The Use and Abuse of Historical Analogies
Friday 01 March 2024
Thinking about spacefaring civilizations has served me as a thought experiment even though I haven’t intended it in this sense. Last week I was thinking about how the kind of developmental processes and selection pressures that would act upon an autonomous human community in extraterrestrial space (or on another world) could only occur once the technological threshold is met making it possible for such a human community to be established. This turns out to be a rather high bar (from the perspective of contemporary history), so no human communities have yet been subjected to these developmental processes and selection pressures. We can define many of these processes and pressures, but how exactly a human community in extraterrestrial space will respond to these processes and pressures cannot be so easily defined. We aren’t utterly clueless, of course, because (if we are capable of being honest, which is increasingly rare at the level of officialdom at which such great projects are planned and executed) we can extrapolate from known human nature and known responses to past processes and pressures, modifying our extant knowledge as needed to make it relevant to a spacefaring society.
Is it possible, would it be possible, to extrapolate our knowledge to an unprecedented context? In newsletter 276 I wrote that the greater productivity of industrialized civilization, “has put our industrialized society into unprecedented territory in terms of macroparasitic load, so that historical analogies no longer hold good.” This is probably an oversimplification, as we would probably find with a sufficiently fine-grained analysis that some historical analogies hold, some fail, and others hold to a greater or lesser degree (which is the same as saying that they fail to a greater or lesser degree). Since we have no science of history worthy of the name, we cannot delve into the details to examine exactly why some historical analogies hold and some fail, but, with a more sophisticated conceptual framework, such an analysis could at least be undertaken. At present, we couldn’t even make a start at such an analysis.
We are also hampered in our analysis by the vagueness of the concepts employed: What is a spacefaring civilization? What is an autonomous human community? Can a community conduct trade with other communities and still be considered autonomous? If a community is autonomous in principle but not in practice, is it truly autonomous? If a community is autonomous as long as its machinery holds out, but would require spare parts from Earth when a machine breaks down, is it autonomous? Suppose that a space settlement has a nuclear reactor supplying its power, and, like the nuclear reactors on submarines, it is made to operate pretty much continuously for thirty years or more. So the settlement has power for thirty years, but it doesn’t have the industrial infrastructure to build a new nuclear reactor. Is such a settlement autonomous? In thirty years, a sufficiently large population could build the industrial infrastructure to eventually replace its reactor, or build some alternative infrastructure for power needs. Such a community would seem to be in a gray area of autonomy, perhaps even being autonomous in principle for thirty years, but on notice that they must develop an alternative within thirty years, or accept another reactor from Earth, in which case they will not be autonomous. If something went seriously wrong (by which I mean politically things went sideways), Earth would be in a position to deny such a settlement a replacement reactor, which would be significant leverage for maintaining obedience.
The question of what exactly constitutes a spacefaring civilization is equally fraught. There any many ways to develop, build, deploy, and maintain spacefaring technologies, and there are many distinct technologies that could accomplish spacefaring, but for which the infrastructure to develop, build, deploy, and maintain these distinct technologies is itself distinct. There is a path dependency built into any settlement, as long as such settlements remain rather small, which is likely to be the case. With an entire planet from which to draw human and material capital, Earth has many options, but, in an extraterrestrial settlement being built from scratch, coverage of the possibilities of industrialization will be limited.
An extraterrestrial settlement that wanted to ensure its control over its own spacefaring technologies would need to construct its initial infrastructure around strong assumptions as to what materials and components would be necessary to the maintenance of its spacefaring capacity. Without this, it loses its autonomy. But acting upon these strong assumptions means an economy built around a particular technology. It would be easy to imagine a future scenario in which multiple extraterrestrial settlements make different decisions on their infrastructure, and, as a result of these different decisions, experience different outcomes based on subsequent developments, and here by “subsequent developments” I mean the whole range of developments possible which might include the development of a given technology, social developments within the settlement or on Earth, political development within the settlement or on Earth, and so on.
These scenarios are extrapolations from what is known about technology and human nature and communities and the relationships between mother cities and daughter colonies (as the ancient Greeks referred to this relationship between founding cities and founded cities). As extrapolations, they also help to probe past history by placing assumptions in a novel context. Most of what I have described above has already happened on Earth with different technology and under different circumstances. The Greek and Phoenician colonization of the Mediterranean holds a wealth of analogies. Recall that it was the Phoenicians who founded Carthage, and recall that Carthage was engaged in warfare with Rome over hundreds of years for supremacy in the Mediterranean. None of this would have happened without the requisite shipping technology to make the Mediterranean a hub of commerce and colonization; the kind of historical and political complexity we see in the ancient Mediterranean was made possible by the shipping technology, so we only know these developmental processes and selection pressures because a particular technological threshold was met.
