Theoretically, each alien government occupies a unique position in this 6-dimensional "space."   Any governance system thus may be described — albeit incompletely and imperfectly — by a series of six "political coordinates."

The first task before xenologists is to devise a comprehensive taxonomy which subsumes all forms of alien governments. The job is fantastically difficult, for there are dozens of different ways to describe a given system of governance.* Human political scientists don’t even agree on how to categorize human polities, and it is virtually certain that Earthly political forms fail to exhaust the universe of possibilities.

But xenologists must start somewhere. So, despite the enormity of the task, theorists have attempted to isolate a few of the most critical dimensions of government. Each dimension, or "governance scale," may be thought of as a coordinate axis which helps to define the geometry of government.

Ordinary physical space as we know it may be described with three coordinate axes set at right angles to each other. Each object in the universe may be uniquely located using a three-dimensional geometry. Political space, as provisionally identified by xenologists, can be viewed as having six primary dimensions. Theoretically, each alien government occupies a unique position in this 6-dimensional "space." Any governance system thus may be described — albeit incompletely and imperfectly — by a series of six "political coordinates."

These are as follows:

• Cultural Scale;
• Leadership System;
• Organizational Centralization;
• Economic Basis;
• System of Exchange; and
• Sociopolitical Freedom.

The entire proposed taxonomy for extraterrestrial governments is summarized in Table 21.1 in Section 21.1.

* See: de Blij,⁷²⁵ Etzioni,⁸³² Katz,¹⁷⁶⁸ Krader,¹⁷⁴⁵ MacIver,⁸¹⁸ McLennan,¹⁸⁶⁶ Parkinson,²⁶⁰⁰ Rodee, Anderson and Christol,⁸²¹ Wescott,²⁶⁴ and Wit.⁸¹⁷

There are six dimensions of governance, as shown in the taxonomy in Table 21.1, at right.

The first dimension is called "cultural scale." This is simply the potential power of the organization as measured by energy production. In this book, civilizations are classed as Type I, II, III, or IV according to a familiar scheme. The chart gives a few extra subdivisions under the Type I planetary culture for added resolution.

The second dimension of governance is the system of leadership employed. The Taxonomy gives several different classes of leadership with illustrative examples of each in parentheses. Expanding Plato’s traditional tripartite model, leadership falls along a spectrum ranging from nullity to totality.

There is rule by none (Chaos), rule by one (Autocracy), rule by a few (Oligarchy), rule by many (Republic), rule by most (Democracy), and rule by all (Pantisocracy*).

The main problem in selecting a leadership is how to determine which "one" or which "few" shall head the organization. This normally involves what one writer has called "the myth of legitimacy."³⁰³⁵ That is, persons must believe their leaders are "legitimate" before they will willingly submit to the organization.

• If this is accomplished by election, and an autocracy is the class of leadership, the result may be called a "limited monarchy."

• If we have a republic instead, the result might be called a "representative democracy."
• If selection is based on military power, an autocracy would be called "despotism" and an oligarchy might be called a "military junta."

The Taxonomy lists 30 bases of legitimacy of leadership that might conceivably be adopted by alien cultures. (Note: These bases are not exclusive. For instance, "aristocracy" is an oligarchy that may be based on wealth, heredity, or both.)

The third dimension of governance is the degree of organizational centralization.

• Unitary governments are most centralized — there is a single focus of authority to which all decisions are referred.
• Empires may be regarded as falling within the unitary classification,⁸²³ but they characteristically involve two separate governments within a single political system:
• The internal government, which controls the interior or homeland.
• The imperial government, which has dominion over subject peoples or external geographical areas.

Empires are normally of two kinds.

• When the two governmental entities are geographically distinct, such as the British, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese systems on Earth, we have a "colonial" empire.
• "Coterminous" empires exist where the subject areas coincide geographically with the homeland, as in the Turkish, Austrio-Hungarian, and most of the oriental empires.

In a federal system, power is distributed between the central and local governments in such a way that a new unity is established while retaining the original territorial diversity. A federal organization requires a definite surrender of claims of sovereignty by component areas as well as the right of secession.²⁹⁹⁰

Confederations are the loosest possible associations of independent social or political units having some common governmental machinery. No new central unity is created. An alliance is a special limited form of confederation having as its purpose a single objective or temporary expediency.

The fourth dimension of governance is the economic basis of the organization.

• Laissez faire is total nonintervention by government in economic affairs; communicative activities are okay, but there must be an absence of control. Piracy is a peculiar form of laissez faire in which economics is reduced to a contest of military prowess and cunning between competing social units, again without benefit of legal direction by governmental authorities.
• Manorialism (sometimes called "feudalism") is an institutionalized system of property ownership and personal contracts between individuals as a substitute for "public" control — the manorial lord replaced the governmental control function within his local fiefdom.
• Mercantilism involves the emergence of real public control. This may include taxation or regulation of the means and fruits of production, under the theory that the economic interests of the larger political body are more important than those of mere individuals.
• The corporation or "conglomerate"¹⁷⁷¹ format is a way individuals can fight back. A group of persons is legally licensed to act with the powers, rights and privileges of a single person (a very powerful "individual").
• Welfarism represents still further public control of the economy, in which the welfare of the citizenry is promoted more by the organized efforts of the government than by private institutions.
• Socialism is the end result — government exercises complete control of all the means of production. However, the distribution of economic benefits is still determined in the private sector.
• Under communism, both the means of production and the means of distribution are controlled by the political organization of the society.⁸¹⁸

The fifth dimension of governance is the exchange system employed.⁸⁷⁴ Exchange between social units involves an act of giving or taking one thing in return for another as its equivalent. Due to environmental heterogeneity and differing abilities, individuals are likely to be in possession of different kinds and amounts of resources than their fellows.

