What things would be universal knowledge among intelligent civilizations?

[Drunkrobot]

We would first talk to each other in Maths and Physics. Assuming we made contact via radio-which is what is most likely to happen-the only thing we would know we have in common with each other would be the transmitters and receivers we communicate with.

What do you need to create a radio telescope? Obviously, an intimate knowledge of light (Radio waves being light) is required. But there is way more to it than that. The machinery would require electronics to run at the necessary precision to hit a planet light-years away. Advanced materials to build their structure. The dish requires what we call euclidean geometry. Even knowing that those little points of light in the night sky are stars like our own needs astronomy. Even that isn't the full picture. How is that telescope even going to be powered? And most of all, who is going to discover this required knowledge? Only a society that values Maths, Science and Engineering would willingly spare the Euclid's, Galileo's, Newtons, Faraday's and Maxwell's of the world to pursue these secrets of the Universe, instead of making them do something "practical", like become a farmer, or join the military.

[Omicron314]

We are on the verge of launching telescopes that will be able to characterize the atmospheres of Earth-like planets within a few dozen light years. So, Earth's spectral signature has been SCREAMING "Oxygen!" "Water!" "Biology is here!" "Habitable world!" across hundreds (thousands, really) of light years for any reasonably advanced intelligent civilizations to see for the 2.4 BILLION years it has had an oxygen atmosphere, and yet, here we are, no one has invaded or tried colonization. We only see evidence of one origin of life (as all life shares the same DNA bases, protein chiralities, etc), and any serious alien colonization would have left evidence behind (such as a separate tree of life, artifacts, orbiting structures, etc.).

The only logical reason I can think of for an alien invasion is that they might see us as threats. But why would we be threats to them? Already, the pristine and untouched nature of our ideal habitable world argues against the idea that civilizations expand and colonize habitable worlds. So why would we be viewed as a threat when we would would not seek to expand and try to colonize their worlds, invading their territory?

I find it more likely that advanced alien civilizations, if they exist, do not undergo the expensive process of interstellar travel very often, because you can find billions of years of energy and abundant building materials around your own home star. There's no real need to go ANYWHERE, other than just basic exploration- much of which can be carried out from afar with telescopes anyway.

I agree, there is very little reason to worry about the possibility of an extraterrestrial invasion. I was just noting how in Hollywood movies conventional weaponry always seems to work. :\

[NGTOne]

I agree, there is very little reason to worry about the possibility of an extraterrestrial invasion. I was just noting how in Hollywood movies conventional weaponry always seems to work. :\

No matter how advanced your aliens are, speeding bits of pointy metal are still deadly

[magnemoe]

I think because eusociality can cause genetic bottlenecking - a species with defined "castes", with major physiological differences, would have a lower "extinction threshold" - i.e. what percentage of the species has to die before it's no longer genetically sustainable? For the overwhelming majority of mammals (naturally, depending on population), you only need a few thousand individuals to maintain genetic diversity, because all individuals are capable of reproduction and random genetic mixing (whether they want to is another matter - giant pandas, for example). But if your species is reliant on a certain "caste" to do all the reproducing, you may have lowered that threshold significantly - imagine that half the species is reproducers, and half is workers, and only the reproducers can produce more reproducers. What happens if a large number of your reproducers suddenly die, as though by disease? The net result is that there aren't enough reproducers to keep the number of workers high, which eventually means the species hits a negative feedback loop (less workers = less food = less reproducers = less workers, repeat until extinction). The same problem occurs if the number of workers suddenly decreases, though it's a bit more immediate - you don't have to wait for the current generation of workers to die off. The end result either way is that the species is in for extinction within a few dozen generations, and likely less (depending on the severity of the die-off). And this is, naturally, an optimistic example - the ratio of workers to reproducers is usually well over 10:1, and (especially with insects), more like 1000:1.

I imagine that naked mole rats are actually the "tail end" of the mammal-eusociality evolutionary experiment - a species so hyperadapted to its environment, that any change in it might as well be a sentence to extinction, and around long after any of its evolutionary "cousins" have died off.

Note that humans is pretty much the opposite, able to live everywhere from desert to arctic from rain forest to small islands even in prehistoric times.

Another issue if is an so specialized species would be able to create an technological civilization, and if they manage do they manage to adjust to the fast changes who are required, you solve problems but generate new problems fast.

This might also be an trap for many other species, an to rigid society who resist changes, think imperial China. One major danger with an world government as it would be no competitors and probably part of the reason why Europe pulled ahead after medieval times. Lots of countries, if one had say banned printing to protect scribe workplaces it would just started somewhere else.

[Diche Bach]

Yeah it is a very good point that euscociality may lead to both genetic bottlenecking (are you guys evobio grad students or something ; ?) whereas humans by virtue of our individual difference are tremendous adaptable.

