Speculative civilizations

Origin and development
Technological development is a very effective way to maximize population, and therefore evolutionary success, over adverse circumstances. Once a sapient species is established on a planet, presuming that it has the physical capability of manipulating tools, it will probably start to bend the environment to its advantage, extracting energy, building instruments and shelters and breeding wild species.

Environment and technology
Also see here and following pages.

While simple tools can be found or made in every environment, a technology as complex as humans' requires the presence (in fact, the abundance) of natural resources to build instruments, weapons, vehicles, buildings and machines. A sterile territory can irreparably stop the development of a civilization: the barren Arctic land denied to the Inuit people timber, farmland and accessible minerals.

Inorganic mineral resources (stone, sand, clay, metals, obsidian, ice, salt, lime, mineral dyes) should exist on any rocky planet, and so should their derivatives (glass, terracotta, concrete). Metals have a key role: they're uniquely malleable and conductive to heat and electricity, so much that an advanced technological civilization isn't likely to exist without an extensive use of metals. It's still possible, of course, to have a complex civilization: Mayas had large cities, figurative art and elaborate writing, advanced math and astronomy, etc., all without using metals except for decorative gold. Anyway, presuming a planet rich in heavy elements in the galactic Disk, metals should be abundant, especially if the planet has a weak gravity or a strong tectonic activity.

Smelting metals requires a powerful and localized source of heat up to several thousands of degrees, such as fire (see below), which in turn requires the direct access to oxidants: it's therefore impossible to smelt metals underwater (or inside any other thalassogen, or in a strongly reducing atmosphere, rich for example in hydrogen compounds), though it could be possible to work to a certain extent softer metals such as gold, copper and lead. Even if other heat sources could be found in an ocean, for example hydrothermal vents, water is too conductive to heat to allow any oceanic blacksmith to get close to them. Metals could be used to cover other objects through electroplating, if electricity is harvested from organisms similar to electric fish and the thalassogen has a high dielectric constant (see the table here).

Other resources (wood, bark, bone, horn, ivory, wax, leather, silk, byssus, purple, coral, etc.) are a part or a byproduct of organisms: it will directly depend from the biochemistry and ecology of the species from which they're collected.

Farming and breeding
The availability of plants and animals (or whatever their extraterrestrial analogue is) apt to domestication has a huge weight on the development of civilizations. Plants are almost always grown for food (except for some textile plants such as flax and cotton): they're usually selected, at least on Earth, for large and nourishing seeds. Areas with a mediterranean climate, with strong seasonal variations, are the most apt, since the plants that inhabit them often live only one year and thus spend all their energy for reproduction, instead of expanding their own body with structural, and usually inedible, matter.

Agriculture will be encouraged in wide arid lands with fertile but very small areas useful to grow crops, such as a river valley (e. g., Nile, Euphrates, Mississippi); if the land is too plentiful, its inhabitants will be able to live there as hunters-gatherers for much longer, as it happened in early Japan. These areas both arid and fertile will likely appear in the belt between the Ferrel and Hadley cells. While agriculture won't likely appear soon near tropical forests, it may be imported and adapted there with forms such as the shifting cultivation (small tracts of land are briefly farmed and then abandoned) and the slash-and-burn (parts of forest are destroyed to gain access to the enriched soil).

