© 1975-1979, 2008 Robert A. Freitas Jr. All Rights Reserved.

Robert A. Freitas Jr., Xenology: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Extraterrestrial Life, Intelligence, and Civilization, First Edition, Xenology Research Institute, Sacramento, CA, 1979; http://www.xenology.info/Xeno.htm

25.2.2  Information-Rate Scales of Contact

The second most important parameter of civilizations which both contactor and contactee will want to determine as soon as possible is the total information processing capability of each culture. This datum will tell each party to the contact how "smart" the other is, how sophisticated may be its thinking processes, and how great are its stores of knowledge.

The basic mission of life in the cosmos is to process information. To the extent that systemic or organismic energy is used for purposes other than information processing, a living entity may be regarded as "inefficient." As Dr. James Grier Miller suggests in an hypothesis drawn from his general theory of living systems:

Hypothesis 3.3-1: Up to a maximum higher than yet obtained in any living system but less than 100 percent, the larger the percentage of all matter-energy input that it consumes in information processing. controlling its various system processes, as opposed to matter-energy processing, the more likely the system is to survive.³⁰⁷¹

In other words, it is always better to be smarter.

How information-efficient are human beings when measured against the universal standard? A 70 kilogram man can process at least 10¹² bits/second of neural reactivity data. Yet, according to calculations performed by H.J. Bremermann,³⁰⁷² the theoretical maximum computing power for an entity of that mass is about 10⁵² bits/second. Apparently humans are woefully inefficient thinkers, having a sentience which is only 10^-38% efficient.

In an earlier chapter we introduced the concept of the Sentience Quotient (SQ), defined mathematically as the log₁₀ of the information processing rate divided by the quantity of mass-energy needed to sustain it, for any living entity. We established that the maximum SQ for any being in the universe was about 50, and that human bodies have an SQ of about 10. We also speculated that with each decade of improvement in the SQ, a qualitatively new level of awareness might emerge, comparable to our own "consciousness" but vastly more efficient in terms of data processing. This defined an arbitrary series of six orders of sentience which we described as "reactivity," "consciousness," "communality," "hypersociality," "galacticity," and "universality," based on the assumption that new modes of thinking emerge every time a thinker can increase its information processing capacity per unit mass by roughly ten orders of magnitude. (Obviously this is just an approximation, based on Earthly experience; more or less than exactly six orders of sentience are possible. We chose six orders primarily for convenience of discussion in this text.)

In other words, although the Sentience Quotient actually spans a continuum from 0 to 50 for thinking entities, it may be that each jump of 10 produces a qualitatively different kind of intelligence. If this is so, and if our approximately six basic orders of sentience have any reality, then we may distinguish some 36 different basic first contact scenarios in much the same manner as we found 16 distinct contact possibilities based on the mass-energy usage scale. The data processing differentials in each contact situation are summarized in Table 25.6. The figures are again expressed in terms of contractor's advantage over the contactee race.

Table 25.6 shows that there appear to be six distinct differentials that may be used to characterize contact along the information processing spectrum. When the two contacting races are of equal sentience, the bit-rate efficiency differential is 0. When a communal race meets a merely conscious race, the SQ difference will be 10. In still other contact situations, the sentience differential may be 20, 30, 40, or 50.

As in the previous Section, the figures in Table 25.7 below provide a meaningful comparison to assist in our understanding of each of the six different "levels of contact." In the leftmost column we have the Sentience Quotient differentials most likely to be encountered in any first contact situation. These are accompanied by a set of comparisons which attempt to relate different orders of data processing ability to something that human minds can readily comprehend -- in this case, book reading rates.

A major problem immediately becomes obvious. It appears difficult intellectually to relate to the awesome power (or awesome lack thereof) of a sentience even a mere 10 orders away from us.²³⁶ This hints at the tremendous difficulties humans are likely to experience in dealing with higher order sentiences during the first contact situation. The subject is so difficult that even science fiction writers have rarely attempted to deal with the astounding implications of an encounter with such advanced ETs. What would we have to say to a being able to mentally digest 8000 books per second? Going in the other direction, could we even communicate with a creature who required 400 million years to read a single volume? These numbers are so far removed from everyday experience that humans can have no empathy with the orders of sentience that they represent. And yet each of these mind-boggling cases are examples of a meeting between beings differing in Sentience Quotient by only 10. What of encounters involving differentials of 20, 30, and more? Ours may be the lot of the amoeba creeping slowly across a requisition form on the information counter in the front office of the Galactic equivalent of the Library of Congress.

The successor sentience to humanity may already be on the horizon -- the electronic computer.^{3270,55,3489,3278} Using a machine intelligence constructed of experimental superconducting Josephson junction logic gates, the Sentience Quotient will be quite high. These gates have switching times on the order of 10^-11 sec, so can handle about 10¹¹ bits/second. They weigh about a nanogram each (10^-12 kg), so their information processing efficiency is roughly 10²³ bits/sec-kg, for a Sentience Quotient of 23. When computers based on the Josephson junction (or similar principle) eventually are built, it may be time for humankind to step aside. Here is one computer scientist’s view of the future:

I expect the human race to expand into space in the near future, and O'Neill's habitats for people will be part of this. But as soon as machines are able to match human performance, the economics against human colonies become very persuasive. Just as it was much cheaper to send Pioneer to Jupiter and Viking to Mars than men to the Moon, so it will be cheaper to build orbiting power stations with robot rather than human labor. A machine can be designed to live in free space and love it, drinking in unattenuated sunlight and tolerating hard radiation. And instead of expensive pressurized, gravitied, decorated human colonies, the machines could be put to work converting lunar material into orbiting automatic factories. The doubling time for a machine society of this type would be much shorter than for human habitats, and the productive capability would expand correspondingly faster.

The first societies in space will be composed of cooperating humans and machines, but as the capabilities of the self-improving machine component grow, the human portion will function more and more as a parasitic drag. Communities with a higher ratio of machines to people will be able to expand faster, and will become the bulk of the intelligent activity in the solar system. In the long run the sheer physical inability of humans to keep up with these rapidly evolving progeny of our minds will ensure that the ratio of people to machines approaches zero, and that a direct descendant of our culture, but not our genes, inherits the universe.

This may not be as bad as it sounds, since the machine society can, and for its own benefit probably should, take along with it everything we consider important, up to and including the information in our minds and genes. Real live human beings, and a whole human community, could then be reconstituted if an appropriate circumstance ever arose. Since biology has committed us to personal death anyway, with whatever immortality we can hope for residing only in our children and our culture, shouldn't we be happy to see that culture become as capable as possible? In fact, attempting to hobble its growth is an almost certain recipe for long term suicide. The universe is one random event after another. Sooner or later an unstoppable virus deadly to humans will evolve, or a major asteroid will collide with the Earth, or the sun will go nova, or we will be invaded from the stars by a culture that didn't try to slow down its own evolution, or any number of other things. The bigger, more diverse and competent our offspring are, the more capable they will be of detecting and dealing with the problems that arise.³²³³

This vision of the future provides but one model of many that are possible for SQ=20 sentiences we may encounter on alien worlds throughout the universe.*

* Since theoretical lower limit biological cell size is about 400 Angstrom, a human-size brain could handle roughly 10²⁰ bits/sec-kg. It thus may possibly be true that no strictly biological intelligence can have a Sentience Quotient greater than about 20.

Last updated on 3 May 2010