Biotechnology and the lifetime of technical civilizations

Abstract

The number of people able to end Earth's technical civilization has heretofore been small. Emerging dual-use technologies, such as biotechnology, may give similar power to thousands or millions of individuals. To quantitatively investigate the ramifications of such a marked shift on the survival of both terrestrial and extraterrestrial technical civilizations, this paper presents a two-parameter model for civilizational lifespans, i.e. the quantity L in Drake's equation for the number of communicating extraterrestrial civilizations. One parameter characterizes the population lethality of a civilization's biotechnology and the other characterizes the civilization's psychosociology. L is demonstrated to be less than the inverse of the product of these two parameters. Using empiric data from PubMed to inform the biotechnology parameter, the model predicts human civilization's median survival time as decades to centuries, even with optimistic psychosociological parameter values, thereby positioning biotechnology as a proximate threat to human civilization. For an ensemble of civilizations having some median calculated survival time, the model predicts that, after 80 times that duration, only one in 10 24 civilizations will survive -a tempo and degree of winnowing compatible with Hanson's "Great Filter." Thus, assuming that civilizations universally develop advanced biotechnology, before they become vigorous interstellar colonizers, the model provides a resolution to the Fermi paradox.

Monte Carlo estimation of the probability of causal contacts between communicating civilizations

“…Intuitively, the probability of the existence of causal contacts between pairs of nodes would be larger for smaller τ a parameters, higher τ s or higher D max parameter values. We also propose theoretical distribution functions for both the lifespans (τ s ) and the number of nodes per unit time (Maccone 2014 a ; Sotos 2019). The latter is related to the time span between the appearance of consecutive nodes (since when τ a is shorter, it produces a greater density of nodes).…”

“…Optimistic estimates from the Drake equation contrast with the so-called Fermi paradox, which states the apparent contradiction between the expected abundance of life in the Galaxy and the lack of evidence for it (e.g. Hart 1975;Brin 1983;Barlow 2013;Anchordoqui et al 2017;Forgan 2017;Carroll-Nellenback et al 2019;Sotos 2019). There are many propositions aimed at solving this paradox, which make use of statistical (Horvat 2006;Maccone 2015;Solomonides et al 2016) or stochastic approaches (Forgan 2009;Forgan and Rice 2010;Glade et al 2012;Bloetscher 2019).…”

Interstellar Communication Network. I. Overview and Assumptions

“…At the travel velocity of Voyager 2 (17 km s −1 relative to the sun) it would take 75,000 yrs to reach the nearest star, and a billion years to cross the galaxy. Such long times exceed the lifetime of plausible probe designs, and likely the lifetime L of most species (Schenkel 1999;Rubin 2001;Sotos 2019). Thus, for our scheme to remain within some boundaries considered sensible today, we require that probes travel between stars on timescales of perhaps 1,000 yrs or less.…”

Peacekeeping Conditions for an Artificial Intelligence Society

“…Suspicion between nations has the potential to cause a disastrous war [2]. This irreversible change is also called the "threat of universal unilateralism" [3], and this sufficiently high existential risk could explain Fermi's paradox: "humanity has no experience of contact with civilized extraterrestrials, compared to their potentially high likelihood of existence" [4].…”