h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

' don't know the details of how exactly we'd get to Type III and who would govern and how they'd govern. It is a complex affair. But surely we all agree that whilst planetary political systems have their problems, the system we have today isn't perfect either?'

I'd agree with that, certainly; but it still doesn't follow that we ought to aim for Type III, or for global unification. Also, given that this is a thread about world unification, and that you advocated world government in your earlier post, the 'complex affair' is rather difficult to ignore.

I think we should be aiming for Type III, or something similar, because it is the logical way for a civilisation to advance, albeit eventually. It make take millenia, and so long as we can overcome problems like the uranium barrier, ecological collapse, astronomical disasters and economical instabilities, we should in the future be aiming to be able travel through space quickly and easily in order to obtain energy from plentiful supplies in the universe, and colonise the galaxy accordingly.

The 'complex affair' is not for me to work out because I am neither a politician nor anybody connected with politicians, and whilst I may have my opinion, I can't influence the governments very easily right now.

Our fragmented society at the moment is not allowing us to co-operate as easily as if we were 'united' in a solid political and economical way. The trade of nuclear weapons between individual countries is becoming a threat to our security, and makes the world 'feel' unsafe for many people, but if the world had a global supply of nuclear weapons that everybody shared, then there would be little point in having a war, thus making the world safer...

...maybe. But it's complex of course. Obviously we don't want to get into a communist government, but we need some middle path of unification to achieve the goals as stated above.

'I think we should be aiming for Type III, or something similar, because it is the logical way for a civilisation to advance'

We still have a problem with how we're using the word 'advance'. I can't see any reason to suppose that spatial or technological advancement would necessarily be accompanied by, say, moral advancement.

I'm not sure whether you've given the proposed obtaining of 'energy from plentiful supplies' as support for your assertion that aiming for Type III is 'the logical way for a civilisation to advance', or whether you've taken the assertion to be axiomatic. If the latter -- show me the logic! If the former -- why do we need plentiful energy? Not for its own sake, but for what it can do for us; so to say that we ought to develop in a particular direction because we need plentiful energy, and that this constitutes advancement, is not a complete explanation. What of the ends to which the energy would be the means? Do they constitute advancement? Can they be shown to be important enough for it to be the case that we logically 'should' pursue them?

Another point: are we really slaves to some sort of Hegelian logic of development? Our primitive ancestors followed the logic, one might say, of hunter-gathering (or died); but the development of civilisation has seen us reduce the extent to which our lives are governed by necesity, and move towards choice and non-utility-based lifestyles. I still cannot choose whether to eat, if I am to survive; but I can choose whether I use the element of civilisation that is h2g2, and I do so without asking myself whether my doing so constitutes 'logical' development. Moreover, the arts are widely thought of as one of the identifying marks of civilisation; but they are based, not on logic, but on aesthetic taste. So it could be argued that civilisation develops away from rigid necessity and the constraints of pure logic.

'I can't influence the governments very easily right now.'

Even supposedly democratic governments in one's own country can, indeed, be problematic. Which makes me wonder how a global government could be prevented from deciding that said government's satus and survival was more important than the distant dream of Type III -- especially if many more people were to decide that the 'complex affair' was best left to politicians.

'Our fragmented society at the moment is not allowing us to co-operate as easily as if we were 'united' in a solid political and economical way.'

I'm not sure exactly how you're using the word 'us'; neither am I sure in what sense you consider society to be fragmented.

I suggest that the greatest obstacle in the way of global co-operation in pursuit of Type III is not pluralism, but the existence of vast numbers of people like me who don't actually agree with you. Such is civilisation, which presumably has advanced logically to this state of multiple opinions. The human race is not the homogenous entity your posts sometimes imply it is. It is not the case that we are all basically the same and would naturally agree with one another were our society different; we really are different people.

Your use of the word 'solid' is interesting; to me it implies rigidity. Does civilisation advance through being rigid? According to the theory of paradigm shifts, science advances by having its entire conceptual framework adjusted, typically by a few pioneers. Freedom and pluralism may be sources of potential disorder, but they also make possible the developments that push our civilisation forwards.