If a planet were homogeneous and relatively unchanging, then a eusocial species might actually do better than a more human like 'individualist' species. But on a planet like Earth, which is quite diverse in econiches, and also quite dynamic through time, humans have proven to be tremendously adaptive.

[NGTOne]

Yeah it is a very good point that euscociality may lead to both genetic bottlenecking (are you guys evobio grad students or something ; ?) whereas humans by virtue of our individual difference are tremendous adaptable.

If a planet were homogeneous and relatively unchanging, then a eusocial species might actually do better than a more human like 'individualist' species. But on a planet like Earth, which is quite diverse in econiches, and also quite dynamic through time, humans have proven to be tremendously adaptive.

Almost by definition, a habitable world (given current understanding of biology, at any rate) would be sufficiently diverse as to make an "individualistic" approach to higher life more evolutionarily viable. A habitable planet is an insanely complex system, in which the smallest things can have massive impacts. Consider this example:

There is a small valley in Chad (a country in Africa) called the Bodele Depression. At a certain time of year, the prevailing winds blow nutrient-rich dust and sand from this valley into the Amazon river delta. It's believed that this little valley halfway across the world provides over half of the nutrient-rich silt in the Amazon delta. That's just one tiny example - the whole damn planet is like this, and I'd bet that any other habitable body where sufficiently complex life could arise would be as well.

On another note:

The other problem with eusociality that I didn't touch on earlier is advancement. Consider an intelligent race with two castes: one is small, let's say no more than 0.1% of overall population, and has large brains, but underdeveloped physiques, and is responsible for thought, invention, decision-making, etc., as well as reproduction. The other represents the other 99.9% of the population, and is far less intelligent, but highly capable at physical labour and survival-type tasks due to instinct, and can be trained to perform non-instinctive simple tasks (e.g. farming, the operation of industrial machinery). Like our Earth eusocial animals/insects, the workers are "tied" to a given ruler by instinct

Now imagine that the population of this race is growing - due to the (by nature) highly centralized nature of the political structure, it seems unlikely that large population centers would naturally arise (too much conflict between different "rulers"). Such a species would have a political/social structure not too different from tribal family-clans on Earth, with their rulers sending small, mostly loyal armies against each other in petty feuds (or even ritualized "warfare", with little or no intent towards actual violence, like some pre-colonial tribes in Africa), and no real geopolitical change ever arising from it.

Such an environment would be exceedingly hostile to technological advancement and the transfer of ideas - clan A develops widget B, while clan B develops widget A, and both are needed to create the printing press, but neither is willing to share, since the rulers have their feuds, while the drones aren't smart enough to understand the implications of the widgets or the printing press. Even if regional technological breakthroughs were achieved, they would take far longer to spread around the world than they did on Earth. On Earth, for instance, iron smelting was discovered, and almost overnight, everyone had switched from bronze weaponry, armour, and tools to iron. I would imagine that, for the race I just described, such a change would take centuries, or even millennia, to diffuse thoroughly throughout the major population groups.

Eusociality also raises some interesting social implications (related to the warfare comment above) - in clan-based societies on Earth, an individual who willingly left their clan would oftentimes become a pariah. Even if they were accepted into another clan, they were usually the lowest of the low, and their descendants wouldn't be much better off. I would imagine roughly the same thing happening with an intelligent eusocial species - all the eusocial species on Earth communicate by pheromones or movement or sound patterns, which tend to be unique to a given family group, and can lead to rejection by other groups should the outcast come into contact with a different group.

EDIT: Thanks to Moon Goddess for pointing out that Chad is in Africa, not South America. Damn, I must have been tired when I wrote that.

EDIT 2: Added some new comments about the potential higher social organization of intelligent eusocial species.

Edited September 7, 2013 by NGTOne

[-Velocity-]

Not quite sure what you mean by "Earth's pristine nature?"

Simply that Earth has been subject to no interference by any of these hypothetical intelligent races, at least, no obvious interference, and the likely explanation is no interference at all. We are "all natural", "pristine". If intelligent life is common and they like to settle habitable extrasolar planets, as all the tradditional science fiction stories go, then Earth would have been colonized billions of years ago.

Anyway, have a read of that wiki page if it interests you! It seems to be a pretty well done page. The question of how common life is 'out there' is a bit OT for what the OP asks so we might want to start a separate thread if you want to talk about that more.

I frequently read Wikipedia; I am fairly certain I already read that one. Edit: I don't know if I did or not, but most everything in there I at least read somewhere else.

All that said, I do not begrudge anyone leaning one way or the other in the 'debate,' as long as everyone is willing to acknowledge that relative rarity or abundance of extraterrestrial life is an about equal possibility at this stage of our knowledge that is good enough for me. In 5 or 10 years when we have even more data on these exoplanets, the balance of evidence one way or another might well shift, and shift quite dramatically. Even though we may be many generations from getting anywhere near any other star, it is nonetheless a very exciting time to be alive in large part because of the incipient revelations of exoplanetary astronomy.

