Slice of PIE: Will All Intelligent Alien Civilizations Be Modeled On the Benevolent Government Democrats Are Striving For?

Question: Why do so many people who DON’T read science fiction widely, make the assumption that any Aliens we come into contact with who have starships, no war, unlimited wealth, with a unified, single party government, be ecologically-pre-civilization-static, single-class, benevolent, democratically elected, and all-inclusive civilization... possibly be REAL?

Do they have evidence that “U-SPG-EPCS-SC-B-DE-AI civilization” is the only way to govern well? (WE are evidence to the contrary. Our governments have always been fractured (check history books); but we use nuclear power, genetic engineering, and we travel in space – all of these achievements are limited and the majority of “doom-sayers” assume that we will destroy ourselves…but despite dire predictions, we haven’t as of this moment. We absolutely have wars, threats, and cruelty…yet seven billion of us persist at this time. Countless others have tantrums about how dumb the “others” are and that unless the entire world embraces their ideal of government, we will continue to be hanging by a thread? Maybe a spider silk thread…)

How did Gene Roddenberry’s dream up the idea of a United Earth and a United Federation of Planets? Except for hippies who were dreaming of yellow submarines and Woodstock, the rest of the world was in shell-shocked horror discovering that the SECOND War To End All Wars hadn’t performed as promised. Things were growing worse. How did Roddenberry get to Star Trek?

That’s easy enough to summarize from the article referenced below: “I really don’t consider myself a science-fiction writer, but I’m interested in what’s happening on this planet and what may happen…Intolerance in the 23rd century? Improbable!...If man survives that long, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures…we couldn’t do a space show without at least one person on board who constantly reminded you that you are out in space and in a world of the future…A science-fiction buff since junior high school, he had the idea for a series that would mix…The Twilight Zone..The Outer Limits with a cast of continuing characters…[a]…space-adventure series [like] “Wagon Train to the Stars,” a nod to the westerns that were still the gold standard in popular TV drama in the 1960s…born in the midst of the turbulent 1960s…it…often reflected and commented on the issues of that divisive decade: the Vietnam War, civil rights, Cold War politics, the budding environmental movement. The show had an idealistic, ’60s counterculture mind-set, imagining a 23rd-century world in which humans had outgrown war and prejudice…[STAR TREK] proved that an outer-space action show could appeal to our intelligence, tackle serious issues—and, in a troubled time, offer some hope for the future.” He certainly didn’t base his enthusiastic hope for humanity on any kind of reality, making the assumption that we would reach a point of evenly distributed wealth and overcome all forms of prejudice to reach the

But…

In the STAR WARS Universe, an Evil Empire has overthrown by an UNQUESTIONABLY Good Republic (it’s “goodness” is an unargued given). But shortly after that happens, the New Republic was once again overthrown by an Imperial copycat of Darth Vader called the First Order which launches its takeover in THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015 – ironically, (hmmm or was it political commentary?) the same year Trump declared his presidential bid). On what basis is the Republic declared “good” and the Empire “bad”?

In Frank Herbert’s DUNE novels, his assumption is that humanity can only avoid the extinction of Humanity by creating an Omniscient God-Emperor to derail a religious High Priesthood of Bene Gesserit and capitalistic Traders. “ We've a three-point civilization: the Imperial Household balanced against the Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad through [CHOAM, the Directors of all wealth], and between them; the Spacers Guild with its damnable monopoly on interstellar transport. Reverend Mother Mohiam.” (Note she omits the hidden rule of the Bene Gesserit.” Paul Atreides (aka Paul Muad’dib institutes “…his Golden Path, [Frank Herbert’s]…argument of how to create a healthy society, avoiding despotism and hero worship, a trap in which social groups can be caught: ‘To make a world where human kind can make its own future from moment to moment, free from one man's vision. Free from the perversion of the [any?] prophet’s words. And free of future pre-determined...’” From universal foundation does Frank Herbert’s declaration of what humanity needs depend? On what foundation of human understanding does he make his postulation?