'The trade of nuclear weapons between individual countries is becoming a threat to our security, and makes the world 'feel' unsafe for many people, but if the world had a global supply of nuclear weapons that everybody shared, then there would be little point in having a war, thus making the world safer...'

Countries don't cause wars. People cause wars. People arguing over what to do with a set of nuclear armaments of which they all claimed ownership could cause a really nasty war; but that wouldn't be a problem, because power over the armaments would presumably reside with the world government, which would then be ideally placed to assert its dominance over all the people who ignored the 'complex affair'.

If the planet advances to the condition that there is only one country, i.e. Earth, then what is the need for weapons at all? Granted, there may still be a need for small-arms for police officers, but I see no requirement for nuclear weapons, large air forces, armies, tanks, warships etc. Who do you fight when there's only one side?

The global government would require weapons in order to ensure that no group (such as a group of religious fundamentalists; I wonder how that example popped into my head...) could develop some weapons and then overthrow the world government. If the world government had only small arms, then it would not have much of a head start over any group entering an arms race with it. It would have the advantage of resources, and hence would win in the long run _if_ it survived the initial attack, but the enemy would have moved first. Better, surely, from the world government's perspective, to give them a hard time.

In a world of around six billion there is unlikely ever to be only one side. You are the world government.

Sorry, that last sentence should be the first sentence of this post, which asks you how you could act to resolve any conflict that did arise between two groups if telling them to be reasonable failed and threats of the use of small arms did not impress. The credibility of the world government would be reliant on people's getting along -- which removes one of the main arguments for a world government, viz. its role in reducing conflict.

Stop using the threat of small arms. Just fire them.

There are a lot of issues here, I agree. I can only give my own opinion, and I'll try to explain my reasoning further:

Definition of the word 'advance' in my understanding: the maturing of the human civilisation in terms of its overall knowledge of the universe, how better the quality of life is for its people is, how much technology changes to suit people's needs better, amongst many other things.

'Moral advancement' presumably means the maturing of our ethics; I think this is a problem in its self that could earn a separate discussion. But maybe if we have better technology to help us in our life, then there will be less 'need' for crime.

Obtaining plentiful supplies of energy, I thought, would be vital for an expanding civilisation that needs to meet the demands of more people. With more people we will naturally need more space, and extrasolar colonisation would self-evidently require an industrial revolution and so on. And this plentiful energy supply can be found in parts of the universe like the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, and the antimatter and 'dark energy' around the galaxy (and even in parallel universes...)

Energy allows us to 'advance' more. Gaining more energy allows us to travel further, which is neatly another conventional meaning of advancement. I think we should pursue it in the interests of population increase and to power the technology that would be necessary in meeting such demands.

And of course I'm not trying to say that this is the only way to advance. Reaching a type III civilisation, or a civilisation that has advanced equally far in whatever area, does not necessarily mean we need a planetary political government. It might mean we need something more than that. Maybe the 'government' should be a big computer underground that keeps track of what everyone's doing, I don't know.

I think you are also assuming that when I say planetary political system I mean 'over-arching all powerful government'. But I could mean any form of planetary political system, including the computer system that I mentioned above; maybe a 'team' republic where the population comes up with suggestions that it feeds back into the rest of the population via open collaboration and implements on unanimous agreements, or something along those lines. It could mean anything, but anything done on a planetary scale that governs.

Definition of 'us': the human race.

Definition of 'fragmentation': the way the world is divided up into 193 nations with such different laws. I am not suggesting this is a bad thing, but I am of the opinion that it makes things somewhat 'disconnected' in the sense that you are not a citizen of Earth, but a citizen of the UK or the US or France and so on.

I shouldn't have put the word 'solid'. I just meant something defragmented I suppose. But really I think the planetary political system should be flexible (I've mentioned this in a previous post somewhere).

