenals per capita or the number of tons of TNT per person in the world during 1954-2000 and (b) the evolution of world military expenditures during 1950-2000. Both indicators show an extraordinary coincidence in their dis-tributions with the demographic transition period with a highest peak around 1980-1990 (Lemarchand, 2000).

3.3 Democratic Diffusion within Nations (1800-2000)

We have analyzed the evolution of this societal indicator in order to under-stand the time constants at which societies organized themselves in order to produce changes in a macro-behavior level. Democracy is a mechanism of collective choice and a form of social organization that can be consid-ered a superior substitute for other such mechanisms or forms of organiza-

462 Guillermo A. Lemarchand

technology of government and social organization. As such, as well as any tion. In this way, democracy may be considered as a disembodied

other embodied or disembodied technology, democracy may be expected to ’

To test this hypothesis we have used, for the period 1800-2004, the list of national democracies (www.bsos.umd.edu/cidcm/polity) provided in the POLITY IV dataset. The POLITY IV survey covers all independent mem-bers of the international system, those that have attained independence by 1975 and whose population exceeded one million by the mid-1990s. It gives, for each such polity, an annual score of institutional democracy, on a scale ranging from zero to ten.

Using this data set, we calculate the fraction of the world population at each year of those polities with scores over 4; 5; 6; 7; and 8 in the POLITY IV classification. Applying the logistic growth model, the best curve fit was obtained only with those countries that have a score over 7 (e.g. a group that includes all the countries with scores of 7, 8, 9 and 10). The ob-tained results are shown in Figure 1. Clearly, the dynamics of the diffusion of democracies among the world population follows a logistic growth curve. The correlation factor of the data fitting is r = 0.96. The calculation of the mathematical derivative of the logistic curve also shows a bell-shape curve centered at the year 1989. This, again, is similar to the distribution found for the demographic transition data, the deadly quarrels analysis, the

technological change. pattern, according with the Fischer & Pry (1971) substitution model of hypothesis posed in the present study is that the growth follow a regular grow, or diffuse, over time, amongst the world s population, and the

Figure 1. Distribution of democracies represented against time (1800-2000). Here, we calculated the fraction of the world population under democratic governments with a score over 7 points (from a scale that goes from 0 to 10), according to POLITY IV data-base. If we consider the democracy as a disembodied technology of government we see that diffuses against time as any other technology in a closed market, following a logistic-type growth. Here F is the fraction of the world population that is under a democratic government at time t and may be rep-resented by a logistic equation that describes the evolution and diffusion of de-mocracies against time. The bell-shape curve is the density function (dF/dt). The takeover time ( t) is defined as the time required for the technology to increase from F=0.10 to F=0.90. In our case t=176 years.

If most of the galactic societies have a similar destructive evolutionary tra-jectory as the patterns that we are facing in our human race, the number of communicative civilizations may be very small. If the metaphor of techno-logical adolescence is correct, we may consider that we are living in a very

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1945-2005 distribution of nuclear stockpiles (megatons per capita), the 1950-2004 world military expenditures, etc.

4. From Kantian Ethics to Lex Galactica

particular moment of our civilization’s history where we can start our

20

social or Habital21.In order to improve the lifetime of a technological civilization it is im-

possible to have superior science and technology and inferior morals. This combination is dynamically unstable and we can guarantee a self-destruction within the lifetimes of advanced societies (105 to 106 years?). At some point, in order to avoid their self-destruction, all the intelligent species in the universe must have to produce this ethical breakthrough among the members of their societies in order to live in harmony between them and their planetary environment. Otherwise, the probability of global extinction would be very high and consequently their social life expec-tancy very short. What kind of ethical principles should guide this trans-formation or social mutation? We consider that Kantian Ethics provides some good elements to start the discussion.

Kant’s outstanding contribution to moral philosophy was to develop with great complexity the thesis that moral judgments are expressions of practical as distinct from a theoretical reason. For Kant practical reason or the rational will does not derive its principles of actions by examples from the senses or from theoretical reason; it somehow finds its principles within its own rational nature. Kant argues that willing is truly autonomous if but only if the principles which we will are capable of being made uni-versal laws. Such principles give rise to categorical imperatives , or duties binding unconditionally, as distinct from hypothetical imperatives, or commands of reason binding in certain conditions, such as that we desires for certain ends. Kant seems to hold that universalizability is both neces-sary and sufficient for moral rightness. Kant arrives at the ideal of the kingdom of ends in themselves or of people respecting each other’s uni-versalizing wills. This has been an enormously influential idea, and its most distinguished recent exponent has been John Rawls (1980).