• Economic historians agree that the most primitive system of exchange is gift exchange, which may perhaps be regarded as an informal method of bartering.
• Slightly more sophisticated is silent barter, which enables individuals to rid themselves of surpluses and to enjoy the specialized products of their neighbors — without having to actually confront a feared or hated neighbor. (The party desiring exchange leaves the merchandise in some place the other party cannot help noticing it, such as a pathway, meeting site or game field. If the recipient finds the goods undesirable or insufficient, he leaves them and comes back later after giving the donor a chance to increase the offer or change its contents. Acceptance of offers were expected to be reciprocated, failure of which could lead to warfare.)
• Open barter is more direct.²⁸⁸⁰ It is usually available only when social units become capable of peaceful and friendly intercourse.
• All forms involve simultaneous exchange. For instance, barter at a fixed exchange ratio is the first attempt to assign value to commodities; this mode shifts to barter with bargaining as exchange relations between social groups become more regular and the range of things traded becomes too extensive for simple ratio systems.
• Open barter with favorite medium of exchange involves the use of some plentiful bartered commodity as a measure of value for all other commodities.⁸⁷³
• Valuable money such as jewelry, coinage, or ingots of rare metals represents the next evolutionary step.
• But this soon gives way to symbolic money — bank notes, paper currency, stocks and so on.
• Ultimately, electronic funds transfer technology or the development of a more generalized sentience may permit the emergence of reciprocal obligation exchange systems in which value as well as specie becomes purely symbolic.¹⁸⁸

The sixth dimension of governance is the level of sociopolitical freedom granted the individual.
There are at least four distinct societal types.

• Societies may be libertarian, with full civil, political, economic and communicative liberties for each individual.
• Egalitarian organizations require not necessarily liberty, but rather only that all group members be treated with absolute equality.
• Authoritarian governments concentrate policymaking within the leadership; citizens acquiesce out of habit or tradition, and obedience to authority is pervasive and rarely questioned.
• Totalitarian regimes are radical versions of authoritarianism.²⁵⁸⁶ They have been described by the late Benito Mussolini, a notorious human practitioner of this form of rule, as "everything for the state; nothing outside the state; nothing against the state."⁸²¹

The 6-dimensional "political geometry" described above is able to characterize in broad fashion most known terrestrial societies. Despite its distinctly human flavor, presumably the Taxonomy may be extended to our analysis of extraterrestrial governmental systems consistent with the Hypothesis of Mediocrity. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the Taxonomy is that it may be used to imagine new political forms that are extremely rare or have never existed on Earth. By selecting alternatives from each of the several columns, imaginative xenologists can generate literally millions of hypothetical alien governmental entities.

For instance:

• We might imagine a Type III emergent galactic society ruled by an hereditary oligarchy based on the means of production, with a tight unitary organization and a socialistic system of wealth distribution to the citizenry.
• We can envision a global republic of machine sentience, totally decentralized and egalitarian.
• Somewhere else we may find a stellar democratic theocracy engaging in piracy on the high frontier, operating with a loose-knit system of opportunistic alliances.
• Most feared among galactic governments would be the totalitarian unitary military autocracies.
• Most laggard the republican bureaucratic constitutional confederations.
• Most mysterious the alien pantisocratic agents of communication who trade by silent barter between the stars.
• Extraterrestrial decentralized monarchies, libertarian communists, and democratic empires are all quite possible.**

[Note: See also the author's article "Galactic Empires", published in 1983.]

* Pantisocracy or "organized anarchy" has been characterized as having fluid participation, a variety of inconsistent and ill-defined preferences, and an unclear organizational technology.⁸³⁷ Sociopolitical anarchies have been treated on rare occasion in science fiction.

(See LeGuin,²⁵⁷⁷ Niven,²⁴²¹ Van Vogt,²⁹⁷⁷ and Weinbaum.²⁹⁷⁹)

** Science fiction writers have experimented extensively with diverse political forms, including:

Naturally, not all governmental forms that may exist are equally likely to exist. The Taxonomy devised in the previous section suggested something of the possibilities but failed to address probabilities.

Xenologists would like to know which political systems are more or less likely to occur, why, and where.

Probably one of the most important determinants of the nature and scope of alien governments is the type of sentience of the individuals who represent the social units comprising the political system. We have briefly examined the question of extraterrestrial intelligence and consciousness in an earlier chapter, so we may now proceed to analyze the effects of different minds upon the mode of governance.

In Chapter 14 we found that a central characteristic of intelligence is its ability to handle increasingly generalized classes of information. Below is an oversimplified list of "mental types" above mere reactivity, in order of ascending negentropic efficacy:

1. Genetic sentience
2. Reptilian brain sentience
3. Limbic brain sentience
4. Neocortical brain sentience
5. Communal sentience
6. (higher-order sentience … )

• Genetic sentience involves a society that is aware of itself but whose members lack individual awareness.
• Brain conscious creatures have individual awareness but no societal consciousness.
• Beings with communal sentience will possess a visceral self-awareness both of the individual and of the society.
• Creatures with genetic sentience are preprogrammed to operate independently of all other units for the good of the society, so such lifeforms might theoretically survive at any cultural scale.
• Brain-sentient ETs likewise capable of independent action because of their individual awareness, probably also may aspire to any cultural scale.
• But communal sentients may be somewhat more restricted.

