We often discuss the notion that interfering in alien civilizations is a bad idea, and
the topic gets debated a lot, but should that include civilizations we created?
So today we are discussing the topic of Uplifting, the notion of genetically altering existing
species such as dolphins or dogs to have the intelligence and physiology necessary to use
technology.
This is part one of a collaboration episode with John Michael Godier, and you will be
able to watch the second half over on his channel, by following the link in the video
description or the in-video link at the end screen of part 1.
John and I had been discussing doing a collaboration for a while.
We were bouncing ideas around and chatting about our shared interest in the Fermi Paradox,
and how technology might not always be inevitable on some planets.
He tossed out the notion that if you encountered a highly intelligent species on an Ocean Planet,
one where no land existed and no fire was possible, you wouldn't so much be interfering
in their civilization as liberating them from the constraints of an environment holding
them back.
I immediately fixated on the idea, as it is different than the normal example of uplifting
- just making a chimpanzee smarter for instance - and uplifting is something that I get requests
to cover a lot.
This concept goes back a long way in time, probably as long as we have been anthropomorphizing
our pets.
We see stories about it as far back as 1896 with H.G. Wells, "The Island of Doctor Moreau",
but the term uplifting, or biological uplifting, we get from physicist and sci-fi author David
Brin, and his series the Uplift Saga, whose first novel "Sundiver" came out in 1980.
Now again, the notion that you could take an already intelligent animal and give it
a bigger brain, or modify it to have hands or opposable thumbs, is not terribly new,
but what Brin did that was different was to use it as a bit of alternate take on the classic
Star Trek Prime Directive.
Many, indeed virtually all, alien civilizations began as something below human intelligence
that one or another alien race uplifted.
These patron civilizations had some complex relationship with their client species.
Humans were an exception in the series as having evolved rather than being uplifted,
and by the time they meet the galactic community they have already uplifted both dolphins and
chimpanzees.
It's a great series and we strongly recommend it, but let's look at the dolphin case really
quick, and extrapolate it to an alien planet.
Dolphins are smart, and in the 80s and early 90s when most of the series was written there
was quite a fad for super-smart dolphins in science fiction.
Quite a few shows revolved around the concept, like Seaquest, and indeed they were originally
going to be the navigators for the Enterprise on Star Trek: the Next Generation.
At the time folks tended to grant dolphins higher intelligence than they probably have
and often liked the notion of making them smarter.
There's a problem here though, as we discussed in the Great Filters series, brains are incredibly
expensive and human-level intelligence arguably is quite a bad trait to develop if you can't
gain the benefit of technology out of it.
Dolphins don't have hands and can't really use fire, so aren't well suited to use that
next step up to human intelligence, so we would expect it to be a mutation that if it
occurred wouldn't tend to stick around, as it is not obviously beneficial, see the
episode Rare Intelligence for more discussion of that.
We can't rule out that highly intelligent critters could evolve on a planet that had
no land, or at least not much of it and what they had not suited for civilizations.
Fire is handy but no good in the sea, yet it isn't the only basic technology and we
do see some tool use by aquatic animals.
Let's assume for the moment we encountered a planet that was almost all oceans, say a
Super-Earth with a strong gravity well that made land-based life more disadvantaged by
needing thicker endoskeletons, that made space travel with chemical rockets nigh-impossible,
and had very thick clouds obscuring the stars to boot.
On this planet, live an intelligent race of giant crabs who are complex tool users with
large brains comparable to humans, called Crustaceans.
They don't need any tinkering mentally or physically to use technology, they just haven't
gotten beyond Stone Age Technology.
They use tools of stone and bone and shell, including knives, and build underwater villages.
They've got rope, the abacus for calculations, underwater percussion musical instruments,
and many other basic technological and cultural advancements.
They even engage in livestock raising and some agriculture, or rather aquaculture.
But their submarine life just prevents them from learning to smelt metal.
They don't make paper underwater or use ink for writing.
Yet they can scratch shells to make records and make use of a lot of other simple technology.
