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"STAGNANT SUPERCIVILIZATIONS

In several posts I have considered the possibility of very old civilizations that are not technologically advanced, i.e., the familiar motif of a million-year-old civilization – a Kardashevian supercivilization – transposed to a stagnant, or nearly stagnant, agricultural civilization (cf., e.g., The Globular Cluster Opportunity and Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project). This suggests a more general approach to stagnation on a civilizational scale. I have considered this obliquely in two posts on suboptimal civilizations (Suboptimal Civilizations and Addendum on Suboptimal Civilizations), as a stagnant civilization is one form of suboptimal civilization.

As part of a more comprehensive approach to the stagnation of civilizations,let us now consider the possibility of the stagnation of a supercivilization, this time without the technological limitation mentioned above. Suppose that a civilization reached “technological maturity” – however it might be defined – and continued to exist beyond that technological plateau. (Nick Bostrom uses the term “technological maturity” in his definitions of existential risk. For example, in “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority” he wrote, “Permanent stagnation is instantiated if humanity survives but never reaches technological maturity.”) In other words, a supercivilization would be technologically stagnant and might remain technologically stagnant for millions of years or billions of years if it survives beyond attaining technological maturity. Is such a civilization even conceivable?

We know nothing about the develolpmental processes of a very old or very large civilization, so that when we attempt to understand supercivilizations it is through extrapolation and analogy. In regard to the present question of stagnant supercivilizations, the important unknown is the temporal scale of the development of science and technology to maturity in comparison to the temporal scale of the civilization itself. If technological maturity occurs early in the development of a million-year-old supercivilization, then stagnant supercivilizations would be the rule rather than the exception. If technological maturity occurs at about the same time at civilizational maturity, then there is a kind of developmental parallelism that leads to a predictable lifecycle of supercivilizations. If the temporal scale of technological maturity is longer than the the time scale of a supercivilization, then technological maturity does not occur and supercivilization stagnation becomes irrevelant. 

There is an argument that suggests technological maturity may not be attainable. In so far as a mature technology is predicated upon a mature science, we would assume that a technologically mature civilization would also be a scientifically mature civilization (one of the possible ways of defining a scientific civilization that I formulated in On the Reflexive Self-Awareness of Civilizations). But there is a problem. Science and technology are both implicated in the STEM cycle, along with mathematics and engineering. Would a scientifically mature civilization necessarily be predicated upon a mathematically mature civilization? The problem here is that we know mathematics to be inexhaustible (this is a corollary of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems). Mature technology predicated upon mature science predicated upon mature mathematics cannot occur given that mathematics is inexhaustible. But there are many steps in this argument, and it might break down at any one of these steps. Technological maturity may be attainable without mathematical maturity, in the sense of mathematics being an exhaustive totality of mathematical truths. 

So, returning to our supposition that technological maturity may be attainable, and that a civilization could survive post-maturity, would such a civilization find other forms of activity in which accomplishments could continue so that the stagnancy was not total, i.e., so that some form of progress remained, or would this necessarily be John Stuart Mill’s “stationary state” extrapolated to cosmological dimensions?

I have referred to Mill’s “stationary state” in several posts, including The Human Future in Space and Addendum on Technological Unemployment. Here is a passage from Mill on the stationary state:

“I cannot… regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.” (John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, Chapter VI,  “Of the Stationary State”)

I also wrote about Mill’s “stationary state” at some extent in my Political Economy of Globalization, but going back to re-read Mill now I see it in a slightly different light. I will have to come back to this eventually to develop more fully the idea of a stagnant supercivilization as exemplifying Mill’s stationary state extrapolated to cosmological scale. For the moment, let us consider the stationary state as a possibility.

A stagnant supercivilization exemplifying the stationary state would be one possible end state for civilization during the Stelliferous Era, and if this stationary state were stable and sustainable, civilization taking this form could persist until the last stars burned out and the Stelliferous Era came to an end. During this period of stagnancy, nothing essential would change; the only changes forced upon such a stagnant supercivilization would be extrinsic changes due to historical contingencies. As the stars winked of our existence one after the other and the last remnants of civilizations clustered around the remaining stars still burning, life refugees huddled around a campfire, the stagnant supercivilization would turn into a collapsing supercivilization in its death throes.

This must be the end of all surviving supercivilizations of the Stelliferous Era eventually, except in so far as supercivilizations adapt themselves to become civilizations of the degenerate era. But this  scenario as I have sketched it is a limiting case of supercivilization stagnation, and it is possible that supercivilizations stagnant in respect to technological maturity may find other avenues of development, relieving the stagnation with some essential change to the nature of civilization, i.e., some trace of the continual self-transcendence that has been the nature of civilization to date.

In such cases, the end state of a technologically mature supercivilization is, ironically, almost exactly the same as the end state of a million-year-old stagnant agricultural civilization: both possess the wherewithal to adorn themselves with artistic and architectural treasures, which would eventually be forgotten, and eventually superseded by other artistic and architectural treasures, so that there would be a deep stratigraphy of these civilizations, the only difference being the scope of each.

One of the reasons I enjoy thought experiments so much is that they yield interesting and unexpected results like this; prior to undertaking this thought experiment of a stagnant supercivilization, it never occurred to me that such a civilization would be structurally quite similar to a stagnant but long-lived agricultural civilization. And I now also realize that there is much more to be said about stagnant supercivilizations, especially in relation to Bostrom’s existential risk classification of “permanent stagnation.” So more on this later. "