The Spacefaring Inflection/Expansion Matrix
The View from Oregon — 325: Friday 24 January 2025
Recently I’ve thought of a way to integrate several distinct spacefaring scenarios into a single framework, and that is by taking two distinctions I’ve worked on and using them as axes for a graph. In a blog post of 2017, “The Spacefaring Inflection Point,” I distinguished among time frames when a civilization makes its spacefaring breakout from its homeworld. In that post I distinguished three possible inflection points, early, mediocre, and late, but it’s obvious that this can be treated as a continuum, or broken into as many periods as would be convenient in a given context. I could have distinguished two inflection points — immediate, i.e., spacefaring breakout as soon as the technologies are developed, and later, i.e., spacefaring breakout some time after the requisite technologies are developed — or I could have distinguished five periods corresponding to a developmental sequence of origins, development, maturity, decline, and extinction. This later periodization of spacefaring breakout would be suggestive for a treatment of spacefaring on a civilizational scale. Let’s call this the spacefaring inflection continuum.
I’ve also made a distinction between the rate of expansion of a spacefaring civilization. Again, this can be kept simple, distinguishing only fast and slow permutations, or any number of periods of expansion could be distinguished. Let’s call this the spacefaring expansion continuum. I remember I was working on this when I wrote my contribution to a volume from a conference, “The Large Scale Structure of Spacefaring Civilization,” and in that I distinguished between a first and a second wave of spacefaring expansion, which was a related idea in the framework I was trying to develop, but looking at this paper again I see that I didn’t fully develop this idea and spell out its relationship of first and second waves of expansion to slower and more rapid rates of spacefaring expansion.
Both of these distinctions are pretty simple and intuitive, and both seem to be straight-forwardly quantitative, but the more I’ve thought about them over the years I’ve come to see that they would contribute emergent properties to any spacefaring civilization that embodied them. Both are temporal or historical metrics, though entangled with metrics of technological achievement — e.g., the initial technologies of crewed space exploration are likely to be rudimentary and therefore not suited for an early and rapid expansion into the cosmos — and metrics of demographic significance. Especially in the distinction mentioned above between first and second waves of spacefaring expansion I characterized these developments in terms of the populations (large or small, which is again a simplistic distinction within a continuum), since the kind of space exploration human beings have conducted to date is so small that it is demographically insignificant, and we can contrast this insignificance with a major effort that would move demographically significant numbers into space, which would then constitute a spacefaring breakout or inflection point. Thus demographics are tied to both of these distinctions of inflection and expansion.
If we take these two continua of inflection and expansion and make them the x and y axes of a graph, we get a framework within which we can locate many different kinds of spacefaring civilizations as the functions of two variables. Say we make inflection the x axis, with early (or immediate) on the left and late on the right, and we make expansion the y axis, with slow at the bottom and rapid at the top. This gives us four quadrants of spacefaring civilizations that are early/rapid (upper left), late rapid (upper right), early/slow (lower left), and late/slow (lower right). As I said, these are quantitative variables, but they yield qualitatively distinct spacefaring civilizations, starting with this rough quadripartite distinction, which can be broken down into whatever degree of detail that the numbers we put to the continua will allow. Each category of spacefaring civilization defined by the quadrants suggests a thought experiment in the kind a civilization that would result.
An early inflection/rapid expansion spacefaring civilization could take place on different scales depending on technologies that are available, so I probably need to also come up with a way of making this distinction of scale in a schematic way that works with the four quadrants I’ve defined. At a small scale, the technologies actually developed in the 1960s and used to get Apollo to the moon would have been rapidly followed up on with further continuous development. This would have been expensive and would have pushed the envelope of technological development, with the outer wave of space exploration always being just barely within the scope human effort. This, then, would have been a scenario of danger in which many lives were lost, but also a scenario of great adventure as these early spacefaring technologies were pushed to the limits of these performance. (The addendum to The Spacefaring Inflection Point” describes one such scenario in which the Space Race never ended.)
At a larger scale, we could posit the sudden and unexpected development of a technology that allowed for interstellar space exploration. With that single crucial piece of the puzzle in place, a civilization could be utterly transformed, but not like in the above small scale scenario. In fact, an effective interstellar travel technology (say, for the sake of argument, that a compact, efficient, and effective Alcubierre drive were developed) would derail the rudimentary space technologies we have at present, which would probably be abandoned as being incapable of competing with the new technology. This sudden and unexpected technology could lead to a sudden and unexpected early interstellar inflection and rapid expansion, in which human beings would be able to pick and choose among distant worlds, focusing on the most interesting or exciting possibilities, with civilization transformed both by a gold-rush mentality and the scientific possibilities suddenly opened up by such a development.