In TV’s extremely popular series, THE EXPANSE, the UN has seized power from most of the world’s governments because of nearly uncontrollable Climate Change – which they stop. They continue to rule Earth as well as colonies on the Moon, Mars, and in the asteroid belt as well as several other Jovian moons and a very few interstellar colonies until rogue Martian marines form their own government, conquer everyone, and call them all the Laconian Empire…[This is all from the resource below. I read the second book, CALIBAN’S WAR thinking it was the first and while I thought it was a great deal of fun, never went back to read the others. I also read A GAME OF THRONES and while it was also fun, (nowhere near as fun as his Haviland Tuf science fiction stories); I didn’t return to that series, either and never watched a single episode of the TV show…]

There are many futures for Humanity portrayed in science fiction literature. These four are currently best known because they were either visual presentations or MADE into visual presentations. Others await production and the passing of time to test their precepts.

Until then, we’re left with what we have here and now, and what we hope in the future – and our own hands to make it – though there are some who believe that we do not labor alone working for the better future or Humanity on Earth, now. [No, I DON’T mean Aliens Among Us!]

Finally, with the perspective added by a few more years, I wonder why so many people today assume that "all is lost" and there's no possible way we could survive to even THINK about a world like the one Roddenberry invented nearly six decades ago? Could it be the BBC's news coverage? Racial unrest (I live in the city and a few blocks from one of the places waves of civil unrest rolled over a bit over two and three years ago...)

Do I have hope for a STAR TREK future? Can we make it? With deep hope and belief, I STILL have to say, "Yes."

Sources: https://time.com/4406710/star-trek-history-excerpt/, https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_Empire, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizations_of_the_Dune_universe, https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Laconia_system, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muad%27Dib
Image: https://coldnorth.com/owen/game/startrek/universe/galaxy-relic.gif

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 666

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Octavia Butler said, “SF doesn’t really mean anything at all, except that if you use science, you should use it correctly, and if you use your imagination to extend it beyond what we already know, you should do that intelligently.” Let me know if anything comes of them.

SF Trope: Absolute xenophobes
Current Event: http://io9.com/what-will-human-cultures-be-like-in-100-years-453934475

Diandra Ngobogo and Guychel Kolchak walked side-by-side in the Mall of America. The Mall was crowded – more so than it had been in decades. The entire building had been renovated and vertical banners proclaiming, “Fifty Years Of Quality Shopping” floated from antigrav advert-eyezers, brushing shoppers with trailers of brilliantly colored silk.

It was just as effective as elaborate signage had been in the last century. Most of the people ignored them. While it was true people ducked into and out of shops, the majority simply walked, talking.

To themselves.

Even so, it was quieter. The near silence was broken only by the squeak of tennis shoes and murmuring voices, as if someone had stumbled into a Buddhist temple filled with saffron-robed monks doing their morning prayers.

Diandra said, “What could you possibly want with that?”

Guychel said, “Where would she go with someone like him?” He squeezed Diandra’s hand so hard, she yelped, yanking her hand away from his.

He didn’t notice even when she glanced at him. He did notice when she shoved him hard enough to stumble into a column that rose up all seven stories to support a semi-transparent roof panel. He said, “I’ll talk to you in a minute,” tapped his phone and glared at Diandra and exclaimed, “What was that for?” He tapped his phone again and muttered, “No, not you! I’m talking to Diandra.” He paused. “She’s my girlfriend.” Paused again then said, “Why would you think that?” and hung up on the caller. He finally looked at Diandra and said, “What?”

Balled fists on her hips, she jerked her head sideways once, calling Guychel. She murmured, “We haven’t said a word to each other since we got here.”

“We’re talking now,” he murmured back.

“You didn’t even notice when I stopped holding your hand!” she said.

He looked stupid at the offending member then at her, murmuring, “So?”

“Why do we even go to the trouble of getting together if we’re just going to walk alongside each other and still talk to the rest of the world?”

He stared at her then swallowed hard. He hung up and said to her directly, “Are you breaking up with me?”