There's some talk about the ethics of contacting them, maybe given time they'll develop technology
on their own, given millions of years, but the ship on the scene notes their sun is an
old and large one that probably only has a few millions more years before it will wreck
the planet.
This is not biological uplifting, just giving primitives technology, is this right or wrong?
Should we give the Crustaceans technology?
Regardless of what gets decided here, there does seem to be an abundance of Ocean Planets
out there and we find two more with complex life.
On one, we encounter something very like dolphins, and we call them the Grampusians.
They are smart, human smart, but do very little tool use, no more than earth-like dolphins
do.
On the third planet, we encounter very nimble but fairly dumb octopus-like critters we call
the Octopods.
They are as smart as most mammals but not nearly at the dolphin or chimpanzee level.
So we have three examples of intervention we could take now.
Technological uplifting, just giving the Crustaceans technology, physiological uplifting, modifying
the Grampusians to have better tool using capability, and neurological uplifting, giving
the Octopods bigger brains.
Needless to say we, have the option to do all three with our own dolphins, giving them
tool-user physiology, a better brain for technology, and then giving them that technology.
We want to emphasize that each of these is different, and comes with its own unique ethical
issues.
One aspect that probably is not different, for the case of our own dolphins, besides
the need for all three types, is that they come from our own planet.
We often discuss the cutoff for civilizations in terms of them being advanced enough to
make contact, but at what point is the reverse true?
When are they so primitive that something like the Prime Directive doesn't apply?
Are chimp or dolphin analogues on an alien planet too primitive for us to worry about
contacting them or even adopting them as pets?
If the answer is yes, we can discard that concern from uplifting in the example of the
Octopods.
Let's say we go ahead and give them those bigger brains and our marine scientists work
with them to develop language and basic technology over a few generations.
Is it now unethical to give them advice and more science and technology?
By the same reasoning, if we gave chimps bigger brains back here on Earth, are we bound to
not interfere in their emerging civilization?
Should we be giving them their own place to develop independently?
Should we simply be integrating them into our own civilization instead, so that Chimps
are living in the house next door, sending their kids to school with yours, playing on
the little league baseball team, voting in elections, and going into city council meetings
to complain about local ordinances and taxes?
How far did you uplift them?
Just a little smarter to be able to do some tasks?
What - if any - rights would a slightly uplifted chimp have, if it can never get to be smarter
than say, a ten-year old?
What, if any, responsibilities do we have to them?
Or are they full human-level, maybe even better at some mental tasks, and want to go to college
and practice dentistry or become professors or get ordained into the clergy or run for
public office?
It's a little different with our own dolphins.
We'd sort of expect them to have their own separate civilizations in the sea, and ditto
with alien species, but the prime directive notion itself seems completely out the window.
Not everyone agrees with the general non-interference policy suggested by the Prime Directive.
For those who do, there is always that cut off for when they are advanced enough for
contact; and general notions for what qualifies as real interference, since obviously any
contact causes some.
As we said though, there needs to be an opposite cutoff for when there's nothing to interfere
with yet.
Even folks who think we should stay away from any planet with life, even just basic microbes,
are unlikely to worry about us kidnapping some of those microbes for experiments in
lab.
However it is unlikely any two people are going to agree where those cutoffs should
be and what qualifies as interference or exceptions.
Yet that isn't the full dilemma.
Let's imagine for the moment we could give dolphins hands and voice boxes able to speak
human languages and the brains to use them.
First off, most of us would not want a set of fins or tentacles no matter how handy they
were, so it's debatable if the dolphins would really want hands or tentacles either.
They might not like the notion of being mutant freaks.
But, there's a lot more to this than just zapping them with a brain gun.
We tend to think of dolphins as pretty nice and friendly critters, and they do tend to
act nice around humans, but they can be pretty cruel, so can other hominids and primates
we consider uplifting.
So you could be unleashing monsters.
Also, there are other behavioral traits that we would find unacceptable, or very difficult
to deal with at least, but we try to keep this channel family-friendly.
That raises the question of if it's okay to tweak their minds for more than just sheer
intelligence, which is a pretty ambiguous term itself.
Let's consider an alternative case way down on the intelligence scale, ants or insects.
