A Teaspoon and an Open Mind by Michael White

A Teaspoon and an Open Mind by Michael White

Author:Michael White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-10-15T00:00:00+00:00


6

Supercivilizations

Do Superraces Exist?

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

King Lear, William Shakespeare

The Time Lords are superbeings, and according to the back story of Doctor Who the civilization that dominates the planet Gallifrey has been around for at least hundreds of thousands of years. The Gallifreyans are capable of time travel, of course, but they have also mastered interstellar travel, they can regenerate their bodies, thereby lengthening their lives almost indefinitely, and they have learned to tap the resources of many worlds.

It is easy for us to believe that we are cleverer than we actually are. There is no denying that the human race is an ingenious one, that we have produced great things in a short time; but it would be naïve to believe that we have reached the pinnacle of our capabilities.

Civilization as we recognize it dates back to the Babylonians and the Ancient Egyptians, who flourished some 6,000 years ago. On a cosmic scale this is little more than the blink of an eye. Furthermore, we now realize that technology is advancing at an exponential rate. This means that what we are capable of today will be outstripped very quickly, and we will look back at our present stage of development as perhaps rather unremarkable.

The onward march of any culture is inevitable; a civilization that stops developing can only stagnate, and stagnation leads inexorably to extinction. No civilization can remain in stasis. Of course, the quality of a civilization is not demonstrated solely by the level of its technology. We might also judge a culture by its art and its political systems, by the rights of its citizens and by the way it behaves towards other societies. But for the exobiologist the primary interest is to quantify the level of technology and scientific advance of an alien culture, and this has led them to categorize civilizations accordingly.

According to this system, there are four categories into which all civilizations fall. Type 0 signifies primitive cultures, in which the population is dispersed and there is little or no social structure. Type I cultures (which includes us) are those that have developed to the point where they can exploit the natural resources of a single, home world. A type II civilization would be capable of building machines that can process the entire energy output of their sun. This level of development would almost certainly be associated with the ability to travel interstellar distances. Such cultures may also have developed means via which they could circumnavigate the hurdles presented by the light-speed restriction. A culture that had reached this stage of development would be thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of years in advance of us.

A type III civilization would be millions of years ahead of us and would have developed the technology to utilize the entire resources of their galaxy, an ability which to us would appear God-like but which is actually possible within the laws of physics. It would be wrong to consider such beings as supernatural;



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