In the North Atlantic, the Vikings managed to make it all the way to Newfoundland in open longships, but they did so during the Medieval Warm Period, and they failed to do so with enough numbers to make these efforts viable over the longue durée and under changed conditions (cf. When a Civilization Retreats). The Mediterranean had different seafaring conditions than the North Atlantic, and a higher density of populations in many settlements, so the outcome here was quite different from the North Atlantic. The technological threshold of seafaring to make it possible for a civilization to cross the Atlantic was a bit higher, but not by much. Many have speculated the Basque fisherman traveled to the fisheries off the North American coast, and this may well be the case, but there is no tradition, and no archaeological evidence, of settlements. So perhaps the fishermen put to shore to fix their boats and camp for a while, but there was no attempt at settlement. The Norse, on the other hand, managed to remain on Greenland for hundreds of years before changing climatological conditions made their way of life impossible. The indigenous people of Greenland, who seemed to have arrived at Greenland at about the same time as the Norse, were able to survive, but they pursued a very different way of life.
When the Portuguese and the Spanish began crossing the Atlantic in earnest, they did so with better ships, with firearms, and in sufficient numbers to grow their settlements into autonomous entities. They were drawing on a larger population base than the Norse, but still Portugal was not a large kingdom by most measures, and it was the Portuguese who pulled off some of the greatest triumphs of navigation, and it was the navigation technique that probably had as much to do with crossing the Atlantic as shipping technology narrowly considered — mapping, the use of the compass, and a tradition of oceanic voyaging all played a role. This was the sustainable technological threshold for planetary-scale commerce, communication, and settlement.
Where the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia autonomous? Were the Portuguese colonies in what is now Brazil autonomous? Thereupon hangs a tale of hundreds of years of completing institutions and political machinations and aspirations to control and to independence. The two cases I have singled out are quite different historically. Magna Graecia was absorbed into Rome as Rome expanded, as was eventually the entirety of the Greek world, which endured for hundreds of years as Hellenistic civilization embedded within a Roman framework, and then, arguably, reasserted itself as the eastern part of the Empire became increasingly Greek. If we include the Byzantine Empire as part of the Greek legacy, it endured longer than Rome itself.
The transatlantic historical parallel is a tangled tale as complex and as fraught as that of the Greeks in the Mediterranean, and closer to us in both time and culture so that we probably have a much better feel for this era than the pre-modern Greeks. But all of this involves developmental processes and selection pressures that only come into play after a given technological threshold is met. And, even if the threshold is met, there is the further threshold of a desire for a civilization to project itself outward into the world, and this has only happened on a grand scale in human history a few times, and only a few of these few times resulted into a viable civilization that went on to experience a history of its own. The Norse in Europe, especially in the North Sea, were one of these instances, but Greenland and Newfoundland seemed to have been an over-extension that was not viable. The Chinese admiral Zheng He under the Ming dynasty suggested the possibility of an expansionist China, but this turned out to be only a brief foray. The Portuguese constitute one of the great examples, and, while they left a significant imprint on planetary civilization, the Portuguese seemed to have over-extended themselves with their great voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and, after that time, Portugal was a small and poor kingdom, which, by the early twentieth century, was as notorious for political instability and its number coups as Bolivia.
All of this has implications for civilization imposed as a template, and submerged civilizations, upon which a template has been imposed from outside. The Greek colonies in Magna Greacia were built on virgin sites, while many (not all) of the Portuguese and Spanish colonies were built on prior cities, upon which Portuguese and Spanish civilization were imposed as a template, initially through military force, and later through economic and technological mechanisms.
The complexity of these histories under different historical and climatological conditions should make us appreciate the possibilities for the future complexities of any extraterrestrial settlements, which will not necessarily grow under the same civilizational template, and will not grow under identical conditions. Imagine a period of very low sunspot activity (a solar minimum), with few solar storms and therefore lower dangers for a spacefaring civilization establishing settlements elsewhere in the solar system. Eventually the sun passes from a solar minimum to a solar maximum, and now the climatological conditions of space weather have changed significantly. Some settlements might not survive the change, while some might be more isolated, with fewer and less frequent flights between Earth and the settlement, leaving that settlement to sink or swim on its own.
The mere fact of meeting the technological threshold to become a spacefaring species does not entail that the moral energies will be present to exploit these opportunities, and, if the moral energies are present, and large-scale space settlement is eventually undertaken, the fate of these settlements will not be the same. Moreover, by the time these settlements come to maturity in several hundred years’ time, both technological and political conditions on Earth will have changed significantly, so that the mature settlement will be faced with changed conditions it must negotiate.
The emergence of distinctive developmental processes and selection pressures it not inevitable once a technological threshold is met. While an entire civilization is necessary to the kind of technological development necessary to achieve such a threshold, further boundary conditions must be met in order for these technologies to act upon history at scale. A major threshold of development, then, involves several emergent thresholds that interact; boundary conditions can be as complex as the complexities that emerge from them.