Now ants are brutal, not only do they demonstrably conduct wars but they also kill their own
hive mates, actively killing members who are past their usefulness.
If we were uplifting them individually, giant ants would be rather horrifying in their outlook
on life, and I think you'd almost have to make alterations to ensure you didn't create
something that didn't want to sweep over the galaxy colonizing everything whether it
was inhabited or not.
That's a thing to remember too, humans breed very slowly, uplift a species that uses the
fast breeding, low survival rate strategy and they might come to outnumber you very
quickly.
Do we really want an uplift species with that kind of advantage in competition with us?
And for that matter, is it ethical to level the playing ground?
Intentionally not adding advantages that you could in order to keep the uplifted species
overall our equal or inferior.
However we do have an alternative where animals like ants are concerned that's worth a mention.
We often refer to ants as a hive mind, an alternative to uplifting a single organism
to intelligence might be doing that for a hive, tweaking them so that they did act as
a single human level intelligence.
A big networked hive intelligence composed of thousands or millions of little sub-intelligent
organisms, something we arguably are ourselves.
You would have this same option for a planet that only has algae or fungi on it, creating
colony minds out of those.
Now, a hive mind made of ants isn't an ant anymore than you are a neuron or white blood
cell, or your computer is a bunch of silicon wafers, those are just substrates, so we don't
know that they'd have any of the attitudes or tendencies of the basic organisms they
are composed of.
We mention this option not just because it's kind of fascinating and off the beaten track,
but also because of the enforcement issues with trying to keep a planet safe from interference.
It's hard to maintain a quarantine for centuries, imagine trying to do it for billions of years
while the nascent single-celled life on some planet treks its way up to sentience?
That's often one of the reasons given for why you need that early cutoff on when it
is okay to colonize or interfere with a planet.
Finding some race of primitives at the neolithic stage and monitoring them without interfering
for a few thousand years is already a dubious task, let alone something that needs millions
or billions of years, and is probably doomed to failure.
So why embrace that path when you can make contact in a controlled way to help them look
after their own affairs?
Whether you wait for them to get advanced technology or not, their culture will be changed
by that event, and yes, it will probably be more drastic if there's a big technology
gap, but it will happen either way.
So you might go ahead and say that if contamination is essentially unavoidable, especially with
millions of years needed to get them to sentience, maybe you should just go ahead and bypass
the quarantine phase and just make a sentient lifeform out of whatever you encounter on
every planet you find life, or at least sufficiently complex life.
Pick one or two species that seem most ideal and bootstrap them up to sentience now.
Use your best guesses for how they might proceed and your best judgement to assure it's something
we can live with too, not a race of hyper-aggressive sharks or lions or such.
There's another reason for this approach as well.
A point made in Orson Scott Card's classic sci fi novel "Speaker for the Dead" is
that galactic colonization does not take very long on evolutionary timelines.
If you encounter some species that's just mastering basic stone age technology, left
to their own, even if they move as fast as we did, by the time they can make spaceships
the galaxy will already be colonized.
I'm not sure they'd feel like you did them any favors if you land to say hello a
hundred thousand years later when they invent space travel and welcome them into the galactic
community only to tell them they are stuck on their home planet because there's no
free real estate left over for them.
Of course I'm not sure they would think you did them any favors even if you did leave
them planets and solar systems to colonize for themselves.
Our cultures and civilizations are constantly changing based on all sorts of random flukes
and events, the notion of inevitable history is a delusion for folks who don't understand
the Butterfly Effect, and they are very likely to ask why we didn't just introduce ourselves
back then and offer them knowledge.
We might say "We didn't want to contaminate or exploit your civilization" and they might
blink and just ask what we thought we were doing right now by talking to them?
They might ask if with our all advanced knowledge we couldn't figure out a method to not be
exploitive jerks, and just offer the knowledge with a few suggestions about bad ideas.
They might even ask why we think we would have been any worse than the culture exterminations
done by their own equivalents of conquerors and inquisitions.
And if we pointed out that's different, because that was their own people, they might
point out that remark was pretty much the textbook definition of racism.