Animals can be breeded for a variety of purposes: In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond lists six main factors needed for the full domestication of an animal: Farming and breeding will probably arise and spread faster on continents with a wide orizontal orientation (e.g. Eurasia), since they contain long parallel belts of similar climate, allowing an easier diffusion of domesticated specie from a place to another, while vertically oriented continents (e.g. the Americas) or islands (e.g. New Guinea) are not likely to spread or trade successfully species.
 * It has to be herbivorous or omnivorous, with a varied diet, since the meat that a carnivore has to be fed requires in turn a ten times larger amount of plants for its production: it's far more effective use directly the plants as food. In fact, the only domestic carnivores on Earth are those who partake in hunting or sustain themselves by eating parasites.
 * It has to grow quickly reaching the adult size in a few years: this excludes gorillas and elephants (indian elephants are not domestic, only tamed: they're captured when they're already grown).
 * It has to reproduce easily in captivity: this excludes, for example, vicuñas and leopards.
 * It must not be much aggressive: this excludes grizzly bears (otherwise omnivores easy to feed and quick to grow), buffalos, zebras and rhinoceroses.
 * It must not have an inclination to panic: this excludes gazelles, which are extremely hard to contain.
 * It has to have a hierarchic social structure in which the breeder can take part: this excludes bighorn sheep and deer (with the exception of reindeer), which are social but don't follow a leader as sheep and horses do. The only non-social species ever domesticated are cats and ferrets, none of which are bred in large numbers.

Energy sources
The most common and primitive source of energy that any early civilization will have at its disposal it musclepower, both that of the sapient themselves and of beasts of burden, fueled in turn by food.

Combustion is another simple way to extract energy from matter: it involves chemical reagents combining in presence of a strong oxidiser, releasing heat. This is also what happens in cells when digesting food. Fire is a particularly quick form of combustion, which produces very intense and focused heat, necessary for many processes such as cooking food, baking clay into terracotta and smelting metals (see above). While combustion can occur with different oxidisers, true fire on a large scale requires oxygen: fluorine gas could be used, while copper or iron can burn when exposed to chlorine, but both of these are very unlikely to exist in large amounts.

A carbon-based biochemistry can produce great amount of fossil coal and hydrocarbons (such as oil and methane), excellent fuels; oils and fats can be burned as well as digested, and so can sugar, especially when fermented into alcohol. Hydrogen, which can be produced biologically by splitting water molecules, is an even better fuel: when it burns with oxygen, forming water again, it can produce three times more energy than oil.

Nuclear reactions include fission and fusion. Fission involves splitting atoms of heavy and unstable elements, such as uranium; like metals, this elements will be more common in planets with a weak gravity or a strong tectonic activity, so that they won't sink to the nucleus. Fusion involves instead fusing hydrogen atoms in heavier elements: it's harder to control (in fact, controlled nuclear fusion has never been achieved by humans) but it's far more effective, and hydrogen can be easily obtained by electrolysis of water or other molecules.

While antimatter offers the most efficient mass-to-energy conversion possible (by annihilating itself with an equivalent mass of regular matter) it's very unlikely to be found in significative amounts in the Universe. Its synthesis, of course, would require the same amount of energy that it will produce: antimatter would therefore be an efficient, if impractical, way to stockpile energy, but not a good source of it.

Solar energy can be directly intercepted and used as heat or converted into electricity through photovoltaic cells. On Earth, each square meter receives in average 1.6×107 J of solar energy per day. Remember that the solar irradiation is directly proportional to the luminosity of the star and inversely proportional to the square of the distance, though a thin or thick atmosphere might further increase or reduce this value; the best current photovoltaic cells have an efficiency of 14-17% (they need roughly 6-7 joules of solar light for each joule of electricity produced).

It can also be used indirectly, as wind or hydric energy. Wind energy can be directly converted in rotatory motion, and this in electricity by turbine generators (low-altitude wind flows from colder to warmer areas; see here). The same can be said for hydroelectric power (which is usually obtained thanks to gravity), and for the energy of sea currents, likely analogues of wind power for aquatic civilizations. Tidal power involves turbines put in motion by the vertical flow of water during tides; of course, it requires the presence of a large and near celestial body.

Geothermic energy involves extracting heat from the interior of the planet, usually in volcanic areas: it'd be more efficient on a planet with strong tectonic activity. Geothermic, nuclear and heat solar energy all can be used to produce electricity simply by heating water and using the steam to power a turbine generator.