I agree with Reddyfreddy about the nuclear weapons. We wouldn't need them anymore in a planetary political system; we shouldn't even have them now. We could use the same concepts as nuclear weapons in the future in order to obtain energy, but using the nuclear force as a means of destruction is just suicidal, and even more so if we had a planetary political system.

And I agree that there are differing opinions on the matter. And I agree that it's people that cause wars. But really we ought to be able to discuss all this between the governments of the nations on this planet and work it out so that it suits everyone. I don't intend to imply that I have the difinitive solution. I am stuck to think of a good one to be honest.

Planetary political systems might be considered to be near communism, whereas fragmentation is leaning right; and democracy doesn't work in all situations either because of the Flaw that I'm sure we all know about. So we really need to think of something totally different, something revolutionary, but I don't know what it is and where to begin.

'Obtaining plentiful supplies of energy, I thought, would be vital for an expanding civilisation that needs to meet the demands of more people.'

It isn't necessarily the case that an advanced civilisation would have far more people than exist now; in the U.K., a 'first world' country, families now tend to be quite small, with large numbers of children being more of a financial burden than the asset they used to be when they could be sent out to work, and contraception being far more reliable than was once the case. So perhaps civilisation 'logically' develops towards small populations. I'd have thought Earth's diminishing supply of natural resources would be a greater spur to exploration, although the sort of grand expansion you envisage would not be necessitated.

Population expansion, colonisation and the acquisition of vast amounts of energy are all means to an end -- Type III -- that I maintain need not be accepted as a necessary goal. It may be to many a desirable one; but it is one thing for something to be desired, and another for it to be the case that it _ought_ to be attained.

'democracy doesn't work in all situations either because of the Flaw that I'm sure we all know about'

I can think of several things you might mean by that, but I'm not sure which you do mean.

'And of course I'm not trying to say that this is the only way to advance. Reaching a type III civilisation, or a civilisation that has advanced equally far in whatever area, does not necessarily mean we need a planetary political government. It might mean we need something more than that. Maybe the 'government' should be a big computer underground that keeps track of what everyone's doing, I don't know.

I think you are also assuming that when I say planetary political system I mean 'over-arching all powerful government'. But I could mean any form of planetary political system, including the computer system that I mentioned above; maybe a 'team' republic where the population comes up with suggestions that it feeds back into the rest of the population via open collaboration and implements on unanimous agreements, or something along those lines. It could mean anything, but anything done on a planetary scale that governs.'

My supposition was based heavily on your assertion that you weren't qualified to work out the details of the planetary political system because you were neither a politician nor someone associated with politicians; which seemed to me to imply that the running of the system was to be left to politicians. I also worry about people proposing a New World Order without having worked out even the elemental details; it seems to me that the new world could be very easily hijacked under such circumstances.

You've already committed yourself to the view that we ought to be aiming for Type III 'or a civilisation that has advanced equally far in whatever area'. If a global political system developed that allowed the human collective to choose a path that you would not accept as advancement, and it did so, it would seem logically impossible for you to accept this, since it would be inconsistent to hold that we ought to create a certain sort of political system in order to advance, but that a given political system could override the necessity of advancement; having identified 'advancement' as that towards which we ought to aim, and placed it above political systems, which are to be means to it as an end, you would be placing political self-determination above advancement, contradicting the axiom that we ought to aim for advancement as our ultimate goal. Moreover, since your definitions of 'advancement' twice include the word 'better', it appears that you identify advancement with the good; and so to hold self-determination to be better than advancement would be to hold it to be more advanced than advancement, or better than the good, which is absurd. Hence I cannot see how you could consistently accept a political system that did not bring it about, irrespective of the will of the human collective, that Type III or its equivalent was aimed for, unless it fortuitously happened that the will of the collective did not dissent from that aim. Hence self-determination would not matter to you, and you would have no reason for preferring a system that allowed it over one that did not; indeed, theose that did not would be more likely to bring about the desired goal. Of course, you could include self-determination in the definition of advancement -- but then you would be logically unable to accept a decision by the collective to turn away from self-determination.