You're not going to find much disagreement here. I'm just surprised to find someone else who actually cares about science, I thought I was the only one. Really, honestly, no one that I know personally actually finds science and knowledge exciting. It's pretty ironic that most folks will respond to news about science with the remark, "I don't care, how does that affect me?", while voraciously watching every single video they can find of whatever trashy celebrity is currently in the news. Oh and of course, then when science comes out with something that doesn't conform to their cherished notions of how the universe should work, then they will be the first to tell the scientist to how wrong they are. Stupidity, plus being too stupid and arrogant to even realize that an expert in a field might know more about it than you do, that takes the cake. Oh well, I guess someone has to clean out the toilets, right?

But anyway, I should have probably stopped already, this is too far off topic.

Edited September 6, 2013 by |Velocity|

[Jackissimus]

No matter how advanced your aliens are, speeding bits of pointy metal are still deadly

Not necessarily:

Edited September 6, 2013 by Jackissimus

[magnemoe]

A flawed assumption. It depends on key discoveries. It might well be that another civilisation discovers a trinary system.

No as it would be vastly more complex. Yes you could operate with multiple voltage levels on the transistors however the this would require so much supporting electronic it would be less effective. Note its done for flash memory, but flash is just huge memory banks who are slow compared with other electronic.

the mechanical calculators even the complex ones tended to use 10 digs. Electronic ones was either analog or digital.

[NGTOne]

No as it would be vastly more complex. Yes you could operate with multiple voltage levels on the transistors however the this would require so much supporting electronic it would be less effective. Note its done for flash memory, but flash is just huge memory banks who are slow compared with other electronic.

the mechanical calculators even the complex ones tended to use 10 digs. Electronic ones was either analog or digital.

Not entirely accurate. Ternary digital computers HAVE been developed, and they were actually more energy-efficient and less costly to produce than their contemporaries. It's also believed that ternary computer systems using light rather than electricity as an information transmission medium (fiber optic cables rather than copper circuit board traces) could represent the future of computing - ternary computers are actually more efficient at certain kinds of math, primarily subtraction, than binary ones.

Ternary computers didn't take off because, even when the first digital one was constructed in 1958, binary was already the established standard (and had been for a couple of decades). A few more demonstration and experimental models were built, but the whole idea petered out by the mid-70s.

[magnemoe]

Not entirely accurate. Ternary digital computers HAVE been developed, and they were actually more energy-efficient and less costly to produce than their contemporaries. It's also believed that ternary computer systems using light rather than electricity as an information transmission medium (fiber optic cables rather than copper circuit board traces) could represent the future of computing - ternary computers are actually more efficient at certain kinds of math, primarily subtraction, than binary ones.

Ternary computers didn't take off because, even when the first digital one was constructed in 1958, binary was already the established standard (and had been for a couple of decades). A few more demonstration and experimental models were built, but the whole idea petered out by the mid-70s.

Now I learned something new within my field, I'm an software developer but has studied computer design and even build an simple cup from logical blocks at university.

Yes it should work, I thought you was thinking of storing or handling data by using two different voltages in addition to zero, not -1,0 and 1.

And yes lots of stuff might be different, Larry Niven had an fun note, an alternate world where the intelligent species came from wolfs, they never had an pollution problem simply as they could not stand the smell. Downside is that it would make starting with industry far harder.

[Moon Goddess]

There is a small valley in Chad (a country in South America) called the Bodele Depression. At a certain time of year, the prevailing winds blow nutrient-rich dust and sand from this valley into the Amazon river delta. It's believed that this little valley provides over half of the nutrient-rich silt in the Amazon delta. That's just one tiny example - the whole damn planet is like this, and I'd bet that any other habitable body would be as well.

I need to make a correction to this to give it the proper impact. Chad, and thus the Bodele Depression, is in Africa, not South America, (I'm sure it was a typo NGTOne)

Yes that's right, A valley in Africa, is providing the nutrients for a jungle in South America almost the other side of the planet.

The ecosystem is crazy interlinked and complex.

[NGTOne]

I need to make a correction to this to give it the proper impact. Chad, and thus the Bodele Depression, is in Africa, not South America, (I'm sure it was a typo NGTOne)

Yes that's right, A valley in Africa, is providing the nutrients for a jungle in South America almost the other side of the planet.

The ecosystem is crazy interlinked and complex.