She hung up as well and said out loud, “I like you a lot. Why would I break up with you?”

“You’re not talking to me, though,” Guychel said.

“I’m talking to you.”

He gestured angrily, “You know what I mean! We’re not on the same circuit!”

Diandra stared at him for several seconds before he looked away. She said, “I skipped fifteen times from Jakarta to here just to be with you. Do you see any more couples here?”

Guychel looked. He frowned. Then he turned in a circle and finally said, “None that I can see. They’re all here by themselves for whatever reason, but they’re with their real friends, too. What’s wrong with that?”

She’d done the same thing, tracking various Mall walkers. She finally said, “I ain’t a genius…”

“You are, too. That’s what the datafile says. It’s why I texted you.”

She blinked in surprise then smiled, “You flirted me because I was smart?”

He grinned lopsidedly, “That and you’re a sexbag.”

She sniffed and slugged him on the shoulder and said, “You’re no outtrash yourself.”

He blushed under his pink dyed blond hair. The two colors clashed remarkably. He said, “So, what you’re saying is that we should like, really talk to each other?”

Diandra shrugged, “Could be new.”

Guychel grinned then looked up. Way up. He frowned. “What?” Diandra asked.

He jerked his chin up. “Someone was watching us.”

She touched her headset then said, “I ran it back. You’re right. Who was that?”

Names: ♀ Indonesia, Central African Republic; ♂ Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia (Siberia)
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Falcon_9_Demo-2_Launching_6_%283%29.jpg/220px-Falcon_9_Demo-2_Launching_6_%283%29.jpg

MINING THE ASTEROIDS Part 29: NOT the "Final Frontier", the Wild, Wild Higher Frontier!

Initially, I started this series because of the 2021 World Science Fiction Convention, DisCON which I WOULD have been attending in person if I felt safe enough to do so in person AND it hadn’t been changed to the week before the Christmas Holidays…HOWEVER, as time passed, I knew that this was a subject I was going to explore because it interests me...

“‘If the idea of mining asteroid seems outlandish,’ Vescovo argues, ‘many technological breakthroughs – the Wright brothers' first manned flight, for example – have likewise carried the same burden. Until, that is, they actually happen. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said that the first trillionaire will come through asteroid mining.’” Victor Vescovo (One of AstroForge’s main investors and the explorer who built a submersible that in 2019 made him the first person to visit the bottom of all five oceans.)

So, I think there’s a reasonable chance mining asteroids will one day be a reality. We’re completely unamazed today, of incredibly wealthy people taking short trips to the “bottom ledge” of space – even actors who’ve PRETENDED to live and work in space, (“No, I'm from Iowa, I only work in space.”), have actually ridden on top of a rocket.

“By April 5, 2025, a total of 13 private visitors, known as spaceflight participants, from seven countries have visited the International Space Station, according to NASA. International Space Station Visitors: 283 individuals from 23 countries have visited.”

“As of March 2025, 682 people have reached the altitude of space according to the FAI definition of the boundary of space, and 721 people have reached the altitude of space according to the USAF definition.” (https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/space-station-visitors-by-country/)

While the number of people who’ve gone into space is hardly staggering, the KINDS of people who have gone has increased – there’s even a way to go into space as a “tourist”!

How long has it taken for this number to climb from one (Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968), First person in space. — Soviet Union Vostok 1, 1961) to Humans having a space station that has been occupied continually for 25 years, and hosted 721 people who have BEEN TO SPACE?

That’s at TINY number of years. If I wanted to, I could probably calculate the actual Rate of Growth of Space Occupation/Visitation Over Time…but I that’s pretty much beyond my capabilities in math (calculus????) or whatever.