Science fiction writer Charles Sheffield has hinted at this problem among humans with biocybernetic implants — a kind of electronic telepathy. He describes what might happen when such communal creatures attempt to expand their cultural scale:

Can you imagine how men with implants would react if they were taken to a place where they were light-years, or light-hours — or even light-minutes — away from the supporting memory banks, and the shared data? I don’t think they could take it. They’d go insane. It’s pretty obvious that the worst punishment you could inflict would be to disable a man’s implant. Like being in solitary confinement, but probably a lot worse.²⁹⁶²

The effects of mental type on class of leadership are equally surprising.

• Without personal self-awareness, genetic sentients cannot recognize any leadership at all. Chaotic government is most likely.
• Brain sentients may have systems of governance ranging across the entire leadership scale.
• But communal sentients, with their social viscera and dualistic insight, should strongly tend toward pantisocracy because the mechanics of rule by all will be enormously simplified through electronic telepathy.
• It may be that only communal beings are capable of forming truly successful anarchs.²⁹⁷⁹
• Similarly, genetic minds might lack concepts of reciprocity — with no sense of the self there can be no empathy for the selves of others.
• Communal beings should tend toward the opposite extreme, choosing a highly symbolic exchange system that everyone agrees "feels" right.

Centralization may be a concept unique to brain-sentient races. Both genetic and communal sentients will have strong social senses which are missing in brain sentients. It is quite possible that federation and empire are organizational forms that can exist only when individual awareness is present and social awareness is not. Similar considerations may obtain with regard to economic systems — perhaps only brain sentients can conceive of a system of production and distribution responsive more to individual than to societal needs. Perfect communism may be possible only among genetic or communal sentients.

As for sociopolitical freedoms, genetic-sentient aliens have no individuality and thus should be the natural totalitarians of the universe. As sentience becomes more generalized, libertarianism should become possible. Communal ETs theoretically are capable of adopting any level of freedom, depending upon the relative emphasis on self-awareness versus social awareness in the existing sociobiological and cultural milieu.

In summary, increasingly generalized sentience should favor smaller cultural scale, broader classes of leadership, more symbolic systems of exchange and more libertarian forms of government. Centralization and individual economic freedom may be concepts unique to brain-sentient species.

Another significant limitation on extraterrestrial governments is the problem of dispersion — the relative distance between social or political units. These units may be individuals, cities, planetary civilizations, stellar communities, or galactic societies, depending on the cultural scale involved. Dispersion is a very flexible concept. It may refer to large physical distances between units or to the length of time required for communication between them. Functionally, the element of dispersion acts to limit the effectiveness of a government by restricting its ability to communicate and to transport the means of control.

While the notion of dispersion may be used to analyze governments at all cultural scales, we shall concentrate on the interstellar regime since this is less frequently discussed in the literature. Distance alone may be the critical factor. The dispersion of social units decreases as their physical separation becomes less:

1. 10⁶ light-years (intergalactic dispersion)
2. 10⁴ light-years (galactic dispersion)
3. 10 light-years (interstellar dispersion, Disk)
4. 1 light-year (interstellar dispersion, Core)
5. 10^-5 light-years (interplanetary/stellar dispersion)
6. 10^-9 light-years (planetary dispersion)

To the extent an extraterrestrial civilization technologically is able to surmount physical dispersion and engage in communication and/or control, it may have government at that scale. Interstellar government thus is sharply limited by the transportation and communications technology available to it. At least four distinguishing technological scenarios may be identified:

1. Suboptic transportation, optic communication
2. Suboptic transportation, hyperoptic communication
3. Hyperoptic transportation, optic communication
4. Hyperoptic transportation, hyperoptic communication

Dispersion is effectively reduced as a culture moves from scenario (1) to scenario (4). Much as radio, telephone, and air travel have caused Earth to "shrink" during the 20th century, so will interstellar dispersion decrease as the carriers of information and control begin to travel at hyperoptic (faster than light) velocities. It must be admitted that communication and transportation are not exactly equivalent. From a control and distribution standpoint, fast transport may be somewhat more effective than fast message-sending. Still a galactic government could position outposts and supply depots near populated centers and dispatch warships or supplies by "remote control." This probably is not a perfect substitute for direct physical presence, but it’s the next best thing. So the series above from scenario (1) to scenario (4) represents a continuous sequence of decreasing dispersion in the interstellar regime.

How will dispersion of sociopolitical units affect the form of alien governance? Let’s consider each of the six political dimensions given in the Taxonomy.

Increasing speed of travel and communication between units effectively reduces the time-distance between them. More units can be added to the organization without additional cost in communication or control delay time. As dispersion decreases, cultural scale is free to increase. Hyperoptic talk/travel will make galactic-size organizations possible.

Similarly, a very high degree of dispersion (lightspeed or slower talk/travel) will render empire virtually impossible.¹¹³⁵ As one science fiction writer explains:

Punitive expeditions would be nearly impossible, hideously expensive, and probably futile: You’d be punishing the grandchildren of a generation that seceded from the Empire, or even a planet that put down the traitors after the message went out. Even a rescue mission might never reach a colony in trouble. A coalition of bureaucrats could always collect the funds for such an expedition, sign papers certifying that the ships are on the way, and pocket the money .... in sixty years someone might realize what had happened, or not.¹²²⁶

As dispersion lessens, greater organizational centralization becomes possible since the leadership is better able to communicate or enforce its decisions.⁶⁰⁰ In other words, while decentralized forms are always possible, low dispersion should permit centralized governmental entities to emerge.

What about leadership? At high levels of dispersion, probably only chaos is possible in the interstellar regime. As dispersion decreases, autocracies and oligarchies may emerge where strong, diligent individuals or small groups are able to command the loyalty of widely separated cultural enclaves. As dispersion becomes small or negligible, democracy and pantisocracy (which require more debate and communication between social units) become possible.