Wealth
The historical and geographical features of a region affect its wealth and prosperity in several ways. For example, a long history of stable government (China has been stable and unified for most of the last 3000 years) promotes further stability, aided by supportive ideologies, a (ethnically, culturally, etc.) homogeneous population and few natural barriers. Other political factors that help economic development are high education, advanced technology and inclusive political institutions.

Coasts and rivers favour trade; landlocked countries end up poorer than others. If the climatic structure resembles that on Earth, temperate and sub-polar regions will probably be richer than tropical ones because of two factors: The abundance of mineral resources, such as oil and diamonds, is not guaranteed to bring prosperity; in fact, it's more likely to cause corruption and low education (most of the economy is going to be based on resource mining). If a colonial history is present, resource-rich regions with dense population, such as India, are likely to be exploited through forced labor and confiscation, and thus to end up impoverished; resource-poor regions with sparse population, such as Australia, will be forced to invest on productivity and education. This difference will be meaningful long after colonialism will have ended.
 * Since the high temperature and moisture allow parasites to survive outside a host body, and the higher tropical biodiversity offers a wider range of vectors (ticks, mosquitoes, etc.), the tropical belt is more subjected to infective diseases, severely limiting the population. Also, the need for high fertility will force most of the offspring-caring individuals to nurse continuously, keeping them out of the workforce.
 * Agricultural yields (see above) suffer because tropical plants typically invest their energy for growth, and thus in inedible structural matter, and because the higher rainfall and decomposition rate cause the ground to be poorer both in minerals and organic chemicals. Rainfall is also more predictable at higher latitudes, and glaciers enrich the soil in nutrients.

Science
Among the several methods devised by mankind to acquire knowledge, the scientific method (the formulation of an hypothesis to explain observations, followed by experiments to test the prediction based on this hypothesis) has been uniquely effective in the development of both theoretical knowledge and technology. Until a civilization employs scientific thinking, it's unlikely to produce technology more complex than basic machinery (such as clockwork and windmills, which already existed in the late Middle Ages).

Science is a result of many combined lines of thought: the rationalism of greek philosophers (that is, the belief that knowledge can be obtained through logical thinking); the abrahamic idea of a lawmaker god clearly distinct by lawmaking humans, leading to that of a Universe ruled by given laws independent from man (developed in proto-science in the early islamic civilization); the concept of self-interpretation and rejection of authority as a basis of knowledge, spread with the Protestant Reformation; empyrical inductivism, matured in the 17th and 18th-century Europe.

Given this, not every sapient species has to develop science, and certainly many civilizations won't. Those who do are likely to be civilizations with an early technological headstart (see for example the conditions for successful agriculture) and in close contact with several other different civilizations.

Culture and psychology
Besides its material features, a civilization will have a multitude of non-inherited behaviours, values and beliefs, with all the symbols and customs that give them significance, which will influence the way it sees the world, and that are in turn influenced by biology and environment. Human culture displays a huge variety, though there always are common traits called cultural universals (e.g. personal names, law, kin groups, age and prestige status, gender roles, marriage, prohibition of incest, metaphoric language, measuring of time, magical thinking, attempts to control nature, myths, music, body adornment, cooking, weapons, shelters, etc.)

It's not at all easy, anyway, to understand what a inhuman culture might be like. For example, in an ermaphroditic species there would be no place for gender roles, while parthenogenetic species with little or no genetic mixing could have no qualms about incest. What would these beings value? What would they like? What would they believe?

In the 1940s, the anthropologists Kluckhohn and Strodbeck wrote a summary of the main ethical and spiritual values in the form of possible answers to common philosophical questions, which can be combined in any way by a culture (answers in the same column bear no relation to each other) : The topography and climate of the environment will also have heavy repercussions on the culture, the degree of dispersion, the objects of worship, etc. of a culture. At the simplest level, one might imagine "ocean cultures" (Minoan and polynesian people), "mountain cultures" (Incas and Tibetans), "river cultures" (Egyptians and early Chinese), "desert cultures" (Tuareg and Israelites), "forest cultures" (Indians and Amazon people), "grassland people" (Mongols and Comanche) and so on.

