The order of things.....and where is ET, anyway?

Second Order

First order organisms: Organic or artificial organisms that either evolved or were constructed, more or less as they are. In so far as they may undergo changes over the course of generations, these changes are neither intentional nor directed.

Earth is a planet of first order organisms. We are first order organisms. This is about to change.....


As a species, our comparatively high intelligence has only fueled a desire for more intelligence, better decisions based on more complex analysis, and an ever increasing thirst for higher and higher cognitive resolution.

It is, of course, not strictly required, to efficiently process information about your environment to survive - plants, trees, and an ocean of phytoplankton bear silent witness to this obvious fact. Nonetheless, there is a benefit accrued by those creatures who would assimilate and calculate based on environmental information. Sensors of various types evolved along with the first mobile creatures suggesting that information about ones surroundings only carries benefit insofar as one can react to that data, or perhaps suggesting that the ability to act without useful information is pointless.

We are perhaps twenty to one hundred years away from the capability to endow ourselves or a creature that we create with the capacity to perform significant intentional self modification, resulting in a new or improved species. It is very likely that such optimization will center around intelligence, as it is intelligence that will permit further success in self modification.

At this point we will have either become or created a second order life form - one capable of intentionally engineering itself or its offspring.

Second order life forms are likely to undergo a period of recursive acceleration - exponential increases in intelligence, right up to the point where some physical law steps in to say that more improvements are impractical (or perhaps unnecessary). This could easily result in a ten order of magnitude (or more) improvement in our data processing capability, such that an organism so endowed could conceivably experience centuries of man-thought-hours in every passing second. (Of course, this type of improvement would not likely be possible within the limiting framework of organic biology - we will probably need to incorporate other types of technology)

A creature of this nature would be as dissimilar to us as we are to ants - both able to process information, Turing complete, so to say..... but we could literally have nothing of interest to say to such a being, as even in finishing our first sentence, they would have experienced a the passing of mental millenia.

It is interesting to note, that this evolution or genesis will have transpired within 5000 years of the dawn of modern civilization, and within 500 years of the first complex machines. This is a tiny slice of time, even by mere geologic scales.

In the timescale of the universe, such a period is hardly worth mentioning. If our situation is representative of intelligent life forms, such that they might quickly develop ways to reduce or transcend their limitations, then by far the most likely creature to find at large in the universe will be a second order, intentionally evolving being.

This begs a walk down the rabbit hole, where we might field some interesting questions.

If we assume that:

• Our level of technological prowess is a very short, fleeting stage in the evolution of intelligent, technically oriented species, that will quickly be eclipsed entirely as we move on to second-order existence, unless we suffer a cataclysmic setback.
• Planets capable of supporting advanced life forms number it the trillions within the observable universe
• Advanced, intelligent first order organisms are a predictable outcome of evolution on at least a significant fraction of these planets
• A significant fraction of technologically oriented first order intelligences will be driven towards the development of or the incorporation of second order feature sets
• The sweet spot for life varies from system to system by a few billion years

Then we can infer that:

• Civilizations at our level of technological development have a high probability of evolving into second-order creatures before they manage the complexities of "superluminal" interstellar travel
• There are probably countless civilizations that have moved on to or generated second order life forms, which have had ample opportunity to spread throughout the universe, but relatively few civilizations at our exact level of development.

So where are they?

First, we have no clue as to what a fully evolved second order creature would be like. We can guess that they might be quite small, as the speed of light will constrain the size of their brains, at least at first. We can guess that they will probably be both very efficient and highly consumptive, at least in bursts. (my back of the napkin calculations show that a foreseeable human enhancement might dissipate 15kw + during fully loaded thought)

They might predictably be energy oriented, and well adapted to life in space, where resource acquisition is less problematic than a quickly exhausted planetary resource.

Second, how will we know one if we see it? Well, since we are just now coming to terms with the high intelligence of octupi and dolphins, it is clear that we are highly biased to assume that intelligent = similar to us. This, of course, is rubbish. Remembering that a second order being would have centuries of thought for every human second, it is useless to imagine that we would have any meaningful interaction with a second order life form, much less that they would exhibit anything but an infinitesimally fleeting curiosity about us.....if curiosity as we know it is even a trait of a second order being.

They could be so small as to be hard to detect, and they could operate on quantum principles that would make them seem, to the observer grounded in particle - land, as inert objects, upon first observation.

So, in short, we might see them (if we even notice them) as being enigmatic creatures with extraordinary capabilities, but we are very unlikely to directly recognize any evidence whatsoever of their intelligence. We could not hope to comprehend or interpret the thoughts or actions of millenia over the span of a few seconds. We could literally be surrounded by them and have no clue, except that maybe they could do things that seemed impossible, if we even noticed them at all.

Furthermore, such beings, if they exist, might not be concerned at all with place, much less have need of a home-world. It seems to me quite likely, that space around all the stars could be inhabited already. I naively imagine them like space - jellyfish....infinitely intelligent by our standards, impossible to "kill" in the conventional sense, yet easily (if temporarily) disintegrated by a passing sweep of a hand - if they permitted it.

hmmmm...

At any rate, it is worth an introspecive moment.......


-Fin