Given a choice between being invaded by your neighbors of the same species who wanted to
pillage all your land and sacrifice you to their gods and being invaded by an alien race
who wanted to introduce you to the wonders of technology, even if they were fairly exploitive
or condescending about it, which would most folks choose?
And as they said, you don't have to be exploitive or condescending jerks about it.
It is actually possible to learn from the mistakes of the past and not repeat them.
And this only applies when there is some civilization to contaminate in the first place.
When we're discussing uplifting, there really isn't one.
Yet it obviously has its own array of complications.
One of which is that, once you get the ball rolling by uplifting one species, Pandora's
Box is open, for good or ill.
You uplift chimpanzees and with that knowledge and precedent someone uplifts bonobos, then
lemurs, then cats and dogs and lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
Just here on Earth you've got an issue about what to do with the old, unaltered species,
and what the uplifted ones want to do about them too.
You uplift, say, 100 primates, enough to form a decent initial tribe socially and genetically.
How do they regard the old species?
They might want to get all of them uplifted, or want nothing to do with them, or even want
them wiped out.
At the same time, while some folks might be jumping around uplifting any critter they
can to human intelligence, a lot of folks might just want a smarter cat or dog, but
not a human-intelligent one.
Is it ethical to uplift someone but not all the way to your level?
I mean, it doesn't sound bad to want a smarter dog or cat, maybe one modified for basic speech,
but there is a bit of nagging background concern that you might end up creating a slave race.
But on the alien front, you now have a species that owes its civilization to aliens coming
by and tinkering with them.
What do you think their outlook on doing this themselves is going to be?
They might come to resent our interference and decide to never do it themselves, but
it seems as likely, maybe more so that they will consider it their duty to do unto others
as was done unto them, so that when they head out to explore and colonize the galaxy themselves
they tend to uplift everything they come across.
The galaxy is a big place, and one that seems to be pretty deserted.
We might find other intelligent life out there, but nobody seems to be rushing about colonizing
everything.
Yet humanity probably would want to.
Indeed it is that desire, and its obvious evolutionary origin that tends to be the strongest
argument for alien civilizations being rare; since if they weren't, we would expect the
galaxy to already be colonized.
Also consider that we tend to have a bit of phobia about modifying ourselves to be better,
genetic or cybernetic enhancement may become the norm in the future for humans, but at
the moment most people would not want any.
An uplifted species may feel the same way, but it wouldn't seem too likely for the
same reason it wouldn't seem likely they'd view uplifting other species as unethical.
That's how they came to be, they would seem more likely to enshrine such a process than
demonize it.
You go Uplift the Crustaceans we mentioned earlier, the ones who had the brains and physiology,
we just gave them technology, and while their views might change over time, they would probably
tend to give technology to everyone they encountered as well.
Amusingly, they might be opposed to neurological or physiological uplifting because they felt
it diminishes them.
They did make the climb to civilization on their own and just got stymied by their environment.
Alternatively, the Grampusians - the ones who were pretty smart but lacked the physiology
for technology - are very likely to make the same basic argument.
They were on their way, but without the right physiology they could never hit that last
evolutionary feedback loop that would have raised them from very smart critters to a
high tech-civilization.
They might get into arguments with the Crustaceans over some planet that has smart elephants.
Earth policy could be that you can't colonize inhabited planets with anything above microbes
on it, and that if you uplift someone you've got to set aside territory for them to expand
and colonize into.
The Crustaceans disagree.
They are fine with sharing the galaxy with others but don't want to divide the pie
too much.
They say it is fine to help folks who pretty much got there on their own, but the humans
made a mistake uplifting everyone and it was a decision they made early on when every new
life bearing planet was miraculous.
And right now the galaxy already has a dozen or so uplifted alien species and multitudes
of chimps, dolphins, cats, and dogs out flying spaceships and settling the stars.
The Grampusians probably won't appreciate being called a mistake, and the Octopods,
the squid people who were decent tool users but pretty dumb, want nothing to do with such
a policy change and are out there uplifting every critter they can find, indeed they've
uplifted a few hundred species from their own homeworld.