Social organization
We'll take for granted that some form of society is necessary for the development of a complex culture and therefore technological advancement. Primates, elephants and cetaceans all live in compact group based on kinship, and they're able to communicate and feel empathy; particularly, primate societies are already large, hierarchical and highly politicized by rivalries and alliances between individuals. Empathy - the perception of the similarity between oneself and others, leading to selfless cooperation and limitation on violence - can be expected to arise in any social species, especially if they live in small and/or viscous populations.

Generally, empathy is stronger the closer is the group: baboon and chimpanzee societies are violently xenophobic towards other. Xenophoby would likely be exacerbated by evident polimorphisms in various populations ("races"). Among humans, the natural aggressivity is channeled into war between societies, sometimes in bloodless ritualized forms such as agonistic sport. Usually, the stronger individuals (young males in primates) will be used for this purpose, but Solenopsis ants use as soldiers the oldest ones.

In primates, males are usually larger than females, thus leading to a general male dominance in most human societies, but among elephants and many cetaceans the opposite would happen. Then there's the case of multiple-gendered or ermaphroditic species; with sequential ermaphroditism (a sex changing into another with age) the dominant sex would probably be the final one. In this case the formation of lifelong familiar bonds could be impossible. Marriage is among the most universal institutions in human societies: each new individual has to be raised and taught for many years by several older ones in order to pass on culture. Human monogamy is a relatively new social construct that doesn't always fit with primates' typical promiscuity, but most birds are truly monogamous by nature.

Xenology gives some examples of terran animals that might be used as models to build extraterrestrial societies :
 * Mammalian groups tend to be centred on the mother-child bond, and therefore on matriarchal structures, with some exceptions. Lion prides, for example, are formed by groups of females with a male (or male brothers) and the cubs; similarly, black bears society are based on solitary mothers that sometimes share their territory with the daughters, while males always hunt alone.
 * Among carnivores, play, prey-catching and aggressivity are especially developed; cats are usually solitary and fiercely territorial, with extreme uneasiness and irritability when enclosed together.
 * Canids such as wild dogs and wolves hunt in packs of several tens of individuals; these packs are highly cooperative and altruistic, with equalitary partition of food and feeding priority given to infants - despite strict dominance hierarchies and violent population control.
 * Wallabies, though strongly individualistic, graze in large mobs (30-50 individuals) that often meet and meld peacefully; aggression is ritualized and rarely dangerous.
 * Beavers live in "cities" inhabited by several families; population is very stable, with low birth and death rates. Different families often work together to build the dams, but each family will defend its lodge from other ones.
 * Prairies dogs live in underground towns with up to a thousand individuals each, divided from other cities by natural boundaries. Each family has its own territory inside the town, which gets passed on culturally.
 * Birds are less promiscuous than most mammals, and more incline to strong pair-bonding, with a heavy involvement of the male in offspring care (after all, newborn birds are not nursed, and eggs can be brooded by either parent).
 * Social spiders live in colonies with thousands of individuals, working together to build a common web, and to capture large preys; otherwise, each spider lives for himself, and injured spiders - or those who lack the colony scent - are devoured by the others.

Logic and spacetime
Also see here, here and following pages.

The psychology (and therefore the knowledge, and the philosophy) of a sapient species will also be strongly influenced by the way it perceives the world through senses: for example, the persistence in time of heat and scents might create a perception of time without a clear distinction between past and present - and language will reflect this lack. After all, many human languages show a great variation in this regard: Hopi language does not have verb tenses that express time, while many others have tenses to distinguish past events that influence present from those that don't.

