SciFi Friday: Could Advanced Technological Civilizations Exist at the Edge of the Milky Way?
Milan Cirkovic of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, and one of
the world's leading authorities on astrobiology and SETI studies, thinks they might.
Cirkovic's approach is similar to the one favored by Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, who suggests searching for distant extrterrestrial artifacts of the Solar System (and other planetary systems).
In Crikovic's view, truly advanced technological civilizations (ATCs: those who survive the bottleneck presented by the threat of self-destruction through warfare or asteroid impact or other accidents) will tend to be located at the outskirts of the Milky Way. The very traits that make ATCs capable of migrating and utilizing resources with high efficiency will tend to make them systematically hard to detect from afar.
Jamin Zuckerman proposed in 1985 that stellar evolution of stars far older than our Sun is an important motivation for civilizations to undertake interstellar migrations. It seems implausible that any but the most extreme conservative societies would opt to wait to be forced to migration by slow and easily predictable process like their star leaving the Main Sequence.
As you would expect, some of these ideas form the story lines of some great science fiction, most vividly in the work of computer scientist Vernor Vinge.
In Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep the idea of ATCs inhabiting low-temperature regions at the boundary of the Milky Way disk and high above the Galactic plane is played out traveling through 'zones of thought.' Faster-than-light travel remains impossible near Earth, deep in the galaxy's Slow Zone--but physical laws relax in the surrounding Beyond, where most of the action takes place and faster-than-light travel is possible but transcendence beyond the Singularity to superhuman intelligence is not. Beyond the Beyond is the Transcend, full of unknowable, godlike "Powers." When human meddling wakes an old Power, the Blight, this spreads like a wildfire mind virus that turns whole civilizations into its unthinking tools.
Is this cool, or what!
Posted by Casey Kazan. Art Credit: Jon Lomberg is one of the world's most distinguished artists inspired by astronomy.
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