As for economics, free market laissez faire and piracy are most likely under conditions of extreme dispersion, since planning and control are virtually impossible across great distances when time delays between data reception, decision, and implementation are too great.⁹⁸²As dispersion becomes less severe, the economy can be controlled more effectively. Socialism and communism become more likely when dispersion is low or negligible.

With high dispersion a "blind" exchange system such as gift exchange or silent barter is most reasonable. As talk/travel becomes quicker, fixed exchange ratios can be set and bargaining may take place because both communication and delivery are faster and more reliable. At the lowest levels of dispersion, symbolic valuta become possible as well.

Finally, as regards sociopolitical freedoms, large distance and high dispersion should make libertarianism all but mandatory. As dispersion lessens, causing the effective talk/travel distance to "shrink," tyrants and mobocrats will find it easier to force authoritarian or totalitarian regimes upon subject populations should they desire to do so. There is considerable support for the above speculations from political histories of societies on Earth. Xenologists have searched for examples of human cultures having geographical dispersions analogous to those of widely separated interstellar communities.^55,883 The best examples on Earth appear to be the island chain societies of the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.⁸⁸⁴

Consider the early Hawaiian political system. True to expectations, it remained primarily tribal (low cultural scale with high dispersion). The leadership was autocratic or oligarchic, consisting of military chieftains or classes of ruling nobles. Most often, chaos ruled among widely separated island communities and only weak alliances ever formed. The economic system remained essentially manorial.⁸⁸⁷ Today, by virtue of modern communication and transportion technology (decreased dispersion), the Hawaiian islands are part of the United States — a national, republican, federal, corporate/welfare, egalitarian political system. Our speculations check against the facts.

Indonesia is another illustrative island chain society. Prior to colonization the Indonesian group was ruled by an absolute monarch, symbol of the highest status in the local religious pantheon. The basic cultural unit was tribal, the central government decentralized and loosely administered, and the economic system manorial. Today, the culture remains fractured. In 1955, just a few years after independence from the Dutch empire was granted, no less than 170 political parties competed in the national elections and representatives from 26 of these were elected to office in the parliamentary legislature. This so weakened the cabinet that Sukarno was forced to assume dictatorship in 1957 to restore order.¹⁸⁶⁶ The history of the Philippines is remarkably similar.²⁹⁸⁹

The Tongan islands too were originally ruled by a military dictator theocrat who presided over a confederation of island-states. The economic system was manorial, involving "lords" and fiefdoms bearing a striking resemblance to medieval European feudalism.⁸⁸⁶ The Samoans, who occupy 14 volcanic islands in the southern mid-Pacific, have a basically tribal society. Individual tribes are organized into districts, but these are notoriously unstable political units. There is no record of any unified government holding sway over the entire Samoan "nation" (e.g., chaos reigns at this level), although occasionally a sacred warrior-chief may assemble a short-lived decentralized autocratic alliance on the two largest islands of the chain.⁸⁸⁸ The record of Caribbean island groups is much the same.²⁶²³

There are several other Earthly analogues to high-dispersion interstellar communities.⁸³¹ For example, desert societies, clustering around water holes and infrequent oases, exemplify an insular existence upon a sea of sand. Desert people tend to be extremely nomadic, organized into families or small tribes. Alliances are rare; when they do occur, they take the form of staunchly egalitarian oligarchies or autocracies of convenience. Piracy and laissez faire with open barter are the most common economic forms.²⁶²⁰

The Eskimos, who inhabit the arctic deserts of the north, lived in bands of less than 50 persons. They had no chiefs or standing deliberative assemblies, and there was "rule by none" among bands. Laissez faire was most common and total decentralization the rule, with controls on social aggression based on informal devices such as kinship systems. The dominant attitude was highly libertarian: Suicide and revenge were considered socially acceptable.¹⁷⁴⁵

Our xenopolitical speculations with regard to dispersion appear to be reasonably accurate. To summarize, a decrease in the dispersion of social units (whether by decreasing physical distance or by technologically increasing the velocity of transportation or communication) should permit extraterrestrial governments to evolve in the following directions: Bigger cultural scale, leadership by larger segments of the population, more organizational centralization, greater control of the economy, increasingly symbolic valuta, and more totalitarian methods of governance.

The size of a governmental system is defined as the number of relevant sociopolitical units that comprise it. This is essentially a measure of population in any organization. Note that size does not refer to physical or geographical distribution (which is closer to the concept of "dispersion" discussed in the previous section).

What is the effect of size on extraterrestrial government? Size has been recognized as a critical factor since ancient times — the State described in Plato’s Laws was always to have 5040 citizens (7 factorial), a population which the Greek philosopher supposed to be the maximum number of people that any one person could ever know on an individual basis. This suggestion, while of questionable validity, embodies a basic truth: As the population of sociopolitical units increases arithmetically, the number of possible interactions between them necessarily increases exponentially. Communication and control thus become more difficult with increasing size.¹⁸⁶⁷

If size increases and unit dispersion is held constant, cultural scale tends to rise because more energy and additional living space are required to support a larger population. Perhaps more important is the effect of size on leadership. Organizational theorists long have recognized that increasing the number of interactive units normally causes the fraction of rulers to decrease.⁸⁵¹ According to Mosca’s Rule: "The larger the political community the smaller will be the proportion of the governing minority to the governed majority."²⁹⁶⁰ Or, framed in another way by Bruce H. Mayhew of Temple University in Pennsylvania: "The relative size of a ruling elite is a decreasing function of the size of the system it governs."⁸⁵¹ Formal research studies in recent times have confirmed that the fraction of supervisory personnel decreases as organizational population rises.⁸³⁵

The effects of size have not gone unnoticed by political scientists. Perhaps the best-known of the published formulations is Roberto Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy.⁸²⁸ According to Michels, growing political systems invariably tend toward more oligarchic forms of government. He cites a variety of reasons for this observed phenomenon.