The perception of time might also be expanded or contracted by the speed of nervous reactions or of the metabolic cycle; perhaps a blue whale, with a heartrate three times slower than a human's, perceives time three times faster. Astronomical (days, years, months, seasons, tides) and biological (generations, periodical migrations, spring blooms, menstruations) cycles will influence more directly the measurement of cultural time.

The understanding of space is even more variable. Depth perception, developed to live in the three-dimensional environment of treetops, allows humans to conceive spatial geometry; wide and flat areas favour instead Euclidean geometry (developed by Egyptians to measure farmland). On a very small planet, a flat environment would be conductive to spherical geometry, by stressing the horizon bending.

A cave-dwelling sapient, or an internal parasite (extremely unlikely case), used to a limited environment, might lack the concept of infinite (and perhaps it would develop hyperbolic geometry, based on surfaces with a negative curvature); a very small one, in a very dense fluid medium, and/or on a world with a weak gravity, might be unable to distinguish top from bottom; one that sees the world with electric or magnetic senses might base its geometry on curved field lines.

Spacial perception also has major psychological and cultural implications: since the main human sense organs are located in the upper part of the body, what is high is "superior", virtuous and active (one stands up to act and lies down to rest), and what is low is "inferior", depraved and passive; the right hand is the dominant hand for most people (70-90%), so it's used for the most important tasks: right is the side of strength and cleanliness, and thus of law and morality; the front is dynamic and future-oriented, the back is passive and past-oriented. In many language, the future is "forward", and the past "backward", because time is commonly represented as a path; but in the Quechua language the future lies behind, because it's unseen.

While the principles of logic and math are universal, their representation can vary too: while Aristotle identified as truth values only "true" and "false", buddhist philosophy recognises four values ("true", "false", "both" and "neither"), jainism seven (various combinations of "true", "false" and "indeterminate"); modern logic admits intermediate truth values, a development that could be easier for sapients that perceive the world through blended gradients of scent and heat. It could be that the prevalence of binary logic in human thought is connected to our bilateral (two-sided) simmetry: Parasky's priapans have a radially symmetric body, and don't see opposite couples with the same immediacy as humans.

The most widespread human numeral system employs ten digits - most likely because human count on their hands, and hands have ten fingers, but every integer above 2 can be used as a basis. Different cultures have used nearly every number up to 30, especially with the 20-digits system (used by Celts, Maya, Yoruba and many others). Since computers use the most simple numeral system, the one with only two digits (1 and 0), the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle suggested that humans could have developed digital technology much earlier if they had four, eight or sixteen (powers of two) fingers.

Religion and spirituality
Also see here and following pages

Ritual behaviours (sequences of specific actions with a determinate social effect) are common among the vertebrates, from the variety of dominance and courtship displays to the rudimentary funeral rites of elephants. Every human culture has developed specific rituals for all the main individual events: birth, acceptation into the community, puberty, marriage, death.

At their root, religions are usually hinged on the origin of life: the maternal womb and the soil in which plants grow are the most ancient and common gods (the same womb-earth equivalence would be equally valid for egg-laying sapient: in fact, eggs are a common symbol of life even for humans). In a subsequent phase (probably with the start of agriculture) these female symbols were replaced by the male seed, believed to be the true origin of lifeforce, and its ecological analogue: rain and the Sun, which "fertilise" Earth and make it fertile. The two principles of life, female and male, are inevitably Mother Earth and Father Heaven (though the arrangement is likely to be different in a species with less or more than two sexes); the objects of worship are celestial bodies, organisms or natural features such as rivers, lakes and mountains.

More mature religions can have a more complex theology, but they still deal with the worship of earth and/or heaven, and the rituals are usually connected to biological and astronomical cycles: generations, the menstrual cycle, months and seasons, the springly renewal of life (survived as Resurrection in the christian Easter), etc. Another common tract is the survival of individual consciousness (or other kinds?) to death, sometimes undifferentiated and equal for anyone (the mesopotamic Arallu, the greek Hades, the ancient jewish Sheol), sometimes based on afterlife justice.