I apologise for any pain caused by my rather convoluted argument; I also hope I've managed to iron out any errors even at this late hour. (I've no doubt that any that are there will be pointed out to me soon enough.)

Oh, and as far as shooting people is concerned... If you shoot people who can't shoot back, that's liable to be termed a 'massacre'. If you shoot people who can shoot back, then so much for getting rid of war.

I have no idea what you two chaps said above. Brevity is a virtue.

I have a bit of one and it was fascinating.

'Brevity is a virtue.'

Are you therefore going to dissent from the long, long slog to Type III? Will the global political system let you?

You are very knowledgeable, RFJS, and I congratulate you on your extensive arguments of methodology. May I ask you, therefore, what your own idealised version of how humans should 'advance' is, and what goals you think we should be aiming for on a long term period?

The Flaw in democracy that I was thinking of was the major one that occurs when you have more than two election candidates and the results for any party other than the winner adds up to the majority of the electorate. Do you know any other flaws in democracy?

As I say, I'm not the one who's going to work out the details of how humans best advance, and whether we advance at all, neither do I have the qualifications to be entrusted with such a task. And as you say, maybe politicians shouldn't be entrusted with it either. Should it therefore be a collective effort in your opinion?

As for the most convoluted part of your argument, I can only respond that I must have made some logical inconsistencies in my posts; personally I don't check through to make sure everything is absolutely logically sound with reference to all of my previous posts. My opinion is vague, and I shall reiterate that I think there are many ways that we might 'advance'; my own opinion is not under any circumstances the definitive answer and I am not going to argue with the government if they advance in a certain way that contradicts my personal opinion of advancement, because they'd just ignore me.

I'm also not quite sure what you are getting at about my definition of advancement. The criteria that I proposed as advancement were separated by commas and constitute separate entities, thus the bettering of the quality of life is one criterion (which suggests industrial acceleration to increase global GDP); and the bettering of how technology evolves for the needs of the people is another criterion; and both uses of the word 'better' just serve to imply that the situation is more suitable, advantageous, attractive and/or improved than the situation that we have at the moment and have had in the past in those specific aspects of the respective criteria.

However, 'advancement' is a subjective and somewhat ambiguous term. My dictionary just says 'promotion in rank, status etc' and 'improvement or development'.

But, I don't know why I bothered to mention this Type III business in the first place because I reckon that very soon humanity will be wiped out before they can get to these advanced stages. It might be due to nuclear war, astronomical disasters, ecological collapse and a whole range of other things.

Finally, I agree that advanced civilisations need not necessarily be growing in population, but I was under the impression that on a world scale the population was increasing, and that by around 2070 there will be 10 billion people in the world. It may peak at this point, but surely with 10 billion people we will need nearly twice as much energy, and would certainly benefit from extra space (i.e. another planet to colonise), making colonisation and advancement in this sense perhaps beneficial.

Thanks for the compliment!

The other main Flaw in democracy in my view is that the most persuasive candidate is not necessarily the candidate best suited to the office in question; conequently power tends to go to people whose qualification for wielding it is that they are good at selling themselves. I also see no particular reason to believe that I should accept a decision merely because it has majority support; I expect a decision to be supported by arguments if it is to be binding.

As for my 'own idealised vision'... I'm not sure that there is any ideal direction of development. For example, technological development can be appealing for many reasons, but some people find it alienating; indeed, some find it appealing _and_ alienating at various times. Besides, I'd like to think that the future will offer new possibilities that haven't occurred to me, and that therefore wouldn't be part of my vision.

I perhaps think of 'advancement' more in psychological/cultural/ideological terms than in practical ones; for example, I am inclined to think of the person who looks at the world in a spirit of inquiry, or of aesthetic judgment, or of imagination, as being more advanced than the person who looks without ever reflecting, even though the act of looking is outwardly the same. Admittedly this may just reflect my prejudices as the type of person who reads for a degree in philosophy, but it seems to me to be consistent with the development of what is generally termed 'civilisation': the development of the arts and sciences, the possibility of a life not purely devoted to practical matters of survival, etc. So I'd expect development further away from pure utility, as more tasks become automated, and towards a more aesthetic approach to life, so to speak. (I was going to write 'contemplative', and to a certain extent I should expect that to be true, but I don't realistically expect that the human capacity for strong emotion would diminish; neither do I think it would necessarily be a good thing if it did.) Of course, this would probably create new vices as well as new virtues; but our improving capacity for complex thought should give us the best possible chance of dealing with them.