• First, the sheer number of organizational members rules out direct participation by everyone in the political decision making process. (In smaller aggregations all individuals may be politically involved; in larger systems, many cannot.)
• Second, larger organizations are more complex because there are so many more interactions possible between units. The division of labor increases and individual roles become more specialized, so problems become more and more incomprehensible to all but specialists — and "expert" power emerges.
• Third, since information and control can be better wielded at the top by a few rather than by many, the position of leadership becomes more impregnable and elitist.
• Finally, leaders acquire over time a working knowledge of the organization and the particular ways it works. Merely by exercising his leadership functions a top official eventually makes himself almost irreplaceable to the organization.

Size also has a significant effect upon political centralization. Among relatively small populations, all modes from unitary to total decentralization ought to be possible. But as size increases, despite the shrinking percentage of the ruling elite, the absolute number of rulers continues to grow (though at a decreasing rate). More leaders means more possible interactions among them, which implies more chance for conflict and a greater likelihood that leadership units will be working to cross-purposes. Organizational unity will be strained and will tend to break down into less centralized forms. As size becomes huge, leadership most likely will fragment into smaller and smaller entities — first federation, then confederation, and finally all the way to total decentralization at maximum size.^2885,827

All economies from communism to laissez faire probably are possible at low population levels. As the number of units increases, interactions rise exponentially and methodical, deterministic economic planning becomes more difficult.⁹⁷⁴ At some point, increasing size produces a system so complex that it cannot adequately be planned because there are too many possibilities and too much data.^829,2961 (The effects of data overload are well-known to systems theorists.³⁰⁷¹) As population becomes vast, the market must be left to tend to itself. Laissez faire probably is the only realistic option in such circumstances.²⁸⁸⁵ Rising complexity also sets limits on mode of exchange. Silent barter is fine among small populations which exchange relatively few goods. But some uniform system of symbolic valuation or reciprocal obligation will probably be necessary when astronomical quantities of commodities change hands among vast populations of sociopolitical units.

And assuming unit dispersion is held constant, libertarianism is more likely in political systems of enormous size. This is due to the relative difficulties of control, dissemination of ideology, and communication in very large organizations, all else being equal. The result is somewhat analogous to the effects of increasing unit dispersion — increasing size while maintaining constant dispersion among units (constant population density) is equivalent to increasing systemic dispersion, which, much like increasing unit dispersion, should favor libertarianism. This seems true even among nonhuman animal communities on Earth. According to sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, "the more complex the society, the more likely it is to be egalitarian."⁵⁶⁵ On the other hand, as systems become smaller in size it becomes easier to impose authoritarian or totalitarian governments.

By way of summary, an increase in size of a political system should cause an increase in cultural scale, more oligarchic modes of leadership,²⁹⁷⁸ decreasing organizational centralization, a trend towards a laissez faire economy and a symbolic exchange system, and a more libertarian form of governance.

The fourth most important factor influencing the character of alien governments is heritage. Heritage is a measure of the biological, ecological, cultural, and historical commonality to be found among social units comprising a political organization. Common heritage generally promotes cohesion; diverse heritage tends to destroy it.³⁰⁷¹

Biology is the most fundamental heritage shared by groups of life-forms.

• Political systems comprised of sentient beings of a single species may be expected to stick together more than aggregations of foreigners.
• Monospecies cultures should be more cohesive than polyspecies cultures.
• Political union between races of wholly different biochemical or thermal regimes, or between natural and synthetic lifeforms, seems less likely because of the probable lack of any sensible common heritage.

Science fiction writers repeatedly have pointed out that we may not be able to understand our own descendants who travel out into space and colonize other worlds.^2362,2204

• Adaptations to higher or lower surface pressures and alien gravity fields will cause changes in human skeletal design, musculature, and blood content.
• Trace elements in alien soils and plants may affect our colonists’ biochemistry and alter psychological response in many subtle ways.
• In just a few thousand years, human space travelers could evolve into a new genetic race altogether.²⁸⁸⁵

Among planet-evolving lifeforms:

• Climatic homogeneity and the presence of large ecologically uniform continental land masses or ocean bodies should encourage commonality of culture and history.
• Climatic heterogeneity and the existence, say, of broken island chains or an ecologically diverse network of small seas connected by rivers, should lead instead to diversity of culture.²⁶¹⁹
• Island communities on Earth, as in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Indonesia illustrate quite well the extreme factionalism and ethnicity that can emerge from a splintered or diverse environment.
• And it appears that heritage and dispersion are inversely equivalent influences. The more widely scattered the social units, the more diverse will be their historical and cultural experience and the less common heritage they will share.

How does the heritage factor apply to extraterrestrial governments?

• Political systems involving units with a high degree of commonality theoretically should be able to create governments of any cultural scale from planetary to universal.
• As heritage becomes more diverse and cohesion begins to dissipate, smaller and smaller governance systems are probably all that reasonably can be held together.
• A system with total diversity may be expected to be maximally fragmented in smaller cultural groups.
• Among homogeneous societies, all forms of leadership from autocracy to pantisocracy should be possible.
• Introduction of heterogeneity reduces the number of options.
• Government by common consent (rule by most or all) is likely only when there exists reasonably strong cultural cohesion.
• With more diverse heritage, the necessary cohesion may be lacking and a shift to more oligarchic and autocratic modes of rule is expected.
• Similarly, unitary government appears virtually impossible in the face of extreme sociocultural diversity.
• Political systems with no common heritage — maximum diversity — most probably will remain decentralized.