A late inflection/rapid expansion spacefaring civilization could take the form described above, if our rudimentary spacefaring technologies are never really practical and space exploration remains at a small scale for a long time (maybe centuries, maybe millennia), and only much later is a sudden and unexpected technological breakthrough made that can enable the above scenario. However, that scenario being enabled in the later stages of a technological civilization would almost certainly change other factors that would enter into space exploration. For example, if a sudden and unexpected technological breakthrough were made now, at our present stage of technological development, our spacecraft would be wanting in several respects since other technologies would be behind the drive technology. A more mature industrialized civilization that suddenly produced an interstellar drive would also likely possess the other technologies that would allow for the effective exploitation of the drive technology.
Alternatively, a late spacefaring inflection could be the result of long-term civilizational stagnation, or perhaps repeated collapse and recovery. This historical experience of stagnation or collapse would again almost certainly feed into the kind of civilization that suddenly came into the possession of an effective interstellar drive. A people with this historical experience would have a longer view of civilization, and perhaps also a more humble view of civilization. An early inflection/rapid expansion spacefaring civilization would almost certainly be brash, inexperienced, ambitious, reckless, and arrogant — the kind of pride that goeth before a fall. It would make a great story. A late inflection/rapid expansion spacefaring civilization that had experienced stagnation or collapse or both would be much more capable of perspective-taking and would temper its rapid expansion proportionately.
An early inflection/slow expansion spacefaring civilization would be, like the first permutation, based on rudimentary spacefaring technology. We can imagine this as a painfully slow rock-by-rock expansion through the solar system, fighting for each new outward effort, which would come only through expending lives and treasure. This would be a hard-bitten civilization that learned every tough lesson along the way, and worked for everything it got. This would also be an extraordinarily thorough spacefaring expansion into the solar system, with no resource left untapped. Under this scenario we would learn every nook and cranny of the solar system like the back of our hand, and the attitude of such a civilization to the universe would likely be quite different from the attitude that followed from the previous scenarios.
Finally, a late inflection/slow expansion spacefaring civilization would be the slowest of all the scenarios I’ve described so far, but there would also be something majestic about it. I wrote about something like this in my 2017 blog post “Stagnant Supercivilizations and Interstellar Travel.” Even if no remarkable technologies are developed, as in several of the scenarios described above, humanity could still expand through the cosmos if only we can learn to be sufficiently patient. Over a period of hundreds of thousands of years and millions of years, many stars will pass by our solar system more closely than even the nearest stars at present, meaning that with technology only slightly advanced over what we have today, we could transfer a human population to another planetary system as it passes within less than a light year of the solar system. In this scenario, humanity could be preparing for this transfer for thousands of years, building enormous space arks that could transfer a viable population to another planetary system. Even if the system had no habitable planets, a sufficiently large effort could transfer enough people and technology that artificial habitats could be built and human beings could inhabit the planetary system regardless.
This scenario could work with the scenario of a very thorough exploration and settlement of the solar system, or with the scenario of long-term stagnation or repeated collapse and recovery. In the event of repeated collapse and recovery, humanity might only return to the technological level required to transfer to another planetary system just in time, and perhaps as the result of an effort make with the awareness of this unique opportunity. And while this very slow expansion model is almost beyond the historical scope of human beings, this opportunity should recur several times while the human species endures. If we take the first opportunity for a planetary system transfer, humanity will be present in two planetary systems. If these two systems then take their first opportunity with the next passing planetary system, humanity will be present on four planetary systems. The rate of expansion is slow, but it can also geometrically increase, so that human beings could achieve a reasonable degree of density in the spiral arms of the Milky Way within a few million years.
This newsletter has been a bit different from the immediately previous iterations, in which I’ve been developing several ideas about the nature of social order. I still have a lot to say about these ideas, but I needed a break, and I’ll go back to them when I can focus on them again. The discussions of the existential vacuum and “backward” societies (Edward Banfield’s “amoral familism”) weren’t random, but were discussions of social defection intended to set the stage for further discussions of defection from the social order in relation to the kind of society that I proposed in my final newsletter of 2024, so there’s a larger argument I’m trying to make, but it requires a good deal of clarification and concentration on my part.
