Civilization’s final frontier – how far can we go before forever stopping?
If you’ve ever asked yourself a very simple question – where the heck are all the aliens? – then you have probably done a bit more research on the topic and have found out some of the possible solutions for the brain-eating paradox. Mathematically, we should be swarmed – or at least in contact – with numerous intelligent alien races by now, devising intergalactical councils, trade routes, open borders and what else. Yet, practically, there are no aliens. There are numerous answers and theories proposed for the paradox, but for today’s discussion, I’ll stick to one that may be the closest to home for us – the uttermost cap of technological advancement.
The theory suggests that every civilization eventually hits a wall past which they can’t cross when it comes to technology primarily. For some time, said civilization then enters the period of stagnation, where it’s neither moving forward nor backwards. Eventually, though, resources thin out, tensions arise, and it enters its initial regressive period. This is marked by exponential increase in crime, plummeting economy, destruction of eco systems, collapse of moralist values, steering then into the great wars between global superpowers where the weapons of mass destruction are inevitably used, which then leads to collapse of the civilization as a whole and regression into a primitive state from which it may or may not recover eventually. Though all of us like to imagine how the future may be, with fully-developed interstellar travel, galactic colonization and discoveries of different worlds and ever-more-exaggerated technology, the truth much closer to reality is that all of those ideas are purely in the fiction department of science.
Every intelligent life, at least if we go by ourselves as an example, has a natural progression, especially so when it comes to technology. There is a reason why we have advanced more in the past 200 years than thousands prior to that, and it’s not because we’re smarter than the ‘old humans’, or because we’ve discovered some magical McGuffin that tells us how things work. Technologies naturally feed off each other; perfecting steam engine didn’t merely make mining easier, it also created trains. Creation of PC didn’t merely give us a platform for games and quicker calculations, it universally sped up every other field of science. We’ve always had all the resources present on Earth, it was just a matter of eventually figuring out how to utilize them and perfect them down the line the best way we can. That’s why the past 200 years or so have been such a massive technological boon it is sometimes even hard to comprehend. However, we’re gaining toward the end of that boon. We’ve mostly discovered everything that can be discovered here on Earth, and while there are still countless things we’ve yet to invent that are feasible and will happen in the future, there is a high chance that the another technological boon won’t happen, and that we’ll eventually hit a wall.
To illustrate this the best, we can look at the classical computers – or, well, computers as most people say. We’ve hit the bar with them. Now, the endless supply of next-next-gen graphic cards, CPUs and SDDs may color your sight in amazement over how we’re always advancing, but, in reality, it’s just a simple idea of stacking. At the core, classical computers are already doing everything they’ll ever be able to do. If you have knowledge and patience, you can already create a life-like simulation of practically anything, but no matter how many gigs of RAM you stack, and no matter how fast your CPUs are and no matter how much VRAM your GPU has, those life-like simulations will run like utter crap. If at all. It’s simply the question of hardware; we’ve pushed what we have as far as it will go in terms of its usage, and, well, it can’t go anywhere anymore. For instance, the oh-so-famous notion of supermind A.I. like Skynet physically isn’t possible to achieve with classical computers. Even if we had knowledge and means to create such a program, even stacking every bit of classical hardware we have would be unable to actually make it run. It’s a sad reality, but reality it is. That’s why people – especially those woven deeply into any branch of engineering – are so amped up about quantum computing. Before it, there’s really not much else we can do when it comes to computing but just stack and stack.
And that’s what I mean when I say the ‘technological wall’. We don’t know yet the limits of a perfected quantum computer, but we do know there is a hardwired limit to it. Every technology we have has that hardwired limit. And things get especially dicey once we decide to leave the Planet Earth and travel out into the vacuum of space in search of the unknown. If we wanted to, we could feasibly send the first colony to Mars within a decade. Rather, we could have even done it by now if we were really hard-pressed. Why didn’t we then? Because, well, we have no necessitated reason for it. There is nothing on Mars that could help us in any way beyond boosting our ego. There are no resources we have no access to, we’re still not even 100% sure if there is water there, and, at the end of the day, the sheer expense of it simply cannot be justified. One has to understand that sending over a colony on Mars is just the first step, and it’s already multi-multi-multi-billion dollars program. That colony will not be self-sufficient, which means it would have to leech resources off the Earth. It wouldn’t be self-sufficient for a long, long time if ever. Such expenses simply can’t be covered by anyone, not even globally combined wealth of every nation – unless there is a specific reason for it. For instance, if tomorrow, let’s say, scientists found a huge, Pacific Ocean-sized source of oil on Mars, everyone and their mother would jump on the Mars colonization train tomorrow. Natural resources on every planet are finite, that is something we all understand. Even something like wind energy and solar energy are finite, to say nothing of oil and such. So, finding a massive hot-spot of it certainly warrants the first colonization mission. So, we can already colonize Mars. That’s great, right? Yeah, yeah it certainly is. It’s amazing how far we’ve pushed the technology. But, well, there’s always that ‘but’. Even if we want to say that the entire solar system will eventually become our ‘home’, anything beyond it, at least for a moment, is impossible.
A lot of sci-fi movies and TV shows that I’ve watched, and even novels I’ve read, tend to forget perhaps the most important part of the equation when it comes to interstellar travel. It’s not technology, believe it or not; we will eventually get to the point where we’re able to synthesize materials that could endure interstellar travel, I have no doubt about that. We, perhaps, might even one day achieve similar technology to cryostasis that would enable long-term interstellar journeys. So, what’s the problem then? It’s energy. Quite simple, really.
Space is huge. Most things are very, very far apart, and they’re only growing further away from us. If you want to get anywhere in space in even remotely sensible timeframe, you will need a lot – A LOT – of energy. Any form of energy that we currently have access to simply won’t cut it. Well, one of the proposed solutions is solar energy, but technology to harvest it in the amounts required for interstellar travel is interlocked with, well, technology that would let us freely roam the space.
And, that’s the cap. The civilization’s final frontier. We can’t yet say that there were civilizations before us that have died out simply because the timeframe is too short. We’ve only actively been looking for alien life for 150~ years (if I’m being extremely generous), and such small length of time is practically nothing in cosmic years. However, the theory of the final cap is hardly far-fetched; the turnabout point of it all is when a civilization hits the technological wall and when resources start dwindling. Interstellar travel and colonization aren’t simply fun ideas and adventurous notions; they are an absolute necessity for the survival of a civilization. And, unfortunately, our civilization may never get to experience it.
Still, I’m an optimist; for all our shortcomings, I truly do believe we’re capable of far more. There’s always a chance for everything, and technological breakthroughs can happen at any time, any place. Even if this reality eventually becomes our own, we’re still pretty far from it. Despite people ceaselessly crying over depletion of resources, advancements in technology will counter-balance it, at least for a little while. Still, that little-while counts more in centuries rather than years. We will witness birth of many outstanding technologies even in our lifetimes, to say nothing of future generations. Perhaps we get lucky, and we never hit the wall. Perhaps, these 2000~ words are just mere musings of a confused mind, in the end. Only time will tell.
Roundabout 