What about the economic system of an alien polity?

• Any form is possible when mutual heritage is great.
• But as biological or cultural heterogeneity increase, the abilities and needs of the subject population vary greatly.
• Cooperation becomes more difficult, cohesion weakens, and controlled economies such as communism and socialism become more difficult to manage.
• In the extreme case of maximum diversity, communism is virtually impossible — it is likely that only loose-knit impersonal economic systems such as laissez faire will be viable.
• Also, as commonality decreases, symbolic exchange systems may become increasingly difficult to use. Agreement upon the meaning and value of symbolic valuta may be harder to achieve, leading to the emergence of simpler systems such as silent barter or gift exchange.

• On the heritage factor alone, low or moderate diversity should allow everything from libertarianism to totalitarianism to exist.
• But extreme heterogeneity of biology or culture will make it more difficult for a ruling class to impose stringent values of allegiance and purpose upon subject populations.
• High diversity implies that a more libertarian ethic should prevail.

In summary, we find that a decrease in commonality of biological, ecological, cultural or historical heritage among social units in a political organization should cause a decrease in cultural scale, a tendency to autocratic or oligarchic modes of leadership, systemic decentralization, decontrol of the economy, a return to simpler and less-symbolic exchange systems, and an increasing prevalence of libertarian ideals.

Table 21.2 High-Probability Extraterrestrial Governance Systems

Part A Part B Full Size Full Size

It must be reemphasized that all of the conclusions reached in this section regarding extraterrestrial systems of governance are speculative and theoretical.

• No alien polities have yet been discovered or observed, and human political scientists cannot agree as to the pertinent dimensions of government.
• There is no consensus on which factors are most important or exactly how they affect social organization.
• Significant factors may have been omitted from the above analysis, and there is no guarantee that factors and dimensions are absolutely additive as we have assumed — there may exist synergistic effects of which we are unaware.

It is in this spirit of tentativeness and uncertainty that the two tables comprising Table 21.2 are offered. These represent a cautious compilation of our xenopolitical analysis up to this point.

• Table 21.2 Part A permits the reader to select various factors, and then to read off which form of governance has the highest probability given those factors.
• Table 21.2 Part B is just the first table turned inside out: The desired governmental form may be selected, and the conditions most likely to give rise to such a system may then be read off by the reader.

In making a determination using these tools, the various measures frequently conflict. When this occurs, more weight should be given those probabilities associated with the more important factors. In the formulation presented here:

• Sentience is considered most significant
• Followed, in order, by dispersion, size, and finally heritage

Suppose we want to know what kind of government a race of genetic sentients is most likely to have, given that their transportation and communication technology is fairly primitive (high dispersion), huge populations are involved (vast size), and all organisms share a common heritage. We go to the topmost table of Table 21.2. On the dimension of cultural scale, we find the following.

• Sentience factor: All scales
• Dispersion factor: Type I or II only
• Size factor: Type III or IV only
• Heritage factor: All scales

Since two of the factors conflict, we weight the more important one more heavily and conclude that a Type II stellar culture is the most probable result

Similarly, for the other dimensions of governance we conclude:

• Chaotic leadership
• Total organizational centralization
• Total organizational centralization
• Little or no reciprocity
• Very little sociopolitical freedom, most probably authoritarian

Conversely, let’s assume we’re trying to find a galactic democratic libertarian corporate empire. From the bottom table of Table 21.2, such a government is most probable among extraterrestrial creatures:

• With minds roughly resembling our own (brain sentients)
• Having either hyperoptic transportation or communication or both (low to moderate dispersion)
• Involving a large population with common or similar heritage

Cybernetics is the scientific study of control and communications systems. Since information is the lifeblood of any organization, the cybernetic analysis of alien governments involves handling flows of data and the management of entropy.^{822,1030,3071}

Xenologists are primarily concerned with the problems of:

• System complexity
• System structure
• Functional system stability

in extraterrestrial political organizations.

Stability is an ambiguous term in political science. According to some theorists it may be static, dynamic, oscillating or adaptive.⁵⁸⁵ Others have defined political stability as the absence of such disruptive events as armed attacks and guerrilla warfare, assassinations, general strikes, major governmental crises, purges, riots and revolutions, demonstrations, and other forms of violence.⁸⁴² Still others require a static structure of government or equate political stability with system maintenance.

In view of its tremendous importance, political scientists have made astonishing little progress in the field of general systemic stability analysis. One of the notable exceptions is a study recently completed by Ronald J. May at the University of Sydney in Australia. After analyzing a number of federated governments throughout world history, May concludes that most of them lack dynamic stability. Looking back on the historical record, he says:

Federal government has not proved to be a very stable form of political organization. Instability is inherent in the structure of federal decision making in a dynamic context. Although for a time a balance may be achieved between the forces of separatism and centralism, in most cases federal systems either succumb to separatist tendencies, in which case either they disintegrate or they are held together by the coercion of the weaker by the stronger units, or national integration proceeds, in which case the original federal form becomes increasingly irrelevant to the political actuality.⁸⁵⁰

May suggests that the ultimate outcome is a function of a number of factors such as:

• Initial differences between units
• Original format of federation
• Extent of interdependence among member sovereignties
• Urgency of the need for unity, and so forth

Relative wealth and size of the component political units may exert a controlling influence, however.²⁹⁷¹ According to May:

The evidence suggests that, in general, when large, rich units are ranged against small, poor units there is some chance of federation being preserved, but the likely outcome is centralization with large unit dominance; in the extreme case federalism may yield to a unitary state. When small rich units are ranged against large poor units, on the other hand, there is a strong tendency for the small units to secede.⁸⁵⁰

While there have been several other attempts by political theorists seriously to engage in systemic analysis (see Hurwitz,⁸⁴⁵ Merritt,⁹⁷⁵ Russett,⁸⁴³ and Wright⁵⁸⁵), few sufficiently generalized results have emerged that are directly applicable in xenology. Thus xenologists turn once again to cybernetics theory for guidance.^831,1867

In the field of stability, perhaps one of the most useful ideas is the concept of feedback. Feedback is a flow of information that has a reciprocating and moderating influence on organizational behavior. Information generated by the system and presented as output is fed back in as input via a "feedback loop." The system thereby keeps an eye on itself and becomes better able to establish and maintain a state of homeostatic equilibrium.⁸²⁷ Sudden stimuli applied randomly to the system and wildly oscillating inputs are quickly "damped" out.

Theoretically a well-designed extraterrestrial governmental organization possessing no time delays in feedback should be capable of instantaneous response to disruptive influences and should exhibit perfect dynamic stability. However, time delays are inherent in all real physical systems, and this problem will be further exacerbated in the case of interstellar systems because of the comparatively large lag times in transportation and communication between the stars. And whenever delays exist in any system, any variation by one of the quantities moderated by the feedback loop may be perpetuated indefinitely.⁸³³ In other words, without multiple control loops certain disturbances introduced in one corner of a galactic empire could propagate throughout the system, reverberating in continuous oscillations instead of settling down. According to systems analysts, galactic governments should be designed to be "resilient" with "soft failure modes" (nonlethal), When unexpected events occur, a well-designed xenopolitical system will not collapse but rather will degrade gradually.

Figure 21.5 A Simple Systems Model of Interstellar Economics Demand Outback Economics C(t) P(t)    Positronic Brain demand   ■ The demand for positronic brains on planet Outback is normally 100 units     at the going price of $3 × 106 each, delivered F.O.B. from Capitol World. ■ The government at Capitol wishes to hold the price constant by     controlling supply. ■ In the figure above, demand on Outback drops precipitously from     100 units/year to 50 units/year, due to bad weather. ■ This causes the price to fall to $2 × 106. ■ By halving the number of shipments of positronic brains to Outback,     the Capitol World government can force a return to the old price level.    Outback Economics   Above is a block diagram of the proposed systems model of Outback economics. ■ P(t) is the price of positronic brains on Outback. ■ Q(t) is the quantity supplied to Outback by the Capitol World government. ■ C(t) is the consumer demand on Outback for positronic brains. ■ Messages travel at 100%c ■ Interstellar freighters travel at 25%c Since Outback is 10 light-years from Capitol World ■ The communication delay dc is 10 years ■ The transportation delay dt is 40 years. The system thus may be described mathematically as follows:    Consumer Driving Function C(t)   ■ In 2400 AD, Outback’s demand drops from 100 to 50 units in a single decade. ■ Demand remains at 50 units for the next century.    Unit Price P(t)   When demand for positronic brains on Outback falls, so does price. Capitol World government finds out 10 years later, by microwave communication. ■ Shipments are immediately cut in half, but since 40 years’ worth of     cargo is already en route, the effects of the cutback are not     felt on Outback until 2450 AD. ■ By 2400 AD, 60 years after the change in demand, price has returned     to normal

Tim Quilici of Rockwell International has devised a very simple "systems" model of an interstellar economics system to illustrate the basic concept of feedback (Figure 21.5). Using a single loop mechanism, a socialistic alien government attempts to hold stable the price of some valuable trade commodity — say, "positronic brains" — by controlling supply. The "brains" are manufactured on the Capitol World, a center of industrial development and political control, and are shipped to Outback 10 light-years away. Communication is via microwave, but interstellar freighters can only make 25%c. Demand for "brains" (to control the agricultural and mining robots on Outback) has remained virtually constant for the last century at 100 units per year. Suddenly, in 2400 A.D., due to poor weather and a series of unusually violent seismic tremors, demand begins to fall. Over a decade it drops to 50 per year, at which point it levels off and holds steady. What happens to the price of "brains" that Capitol World is trying to control?

As we see from Figure 21.5, the decrease in demand on Outback causes an immediate price reduction there. Suddenly there is a glut on the market. The price remains low as too many new "brains" continue to pour in from Capitol World — which has not yet had time to react to the changed circumstances. The situation, in this simple model, is not fully remedied for 60 years following the initial disturbance. This suggests some of the difficulties inherent in interstellar commerce and government. Systems theory should allow similar modeling of the dynamic behavior of vastly more complex galactic organizations, provided their modes of operation and multiple feedback loops can be precisely and quantitatively specified.

Dr. James G. Miller, pioneer in systems science and president of the University of Louisville in Kentucky, has developed what is probably the most comprehensive and far-reaching general systems theory devised to date. Miller claims that his theory, and the principles which emerge from it, are applicable to all living systems from cellular lifeforms to organic societies. Xenologists expect that this work may profitably be extended to considerations of xenopolitical systems as well, primarily because of its general and universalistic approach to systems analysis at all scales of organization.

In his fascinating 1100-page monograph entitled Living Systems,³⁰⁷¹
Miller considers living systems at seven different levels of complexity:

■ Cells   ■ organs   ■ organisms   ■ groups   ■ organizations   ■ societies   ■ supranational systems

Based on fundamental notions of evolutionary unity, he then derives nearly 200 cross-level hypotheses which he asserts may be general characteristics of any living system.

