After the 2013 Icarus Interstellar Starship Congress a number of those of us who participated continued to correspond about interesting ideas that came out of the conversations, and one of these ideas was that of the Rezabek Ratio. During a discussion of METI (active messaging of extraterrestrial intelligence) by Jim Benson, Heath Rezabek suggested that someone opposed to unregulated METI could broadcast a static or random signal as a masking counter-signal to a METI signal and essentially silence the outbound METI signal. Formally, this can be expressed such that the factors of the Drake equation, which terminates with the number…

The issue of Science for 25 September 2020 features a crow on its cover with the headline “Avian Awareness: Carrion crows display sensory consciousness.” There are three articles in the journal on this theme, “A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird” by Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, and Paul Rinnert, “A cortex-like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain” by Martin Stacho, Christina Herold, Noemi Rook, Hermann Wagner, Markus Axer, Katrin Amunts, and Onur Güntürkün, and “Birds do have a brain cortex — and think” by Suzana Herculano-Houzel.

Everyone who has watched crows carefully knows that they are intelligent…

In A Counterfactual on Central Nervous System Development I speculated on the possibility of an evolutionary trajectory in which central nervous system (CNS) clusters developed supervening upon sensory organs, so that the organisms of such a counterfactual biosphere had “smart” sensory organs — smart eyes, for example — and perhaps the entirety of a sophisticated brain evolved supervening directly upon sensory organs. …

Ever since I first became interested in futurism in the 1970s, and I began to read everything I could find on futurism, I noticed the almost exclusive interest in world government as the political paradigm of futurism, and even at the time I thought it was odd. I still find it odd today, and so I have gone looking for explanations for the political monoculture of futurism. …

Usually when a civilization goes into decline, its geographical extent contracts at the same time as its social and political institutions lose complexity, so that contraction and loss of complexity are correlated for causal reasons. One could distinguish the cases in which territorial contraction (perhaps caused by aggression by a neighboring power) causes loss of institutional complexity, and those cases in which the loss of institutional complexity causes the loss of territory.

I first heard the term “civilization-state” in 2012 (cf. some brief comments on the article and Civilization-States and Their Attempted Extirpation), and then just a few weeks ago I ran across an article by Bruno Maçães, The Attack of the Civilization State.

Now Black Pigeon Speaks has made a video about civilization states, Clash of Civilizations and Neo-Turkish Caliphate Rising, in which he cites several sources of which I was unaware: The Irresistible Rise of the Civilization-State by Alex Roussinos, China, Russia and the return of the civilisational state by Adrian Pabst, and the book The China Wave: Rise of…

We can construct an historical sequence in the development of civilization on Earth such that a small number of pristine civilizations initiate an age of agricultural civilizations, and later with the industrial revolution the paradigm of agricultural civilizations, by now almost ten thousand years old, gives way to a new paradigm. This new post-agricultural paradigm I addressed in Permutations of Post-Agricultural Civilizations: Industrial, Technological, and Scientific Formations, in which I suggested that a tightly-coupled STEM cycle entails differences of emphasis that can yield scientific, technological, and industrial engineering civilizations. We are still early in this development, and we have not…

Having recently written about scientific civilization through the lens of comments by Jacob Bronowski and Susanne Langer, I have been doing more research on the idea of scientific civilization for further posts in the series. This has brought additional material to my attention, but it has also raised questions. Why focus on scientific civilization? Does scientific civilization have a special place in the future of civilization, or ought it to have a special place in the future of civilization?

In particular, what relationship does scientific civilization have to other forms of post-agricultural civilization, or what we might also call modern…