Source: https://www.sociostudies.org/almanac/articles/post_singular_evolution_and_post_singular_civilizations/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 06:15:04+00:00

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Initially, this work was motivated by a question related to the SETI program (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence): If intelligent life is a normal phenomenon in the Galaxy and if the rate of technological evolution is as high as on Earth, then the Galaxy must be full of highly-developed technological civilizations and we should see them in all directions. So why do not actually we see them? This question is well known and is frequently referred to as the ‘Fermi paradox’.
I prefer, however, the following form of the question, which is of much more significance: Assuming intelligent life to be a normal phenomenon in the Galaxy, what would such a highly-developed, technological civilizations look like and why would it be ‘invisible’ to us? This question has great practical importance. If we would like to find extraterrestrial civilizations, we need to understand what we are trying to find. Our methods should depend on the object of our search. If you go hunting for a duck, you should know that the duck likes water!
In order to find such an answer, one needs to first develop an understanding of what civilization might look like in the future. This is a challenge, of course, but not impossible. The idea is to look at technological development in the light of the general laws of evolution.
I outlined one such model of evolution on Earth, from the origin of life up to the present, as a sequence of phases with phase transitions between them. It was a model of global biospheric revolutions. Each biospheric revolution is the result of some evolution crisis, and the revolution (the phase transition) overcomes the crisis. The list of these phase transitions includes 19 events, including the Cambrian explosion, mammalian revolution and the Neolithic revolution; The last analyzed event was the information revolution (computers, post-industrialisms – 1950) (Panov 2005).
My analysis of the sequence of biospheric revolutions is not the only method that leads to a derivation of the Singularity. It has been long known that the hyperbolic growth law of human population also possesses the property of scale-invariance and that extrapolation of it predicted the Singularity for 2026 (Foerster et al. 1960). Additional details of this scenario were elaborated by Kapitza (1996). There is also the notion of a ‘technological singularity’ that was proposed by Vernor Vinge (1993); it is based on arguments like scale-invariance and was predicted to occur in the first half of the 21st century. Thus, a variety of arguments, each of which points to almost the same date for t*, force us to seriously consider the singularity of evolution. But, we must keep in mind that the Singularity is not a single point in time – it is a period of time, approximately the first half of 21st century, a time when the laws of evolution and historical trajectories will change dramatically.
It is clear that the survival of a civilization after its Singularity means that that civilization has managed to overcome its deepest technogenic crises. In order to overcome them successfully, a post-singular civilization must have elaborated the corresponding adaptation mechanisms and used them for its homeostasis. If a civilization does not elaborate such mechanisms, it will not enter the post-singular stage of development – it degrades and/or perishes. It is not difficult to imagine at least some of the necessary preservation mechanisms.
A singularity crisis cannot be overcome without a huge jump in the power and in the depth of the mechanisms developed to constrain the destructive effects of technology. We call this jump, the post-singularity humanization of civilization. I emphasize once more that such ‘human­ization’ should not be understood simplistically or too literally. It certainly can include ethical principles accepted by the majority of people, i.e. humanism in its classical sense. However, ‘humanization’ can also be implemented as a system of legal and punitive measures. Its focus must be on a holistic system of cultural constraints that curb destructive technogenic effects and which will keep civilization alive as a cosmic-technological entity.
The assumption that elaboration of such con­straining mechanisms is possible is not arbitrary. Based on many facts, Akop Nazaretyan has shown (2004, 2009) that cultural constraints of aggression have been increasing throughout the his­tory and pre-history of humankind as technological power was increasing. Moreover, they were increasing at a growing rate, so that in spite of the increase in the killing power of weapons, the level of bloodshed (per capita) decreased. Nazaretyan summarized this conclusion which is paradoxical for ordinary consciousness as the ‘Law of Techno-Humanitarian Balance’ (Ibid.).
Recent examples of the Law of Techno-Humanitarian Balance in action are the sweeping-out of the bloodiest political regimes of the 20th century (Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot) and their replacement by gentler methods of administration. A sign of the awakening of planetary consciousness and the development of ways of overcoming corporate and state self-interest is the Kyoto Protocol. A lot of other examples of the formation of ecological consciousness can be adduced, from Earth Day to international NGOs. Certainly, the idea that a developed form of hu­manism should be typical for highly-developed cosmic civilizations is not new. It was expressed by К. E. Tsiolkovsky and I. A. Efremov early in the 20th century, and recently, e.g., in the papers by Gindilis (2001, 2003) and the book by Nazaretyan (2004).