You could see some serious fights starting over what the right policy is, particularly
since any given policy could de-legitimize one of these groups by saying they were a
mistake that should never have been born.
Those are definitely fighting words.
Of course they might defer, especially early on, to humanity as their parent race.
However, humanity is not homogenous in motivations and outlook.
You might have a lot of folks who like them and want to work with all these new species.
Out of them, there will be some of those who are kind of condescending about it, ya know,
"We came down out of the trees and built starships all on our own" and others who
like them but also like being viewed as a bit superior or even godlike.
On the flipside you are going to have some folks saying we should never have done it
in the first place because of the conflict it caused or worse, who just don't want
to share the galaxy with the uplifted mutant freaks.
Like a lot of issues, it isn't strictly black and white because there's going to
be a lot of coalitions of folks who agree on a given policy for different motives, some
less than honorable, or who simply accept the policy as a good first step in the right
direction.
This doesn't mean uplifting is right or wrong, or that it is always right or wrong,
or that one of the three types, Technological, Neurological, or Physiological is right or
wrong either.
Indeed, odds are you often need to do more than one of those for it to work, but same
as the non-interference path, the Prime Directive approach has some troubling implications,
so does Uplifting.
If it turns out humanity was the first space-faring technological civilization to arise in the
galaxy, conventionally we'd expect to be able to colonize the entire thing before anyone
else achieved technology.
It takes a long time to colonize a galaxy, but nothing like astronomical times so it
would be statistically improbable someone else would pop up in the next million or so
years when no else had in the previous billion.
At the same time, you don't need to encounter alien civilizations for them to come to be.
You could end up making your own as you go.
Uplifted alien lifeforms, uplifted Earth-based ones, or even humans who have become pretty
alien.
After all, we aren't that many millions of years removed from the other smart Earth-based
critters, so a couple hundred thousands years of living on an alien planet, even if you
don't tinker with your own DNA, can make some pretty alien biology out of what was
once human.
And the thing is that you probably will.
And the issue with the Prime Directive is that it is so hard to enforce when every species
might not follow it, nor all the members of every species, and that you need a quarantine
on a primitive planet in place for thousands or millions of years for it to work.
It's essentially impractical so you wouldn't expect it to be too common as it requires
a lot of resources for a very long time with a high probability of failure.
Uplifting though is the opposite case, it would be very hard to prevent anyone doing
it at some point, and once it's done you either have to accept that new species or
just jump right into the Moral Event Horizon and exterminate them.
And again, they aren't likely to share your views on uplifting, and once it's happened
that first time you'd have people going around doing it again.
It's not hard to imagine folks wanting to be the person who created a whole new civilization,
anymore than being the person who ran the quarantine blockade to bring enlightenment
to a primitive planet.
One can argue the ethics of non-interference versus uplifting, what's right or wrong
with each option, but the key difference is that one requires a ton of constant effort
to enforce while the other just requires an initial investment of technology, and beyond
that take continuous effort to prevent happening again and again.
Now uplifting is unlikely to ever be something so easy somebody can pick a brain gun up at
the store, fly off to a young planet and start spraying sentience on whatever critter they
run across.
But once the basic methodology is figured out, it probably would be something a relatively
small group could do on their own.
So again, it differs from non-interference policies in that you have to actively work
hard to prevent it happening, as opposed to working hard to keep it happening, and every
time it does you've probably created a species that thinks it is morally proper to do, since
that's how they came to be.
So it's an interesting possible future, one where maybe humanity really is the first
on the scene and could claim the whole galaxy for itself, but might end up creating a million
descendant alien species, those we made and those to whom we are grandparents or great
grandparents to.
Even if there are no other intelligent civilizations beyond humans in this galaxy, it seems likely
there will be.
Uplifted animals from Earth or Alien planets, even androids, our topic for next week, could
come to fill that niche.
But we're not done yet, follow the link to watch part two of this episode in which
we'll explore some more concepts including down-shifting, the opposite of uplifting,
and further discussion of rescuing alien species who might be trapped on their planets.
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