The specific conditions in which a people lives directly shape its beliefs. Abrahamic religions (judaism, christianity and islam), born in an arid environment where every need of life must be created by man, see in everything a deliberate divine design, and hope for a future of rest and abundance, as a messianic kingdom on Earth (for jews) or in the afterlife (for christians and muslims). Conversely, dharmic religions (hinduism, jainism, buddhism, sikhism), born in the tropical seasonless fecundity, see existence as an infinite cycle of rebirths, to be broken through asceticism and rejection of material goods.

In most cases, the rituals of connection with deities include a request for favors (luck, protection or forgiveness), which are repaid with a sacrifice, often animal or even human - sometimes just in a symbolical form (such as the christian Eucharist).

Over these basic elements, finally, there is a complex web of traditions, laws and prohibitions, often arbitrary, and communal rituals, mostly to the purpose of reinforcing group identity.

Art and aesthetics
Also see here and following pages

Alien artistic and aesthetic value are simply unknowable: even in the same species a culture might prefer expression of conflict and turmoil, another order and armony. The only factor that can be deduced from its biology is the dominant sense: human art is mostly visual or acoustic, or both, while tactile or olfactive art is extremely rare (though light and sound, being waves, have the absolute advantage of being easily broadcasted at distance).

The philosopher Abraham Moles classified artworks on the basis of three criteria: the spatial aspect (adimensional, one-dimensional, two-dimensional or three-dimensional), the temporal aspect (static, if it lack an element of time; kinetic, if it varies with time; dynamic, if it's influenced by the viewer) and the perceptive aspect (visual, acoustic, olfactive, tactile, electric, magnetic, etc. or mixed). For example, a concerto for piano is adimensional, kinetic and acoustic; a statue is three-dimensional, static and visual; a movie is two-dimensional, kinetic and mixed; a dance is three-dimensional, dynamic and mixed.

Stimuli of a sense can be classified by intensity and "tone": visual and acoustic tones (colours and pitch) correspond to the wavelength of light and sound; their analogue in other senses could be olfactive "hues", temperature or electric resistence. Even conserving the same sense its artistic rendition can be very variable: the paintings of a species with a bee-like vision will be rich in blue and violet, and UV parts invisible to human eyes; those of a species with gull-like vision will contain mostly orange and red, and equally invisible infrared parts. Sapient rattlesnakes could "paint" with heated materials that emit infrared light.

Ecolocation and electric senses can pass through differente layers of matter, giving a stratified three-dimensional vision on the interior and exterior of an object. The "portraits" of a species with such a perception could be machines (maybe vibrating laminae with echo chambers) that emit a specific sequence of high-pitched sounds that wouln't be visually similar to the object they represent; likewise, they'd see a human painting as a thin block that doesn't resemble the subject at all. Since Doppler effect is much more noticeable with sound than with light, changing the frequence of the portrait would give the appearance of movement.

Even more unusual to human observers would be the chemical art of a species with smell-based perception; their "paintings" might be porous surfaces apparently bare but permeated in different perfumed substances, and their movies would involve a sequence of scents (each of which would influence the following, unless they're rapidly cleared away).

The most important aesthetical criteria will likely be about the physical aspect (sound, shape, temperature, scent...) of their own conspecifics. They will most probably consider three factors:


 * Marks of good health (such as symmetry, regular body proportions, a complete body covering, etc.);

It's not uncommon that sexual selection causes the development of traits detrimental to survival, but precisely for this reason considered marks of fitness and therefore attractiveness.
 * Traits that help survival and procreation (for example strong biological weapons, features linked to sexuality and childbearing, fat storages for desert-dwelling species, dense fur in cold enviroments, etc.);
 * Signals of high social status, if such a thing exist for them: for most of the european history, pale skin and fatness were considered attractive since typical of nobility as opposed to thin and dark-skinned peasants.