My not-terribly-well-expressed point about your definitions was to do with my impression that you were identifying advancement with the increasingly 'good'; in two of your examples you used the word 'better'. This seemed to me to imply that the more 'advanced' something is, the better it is; hence the most advanced thing presumably would be the summum bonum, the highest good, and so to aim at the most advanced would be to aim at the highest good. My thinking was that it would follow logically that your preferred system of government would be that most likely to achieve the highest good, since to prefer a different system would be to favour that system over the achievement of the highest good, and to favour something over the highest good, i.e. to consider it better than what one considered the highest good, would be illogical, since it would involve thinking that something was better than the highest possible good. (I've introduced the word 'highest' for the sake of clarity; 'better than the good' still works in the argument, but talking in terms of degrees of goodness hopefully makes things less vague.) Since a political system that allowed the human collective to choose not to pursue the summum bonum seemed less likely reliably to keep aiming at it than one that did not allow the human collective to make that choice, it seemed to me that you would have difficulty preferring political freedom to the absence thereof without illogically deeming it better than the highest good, and would therefore have to opt either for the dominant world government you professed not necessarily to prefer to other systems, or possibly for a refusal to choose. There was a bit more to the argument, but that was 'basically' it.

I now have to worry about whether my own vision can get around the argument. I'm going to argue that the psychological development I referred to involves movement away from necessity and towards self-determination and creative development, and that therefore such development is not true movement towards the summum bonum, and hence not true advancement, if it is forced. That could develop into a debate about the nature of education, free will and what is it to be 'forced', but I'll lay that aside for now.

The world's population is increasing, yes, but then, large parts of the world are still not terribly 'advanced'. Conceptually, I don't think an 'advanced' civilisation has to be a large one; however, on a factual basis I'm prepared to concede that point, since the U.N.'s demographic projections for the next few decades predict that the global population will keep increasing.

'I reckon that very soon humanity will be wiped out before they can get to these advanced stages. It might be due to nuclear war, astronomical disasters, ecological collapse and a whole range of other things.'

Now there's an incentive to advance technologically, spread out from Earth, etc. -- appealing to our basic survival instincts. Then again, if its appeal is to our basic survival instincts, is it really advancement?

Right. Having finally set out some ideas of my own, I look forward to seeing whether anyone will dissect them. Thus does philosophy advance... or does it?

The EU works because all the member states are roughly economically equal. It stems from the European Coal and Steel Community. The idea at the time being if the core industries were tied together between countries very tightly, they could never go to war again. The problem with a World Federation would be that there is a huge gulf in the strength of countries like the USA and say Libya's economies and so it would be impossible to interconnect them without severely hampering the economic strength of the strong country thereby reducing the standard of living there. That is my understanding of it anyway, although i could be wrong

oops, sorry if that was really off topic i got confused by the layout and thought there were only 20 posts so i was replying to the 19th one or something. Am embarassed now

Dissection of these 'speculative' - for want of a better word - concepts would probably take hours if we are to go into detail. Philosophy, as I often understand it, is almost always subjective, and I think sometimes even deliberately unprovable or taxing for the brain at least.

Firstly, if civilisation is going to 'advance' - in any sense of the word - it will need to survive in the first place. That at least is explicity agreed. To survive, it needs to overcome the most pressing issues facing it (as well as performing the crucial tasks we do as humans): that of, for example (and in no particular order), global warming, nuclear warfare, asteroid collision threats, Microsoft and so on. And as you say, one of the best ways of surviving these things is to run away, or at least to spread our population out across the solar system so that there is less chance of the entire human race being destroyed.