Some useful ideas in the direction of the evolution of social ethical

originally by Piaget (1971) and extended by Kohlberg (1973). In his pio-

20 For a complete description of these aspects see C.A. Mallmann, “On Human

Development, Life Stages and Needs Systems” in F. Mayor (Edi.), Human Devel-opment in its Social Context, UNESCO, Paris, 1986.

21 Here we use the word “Habital” in reference to the concept of Habitat.22 In its most famous formulation, it states that “the maxim implied by a pro-

464 Guillermo A. Lemarchand

aspects : Intra-individual or Somatic, Inter-individual or Social and

22

stages – applied to the study of several terrestrial cultures- were developed

nature.” posed action must be such that one can will that it become an universal law of

self-annihilation. In order to avoid it, our species must make a deep trans-formation of the human individual behavior towards, at least, three main

neer works, Kohlberg established a correspondence between Piaget’s cog-nitive evolutionary stages and his moral judgment stages. According to his view, the final ethical evolutionary stage is based on “universal princi-ples.”

Our thesis is that all the civilizations should evolve ethically at the same time they evolve technologically. When these civilizations reach their TAA, they must perform the social mutation or become extinct. After learning how to reach a synergetic harmony among the individual mem-bers, theirs groups and their habitat, they would extend this praxis to the rest of living beings, including their hypothetical galactic neighbors. Their own evolutionary history will teach them the Kantian principle of respect-

interference policy with the evolutionary process of underdeveloped socie-

defined as Lex Galactica (Lemarchand, 2000). If some of these ideas are correct, they will produce some observational

consequences within the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) radioastronomical programs. If the Lex Galactica principle is applied by galactic civilizations after the macro-transition between TAA and TMA, we might expect that very limited amounts of practical technical informa-tion would be distributed among the galaxy by them. This behavior will be reflected within the contents of any intended electromagnetic galactic mes-sage, sent to us, that may be detected by any of the SETI projects that are carrying out from different observatories worldwide. An access to tech-nologies thousands of years more advanced that the present ones, could cause our self-destruction if those technologies become available to terror-ists or some other crazy leaders. These hypothetical advanced civilizations would not want to place potentially destructive knowledge at the disposal of any ‘ethically underdeveloped’ society. Such knowledge could be a threat to the emerging societies’ survival. Any civilization needs time to work out adequate moral restraints on their own behavior.

Earthlings’ electromagnetic transmissions have only revealed their exis-tence to the universe within a sphere of approximately 70 light-years around the Sun. Distant advanced societies will be unable to recognize that some primitive intelligent life is around our Sun, and consequently they will be unable “to calibrate” our technological and ethical evolutionary level to start sending their “advance knowledge” to us.

465The Life-Time of Technological Civilizations

evolutionary path is unique, these advanced civilizations will have a non-ing each other’s universalizing wills. Being aware that each planetary

–ties. This galactic quarantine hypothesis – based in the Kantian Ethics was

5. Conclusions

With the invention of the technologies of mass destruction after WWII we

to annihilate our species and most of the life forms on Planet Earth. The long-term evolution of the three different societal indicators analyzed, showed a transition that started after the WWII and that may end after the middle of XXI Century. If we want to avoid self-extinction we must change the rules of the inter-human interaction within the limits of this particular period of time, defined as TAA.

After the WWII our terrestrial civilization reached the technological ca-pability for interstellar communication via electromagnetic waves (radio and laser signals). In a broad sense, the bottleneck for the evolution of any technological civilization in the galaxy would be the TAA.

If we assume the so-called “Principle of Mediocrity” (Hoerner, 1961) that proposes that our planetary system and our civilization are about aver-age and that life and intelligence will develop by the same rules of natural selection wherever the proper surroundings and the needed time are given. Then we may also assume that the average lower boundary for a techno-logical civilization lifetime with interstellar communication capabilities would be close to L~150 to 200 yrs. If this is so, we may use the Drake Equation to determine the lower limit of the number of technological civi-lizations in our galaxy as N ~ ( f x L) ~ (2 to 2000).

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by a Foundation for the Future (Seattle, USA) research grant and CONICET (Argentina). My participation in this meet-ing was possible thanks to the generosity of the organizers and The Plane-tary Society (Pasadena, USA).

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