It is curious that this humanization of terrestrial civilization finds its most direct expression in attitudes to the Cosmos. For example, it is clear that if there were life on Mars, it would be of a most primitive kind. We would expect that humans would think only about their own safety and ignore such potential life. But actually, all vehicles sent to Mars have been carefully sterilized so as to not harm potential Mars life! Another example is the destruction of the space explorer Galileo in the atmosphere of Jupiter in 2003, so as not to allow terrestrial microorgan­isms to infect the Jupiter satellite Europa, where the existence of life is also possible.
The issue of ‘the end of science’ deserves a large paper or even a book of its own, but for our purposes here, this range of study will only be considered in brief. First, let us define what we mean by ‘science’. There are several methods of cognition: philosophic, religious, etc. Science is one of these forms of cognition. A scientific truth is not a synonym for truth in general, but its results can be reproduced. In science, there are two basic classical methods to verify results: 1) a reproducible experiment in natural sciences, or 2) a deduction or calculation in mathematics (deduction is also a method of reproducible reasoning in natural sciences). We call the methodology based on the combined use of reproducible experiment and deduction: the classical scientific method. By definition, science is a method of cognition assisted by classical scientific method.
First, sooner or later, science will run into limitations caused by the lack of availability of natural resources. Such tendencies already exist. In the United States, we saw the cancellation of construction on the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 and the recently pared-down space programs. In prospect, at best, science expenses could be stabilized at a constant level, taking into account the intensive character of development of post-singular civilization. This must mean stabilization and a gradual decrease of the flow of new scientific results, because the cost of every newly solved scientific problem increases due to the increase of its complexity, in spite of development of new scientific methods (computer simulation, processing of data, etc.).
Can a civilization avoid the crisis by making one of the other existing methods of cognition the leading one? Every method mentioned above is older than science and was once a leader, but evolution does not enter the same river twice. It seems that the information crisis will inevitably lead to a general crisis of civilization. This crisis could first manifest itself in science and technology, but it is easy to imagine that such a crisis of science will lead to a larger crisis in general culture: An all-planet ‘longing for something new’ and a feeling of being in a blind alley may arise.
In my opinion, the most part of this rather complicated signal will mainly refer to what we would call art and history, but not natural sciences and math-ematics. For me this is clear from combinatoric considerations, because our society or any other long-living society will solve many natural-scientific and mathematical problems by easier ways than by studying records of interstellar messages (Morrison 1975).
Victor Shvartsman stated similar ideas in 1986: ‘An opinion generally accepted among physicists that the extra-terrestrial intelligence must pass fragments of its scientific knowledge to “younger brothers” seems to be very disputable’. He noted that information related to art and games can turn out to be much more important. This opinion is mainly grounded in two considerations. First, scientific information forms a single logical construction. If a part is lost, the whole is lost too. In other words, the scientific information is difficult for decoding and understanding. Whereas information contained in art is much more resistant to the loss of fragments – the kept parts have a definite integrity and value as before. Rules of logical games are very simple and compact. They can be transmitted easily. At the same time, they contain huge amounts of information about an unimaginable number of potentially possible logic sets. Second, art and games say much more about the intellect that created them than impersonal scientific information or even data of neurophysiology.
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 The Kepler mission (Borucki et al. 2011) has already discovered 68 planetary candidates of approximately Earth-size during its first three months of operation; 54 of these are found in the temperature range appropriate for a habitable zone. Undoubtedly, this is only the first small portion of what will be much larger results, because long-period planets (about one year and more) have not yet been considered, etc.
 Much more detailed analysis is presented in our paper (Panov 2009).
 Please, note that it would not be so under the conditions of the extensive growth of a civilization at the expense of the cosmic expansion.
 I do not agree with this reasoning. Vice versa, the knowledge in mathematics, physics, chemistry and astronomy (cosmology) are common to all and should be easy to decrypt.

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