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Civilizations of Planetary Endemism, Part II

11 February 2016

Thursday

https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1214a/

This artist’s impression shows a sunset seen from the super-Earth Gliese 667 Cc. The brightest star in the sky is the red dwarf Gliese 667 C, which is part of a triple star system. The other two more distant stars, Gliese 667 A and B appear in the sky also to the right. Astronomers have estimated that there are tens of billions of such rocky worlds orbiting faint red dwarf stars in the Milky Way alone. (Credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

When I wrote Civilizations of Planetary Endemism I didn’t call it “Part I” because I didn’t realize that I would need to write a Part II, but my recent post on Night Side Detection of M Dwarf Civilizations made me realize that my earlier post on planetary endemism, and specifically using planetary endemism as the basis for a taxonomy of civilizations during the Stelliferous Era, was only one side of a coin, and that the other side of the same coin remains to be examined.

As we saw in Civilizations of Planetary Endemism, during the Stelliferous Era emergent complexities arise on planetary surfaces, which are “Goldilocks” zones not only for liquid water, but also for energy flows. As a consequence, civilizations begin on planetary surfaces, and this entails certain observation selection effects for the worldview of civilizations. In other words, civilizations are shaped by planetary endemism.

One aspect of planetary endemism is temporal, or developmental; this is the aspect of planetary endemism I explored in the first part of Civilizations of Planetary Endemism. Another aspect of planetary endemism is spatial, or structural. The developmental taxonomy of civilizations in my previous post — Nascent Civilization, Developing Sub-planetary Civilization, Arrested Sub-planetary Civilization, Developing Planetary Civilization, and Arrested Planetary Civilization — took account of the spatial consequences of planetary endemism, but in a purely generic way. The spatial limitation of a planetary surface supplies the crucial distinction between planetary and sub-planetary civilizations, while the temporal dimension supplies the crucial distinction between civilizations still developing, and which may therefore transcend their present limitations, and civilizations that have stagnated (and therefore will produce no further taxonomic divisions).

My post on Night Side Detection of M Dwarf Civilizations suggested an approach to planetary endemism in which the spatial constraint enters into a civilizational taxonomy as more than merely the generic constraint of limited planetary surface area. In that post I discussed some properties that would distinctively characterize civilizations emergent on planetary systems of M dwarf stars. In some cases we can derive the likely properties of a civilization from the properties of the planet on which that civilization supervenes. This is essentially a taxonomic idea.

The idea is quite simple, and it is this: different kinds of planets, in different kinds of planetary systems (presumably predicated upon different kinds of stars, and of different kinds of protoplanetary disks that were the precursors to planetary systems), result in different kinds of civilizations supervening upon these different kinds of planets. Given this idea, a taxonomy of civilizations would follow from a taxonomy of planets and of planetary systems.

What kinds of planets are there, and what kinds of planetary systems are there? It is only in the past few years that science has begun to answer this question in earnest, as we have begun to discover and classify exoplanets and exoplanetary systems, as the result of the Kepler mission. This is a work in progress, and we can literally expect to continue to add to our knowledge of planets and planetary systems for hundreds of years to come. We are still in a stage of knowledge where classifications for kinds of planets are emerging spontaneously from unexpected observations, such as “hot Jupiters” — large gas giants orbiting close to their parent stars — and we do not yet have anything like a systematic taxonomy yet.

Since we want to focus on peer life, however, i.e., life as we know it, more or less, this narrows the kinds of planets of interest to far fewer candidates, though ultimately we will need to account for the planetary system context of these habitable exoplanets, and in so doing we will have to take account of all types of planets. There has been a significant amount of attention given to habitable planets around M dwarf stars (one of the reasons I wrote Night Side Detection of M Dwarf Civilizations), which are interesting partly because there are so many M dwarf stars. We can derive interesting consequences for habitable planets around M dwarf stars, such as their being tidally locked, though we have to break this down further according to the size of the planet (since gravity will have an important influence on civilization), the presence of plate tectonics (as a tidally locked planet with active plate tectonics would be a very different place from such a planet without plate tectonics), the strength of the planet’s electrical field, and so on.

Other kinds of planets that have come to attention are “super-Earths,” which are rocky, habitable planets, but larger than Earth, and therefore with a higher surface gravity (therefore with a greater barrier to the transition to spacefaring civilization). The observation selection effects of the transit method employed by the Kepler mission favor larger planets, so the Kepler data sets have not inspired much thinking about smaller planets, but we know from our own planetary system with the smaller Earth twin of Venus, which is too hot, and the smaller yet Earth twin Mars, which is too cold, that the habitable zone of a star can host several Earth-size and smaller planets. When some future science mission makes it possible to survey exoplanetary systems inclusive of smaller worlds, I suspect we will discover a great many of them, and this will generate more questions, like the ability of a smaller planet to maintain its atmosphere and its electrical field, etc.

One way to produce a planetary taxonomy for the civilizations of planetary endemism would be to take Earth as the “standard” inhabitable planet, and to treat all planets inhabited by peer life as departing from the terrestrial norm. We already do this when we speak of Earth twins and super-Earths, but this could be done more systematically and schematically. This, however, does not take into account the parent star or planetary system, so we would have to take our entire planetary system as the “standard” inhabitable planetary system, and work outward from that based on deviations from this norm.

The above is only to suggest the complex taxonomic possibilities for civilizations based on the kind of planet where a civilization originates. I don’t yet have even a schematic breakdown such as I formulated in my previous post on planetary endemism. The variety of planetary conditions where civilizations may arise may be so diverse that it defeats the purpose of a taxonomy, as each individual civilization would have to be approached not as exemplifying a kind, but as something unprecedented in every instance. Still, the scientific mind wants to put its observations in a rational order, so that some of us will always to trying to find order in apparent chaos.

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