Of course, colonisation of other planets is only one solution, but I think it's the best solution because eventually the Sun will die, destroying the Earth and all of its life. This won't be for about 5 thousand million years of course, but at least it gives us plenty of time to organise our escape.

And of course in order to survive that fate we will need to set up camp elsewhere, and to do that we will obviously need energy - lots of it. However, the question is, where do we best get this energy from? If we need a lot of it, then the best sources are not on our planet. And we can't get off the planet without the energy (at least probably not far enough and quick enough). This appears to be catch-22, but, if we harbour all of the energy resources that we can possibly muster from _every_ nation, then we may have enough to get to a more plentiful source of energy. Maybe. And from there we will have enough energy to take everybody off the planet, or at least half of us, and colonise somewhere else. And what I was getting at before, I think, was that the best way to gather up this international energy resource, is by having a planetary political system, because there are no territorial aspects of ownership of the resources.

What I think you are trying to say is that advancement in your opinion is not as practical and necessary as the advancement I describe above, but geared towards psychological and cultural advancement. And of course this advancement is just as valid for a civilisation as any other, and indeed may be essential in getting people to leave the planet. Their minds will need to be so psychologically inclined to comprehend the necessity in leaving to colonise another planet. Also, of course, if people's psychological outlook on life is 'advanced' then perhaps it may mean they are less likely to commit a crime, or alternatively, they are cleverer to get away with one.

How do you propose that civilisation advances in the psychological and cultural way you describe? Naturally a degree in philosophy would help. I like philosophy myself; in a way one can sometimes 'invent' proof for any surrealistic concept and deny that it can be disproved. That could be fun. But anyway... have I strayed away from the point about a world without frontiers?

I have just noticed your post, Sir Auron, and I think that's a very good point. I think in order to have such a planetary political system you will also need a planetary economical system, as you suggest, which could 'balance out' the global living standards.

But in order to stop the countries with a high quality of life from diminishing rapidly we would need an economy that was flexible and liberal in the distribution in money. How about this idea: the planetary political 'government' - in whatever form - has a potentially infinite amount of 'virtual' spending money, a bit like the e-currencies we get with PayPal and so on. The rest of the world has a variable amount of money as they do now, all stored as virtual credits on a computer. The government can take and remove money from anybody as well as add money on, but of course they wouldn't need taxes, they'd just need a carefully worked out budget. By making sure that every 'nation' had just as much money as the others, the quality of life would be more or less equal.

Something like that? Maybe? I'm not economist either, by the way.

Don't worry, Sir Auron, it's more readable than Baryonic's essays! Blimey, I came across a post that I didn't have to hold the page down key to ignore!

'Philosophy, as I often understand it, is almost always subjective, and I think sometimes even deliberately unprovable or taxing for the brain at least.'

I take it you're thinking of continental philosophy (and possibly Indian and/or Far Eastern). I'm largely studying the analytic tradition, which is the other sort of philosophy: rigorous, objective proofs, in formal logic for preference. Analytic philosophers tend, unsurprisingly, not to generate grand, memorable theories, but then, the argument is more philosophically interesting than the conclusion; as someone (I forget who) once said, we used to think we were looking for a needle in a haystack. We've now decided that the needle may not be there, and that even if it is we'll probably never find it -- but we've also decided that we really like hay.

I don't actually disagree with the idea of space exploration; I simply think that it would constitute 'advancement' only in a very limited sense, and that it consequently would not warrant global unification. Global co-operation, perhaps; but just as I can co-operate with people outside my own family, so governments can co-operate if the will exists. It's not fragmentation that stops co-operation, but disagreement, which humans can achieve under any system that allows multiple opinions to be voiced.

Psychological and cultural advancement will presumably continue in the way they previously have: by movement into the space of the adjacent possible. One can't bring it about by one's will that someone will exhibit startling creativity, or have the brainwave that ushers in a new scientific paradigm, but such things have frequently happened in the past, which inclines me to think that they are likely to continue. At any rate, if they don't, there's nothing that can be done about that besides the provision of good education and the means by which ideas can be developed and publicised.