Yeah, that's my bad >.<

I was drop-dead exhausted when I wrote that >.<

[Requiem762]

Math and physics seems to be the best assumption the hard part of that though is that all the different races would have different units of measurement for us to figure out...... Why can't everything be done in metric

[magnemoe]

Math and physics seems to be the best assumption the hard part of that though is that all the different races would have different units of measurement for us to figure out...... Why can't everything be done in metric

An meter is around 1/40.000 of the circumference of earth, unlikely that an alien will be using meters. And yes the 40.000 part is done because its an good suitable length for us. An larger or smaller race might prefer another length.

Main issue would be language, it would be totally different from any human languages. Might be outside of our range of hearing. However it would probably be sound.

You could do visual, sign language don't have a so much lower bandwidth or something like chameleon skin, downside it require that you look at the speaker

[Xeldrak]

Well, binary is not necessary to build a computer - you can go ternary too!

On the other hand, if a species can build a computer, it should be able to calculate in any base. So basic mathematical priciples and geometrics should be known to all intelligent civilizations.

Also: Periodic chart - it might me arranged in a different way, but I would basically be the same.

[Pds314]

I think MOST things would be universal knowledge.

Considering that the majority of people would probably have memories in the range of yottabytes due to brain upgrades, and would likely have encyclopedias in their head, their knowledge would likely be the vast majority of useful non-duplicate publicly available information.

If they really needed to, they could connect to the internet or talk with someone else in the room via radio (which they would do on a continuous basis from within their brain, possibly even semi-voluntarily and subconsciously)

In other words, knowledge would cease to be valuable except for private knowledge, this is already happening today in that anything can be Googled certainly within a few minutes of a question being asked, people simply aren't stuck wondering why the moon orbits the Earth or why whatever else happens anymore.

Then there is processing and bandwidth improvements, we can perceive and focus on a small amount of information in a given period, whereas beings from an advanced civilization, the ones born post-singularity anyway, would have instant mental access to gigabytes or terabytes or more every second, they would be able to process it all in real time, the result of this is that they would learn, more-or-less download the methodology and reasoning for all mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, programming etc.

They wouldn't necessarily be any SMARTER than us, but having total access to information would definitely make it seem like they were, they could, in general, when offline, solve any variant of any problem we as a society have solved to this point using the standard methods of doing, remember most of their culture(s), etc.

When online, they would be able to more-or-less perform any function anyone in their society could mentally perform, including so-called muscle memory for a similarly sized being.

Basically, they would be nigh-omniscient ninjas who DID read your last Blog post even though your a random nobody they've never talked to before.

And they also know everything about their environment, tricks of perception would always fail, they would remember everything crystal-clear.

So they would basically know everyone from their and every other world they communicate with's life story and ideas.

Which would also eliminate the worse ideas by having literally millions of people yelling that the idea is incorrect.

More-or-less, they'd be Borg-like collective consciousness, every relevant bit would be given by news agencies, They would likely be able to host secluded networks as well, limiting access to a small group of nearby individuals while simultaneously talking on the internet.

The spread of common knowledge would be instantaneous, the speed of light being the only limiting factor for the spread of the latest discoveries.

Either way, It would most likely segregate crackpots away simply by accident, due to the fact that people will tend to choose the explanation that works, over the one that doesn't, and since they have an entire planet to test and memory to show it, they would basically show examples once to disprove it and it would be ingrained in their memory for the rest of time.

Again, omniscient robotic super-ninjas with highly cooperative tendencies.

[Pds314]

Honestly, I think if they were, say 20 LY away, they would probably know everything from 20 years ago broadcast on the radio about US.

So they may not be able to predict today's world perfectly, but they would likely devote considerable effort to aging worlds they hear about into realistic ones in the present time.

Also, science that could be done mentally would go incredibly fast, such that they may reach plateaus in mentally computable information multiple times an hour, do a quick physics experiment according to just-made blue prints, than race ahead to the future.

This also means that even a few years like that could lead to the entire world being stagnant in terms of new information until experiments requiring large amounts of time and resources are done.

As manufacturing and whatnot got exponentially more efficient, the next generation would come, they would likely be composed of fusion-powered nanites, quickly turning their entire world into universal computer-constructor material.

This would also result in the notion of individual beings being thrown out the window, the idea that one nanite would be alive and alone is unthinkable.

Now, they would, over the next few minutes, learn to exploit every single physics quirk in the universe and how to optimally exploit it. Generation three would be born, as their star system is converted to more of them, the amount of energy released in this transformation could exceed that released by a supernova, but they would likely just turn transparent to the resulting blast.

Generation three would either use warp drives or if not possible, antimatter or zero-point energy to accelerate to near the speed of light in a near-instant fashion, thanks to their primarily subatomic nature, they would survive this acceleration easily.

After this point, they would basically accelerate to the nearest star, make more of them, etc, carrying on the prime directive of life, they would have fully learned physics and whatnot to the highest possible extent, possessing all meaningful information that enters their sphere of influence.