But GIVEN that, let’s see what the rate of growth and in particular, mining of the “new” world that Europeans started mining:

USA is 250 years old in 2025 AD.
Earliest known metalworking: 5000 years before the Roman calendar.
“The earliest known metalworking in North America began some 7,000 years ago, when Native Americans mined copper in hand-dug pits on an isolated peninsula in the Midwest. Remains of this massive deposit and the booming industry that grew around it are now part of a national historical park.”
The European invasion started in 1000 CE, the Vikings being the first perpetrato
“The oldest-known mine on archaeological record is the Ngwenya Mine in Eswatini (Swaziland), which radiocarbon dating shows to be about 43,000 years old… The oldest-known mine on archaeological record is the Ngwenya Mine in Eswatini (Swaziland), which radiocarbon dating shows to be about 43,000 years old. At this site Paleolithic humans mined hematite to make the red pigment ochre. Mines of a similar age in Hungary are believed to be sites where Neanderthals may have mined flint for weapons and tools.” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining)

The Dawn of Mining to the Asteroid Age was about 40,000 years (for the ease of calculations). Some 1600 generations; let’s say 1000 (a generation in prehistoric southern Africa was substantially SHORTER than a generation of 21st Century (48th Century China; 21st Century in India (though it’s 2082); Reiwa 7 in Japan)…so, let’s give us (ONLY for the sake of argument!) from the establishment of the OLDEST known Earth Human mine it took 1000 generations.

But THAT included the development of Human civilization from the invention of cloth and leather to expanding Human occupation of more and more hostile environments. THAT part of our history is past. Let’s take it from the inauguration of mechanized mining: “…Water wheels date to the Roman period and were used to grind grain and lift irrigation water. Water-powered bellows were in use on blast furnaces in China in 31 AD.[4] By the 13th century, water wheels powered sawmills[5] and trip hammers, to pull cloth and pound flax and later cotton rags into pulp for making paper. Trip hammers are shown crushing ore in De re Metallica (1555).” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanization)

So pulling it all together, it took some 2000 years to raise Human mining from pickaxes, water wheels, and charcoal fires, to automated, computerized digging, transporting, and processing, to a space-going civilization. Let’s take the “automated, transporting, and processing” as a given – BUT, add digging, transporting, and processing IN A VACUUM and add 1000 more years. That’s NOT to say that we can move FASTER than the civilization 2000 years ago; but let’s just say (1000-500 or 750 year) or somewhere between 2025 and 2775 as a full-blown space-occupying civilization. I’m NOT talking about Humans on Pluto or anything; but there will certainly be large habitats between Earth and Mars (where many ASTEROIDS are); probably islands of Humans between Earth and Venus – who KNOWS what’s on the surface there (well, WE do, but the days are brutal because the day is nearly as long a its year, and everything made on Earth pretty much disintegrates because of TRULY acid rain, no real sunlight, and perpetual cloudiness…

Likely there will be “islands” in space – asteroids mined out and abandoned, then gengineered plants cultivated on the interior under the light of self-replicating-and-repairing sunlamps…with the requisite adaptations to a new environment…leading (inevitably to revolution and a break from Earth and the birth of a “frontier society” akin to the American West, Russian Siberia, British Australia, and China’s Xinjiang province with its mosques, steppes, sand dunes, and majority population (47%) of Uighur, dubbed by “official Chinese”, as “a place which is luoho and luan, or “backward and chaotic” (sounds like the wild, wild West to me!).

Me? I’d lay my bets on SOONER than the 28th Century…

Today’s Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250320-how-close-are-we-really-to-mining-asteroids
Other data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_travelers_by_nationality
Foundational Resource: (A general Wikipedia post detailing what the authors currently know about asteroid mining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining)
Noted Resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth, https://www.pharostribune.com/news/local_news/article_7fcd3ea5-3c14-533f-a8d5-9bf629922f34.html, https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/04/29/like-asteroid-mining-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/, https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/learn/historyculture/theroadtothefirstflight.htm, https://hackaday.com/2019/03/27/extraterrestrial-excavation-digging-holes-on-other-worlds/, https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/every-small-worlds-mission
Interesting Stuff The Might Apply To Mining Asteroids: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgej7gzg8l0o 

Image: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/A2D5/production/_114558614_hls-eva-apr2020.jpg