The following are six of these hypotheses which xenologists believe may have relevance to the problem of stability in xenopolitical systems at all cultural scales:

• Hypothesis 5.2-2: The greater a threat or stress upon a system, the more components of it are involved in adjusting to it. When no further components with new adjustment processes are available, the system function collapses.
• Hypothesis 5.2-10: Under equal stress, functions developed later in the phylogenetic history of a given type of system break down before more primitive functions do.
• Hypothesis 5.2-11: After stress, disturbances of subsystem steady states are ordinarily corrected and returned to normal ranges before systemwide steady-state disturbances are.
• Hypothesis 5.2-12: More complex systems, which contain more different components, each of which can adjust against one or more specific environmental stresses and maintain in steady state one or more specific variables not maintained by any other component, if they adequately coordinate the processes in their components, survive longer on the average than less complex systems.
• Hypothesis 5.2-13: Under threat or stress, a system that survives, in the common good of total system survival, temporarily subordinates conflicts among subsystems or components until the threat or stress is relieved, when internal conflicts recur.
• Hypothesis 5.2-19: The greater the resources available to a system, the less likely is conflict among its subsystems or components.³⁰⁷¹

One last point about xenopolitical systemic stability. A few cyberneticists have suggested that really complex networks with intricate webs of feedback and feedforward loops "may include processes of consciousness of internal monitoring of certain states of the net."⁸²²

• Galactic organizational systems which have accumulated vast quantities of information may perhaps in some sense be viewed as having memory, will, consciousness, and various other sentient life functions.^3071,827
• Intergalactic contact between two such entities would truly be "a meeting of cultures," and would almost certainly be incomprehensible to any single individual or race of individuals.²³⁶
• How such communication might effect the equilibrium and stability of each of the two "conscious" networks is unknown, but the implications are many for the sextillion or so sentient beings involved.

Galactography is a descriptive science which deals with the physical features of galaxies, their political and economic subdivisions, their natural resources, lifeforms, and industries.³¹⁹⁹ As the subject is both massive and complex, and since many pertinent areas have been touched upon elsewhere in this book, we shall restrict our discussion here to a brief overview of a few strategic aspects of economic and military galactography.

An astonishing fallacy that appears repeatedly in the literature is the assertion that interstellar freight costs must be so prohibitive that not even gold, diamonds, radium ingots, or complex microelectronic devices would be worth their weight in trade between the stars.⁵⁵³ This notion often is used to demonstrate that trade in any commodity other than knowledge (data) is a futile and cost-ineffective endeavor. Fortunately, this simply is not so.

Two civilizations inhabiting different star systems can trade in bulk goods for comparatively little energy. Each culture, for example, may erect a giant mass driver which is used to dispatch cargos as well as to receive them. Here’s how such a transport system might work.

As the consignment arrives at Solar System A, traveling at its normal operational velocity (say, 50%c), it is swallowed by the giant mass driver. The driver decelerates the robot cargo vessel by coupling with magnetic fields. Kinetic energy is recovered and converted to potential (stored) energy. (See Chapter 19 for some ideas on how this might be done.) The cargo ship, now at rest, is unloaded and filled with goods ordered by the inhabitants of Solar System B. Finally, using the energy stored during the craft’s arrival (plus a small bit of local energy to balance conversion losses), the ship is accelerated back up to 50%c and shoots out the barrel of the giant mass driver bound for B. If A and B are 10 light-years apart, each trading cycle should require only about 20 years.

The total energy which must be handled during each cycle phase is about 3 × 10²⁴ joules, which looks like a job for a Type II civilization.* However, most of this energy is recovered because a mass driver constructed by advanced aliens may incorporate superconductive windings and ultra-high-efficiency storage devices. So what is the cost, in terms we can understand?

• Assuming roughly $0.01/kilowatt-hour, the mass driver regenerative system must be 99.998% efficient to achieve costs comparable to the space shuttle (about $1000/kilogram) — but between stars.
• If 10%c missions are acceptable, the required efficiency drops to 99.93%; if 1%c missions are sufficient, only 92.6% efficiency is needed.
• And large-scale power generation in space may permit energy to be produced vastly cheaper than on Earth’s surface today.
• If the price of energy drops by three orders of magnitude, then the required efficiency for the 50%c mission is only 97.7% and for the 10%c mission a mere 23.8%.
• With sufficiently refined technology, interstellar bulk trade in raw materials and manufactured items may actually be cheap!

* A Starship Enterprise-sized cargo vessel (190,000 metric tons) is assumed.

Table 21.5 Galactic and Globular Clusters as Interstellar Trade Route Nodes

Part A Part B Part C Full Size Full Size Full Size

Generally speaking, trade routes are fixed along the shortest possible physical pathway between the sources of the principal commodities shipped and the major centers of consumption.¹¹⁶⁹ Each regime of travel has a unique set of physical characteristics that dictate the distribution of optimum routes.

• On land, surface conditions such as mountain chains and passes, accessible waterways, impassable swamps and deserts are determinative.
• On the sea, the curvature of the Earth, ocean currents, wind patterns, and the presence of iceberg fields, monsoon tracks and other hazards to navigation are more critical.
• In the air, trade routes are fixed mainly by political considerations, distribution of major population centers, jet stream and other atmospheric conditions, and so forth.

In the realm of interstellar commerce, too, a unique set of problems prove determinative.

Probably the single most important parameter in deciding which trade routes should be utilized by an extraterrestrial civilization is the level of sophistication of transportation technology.

• Starships restricted to speeds below 50%c will gain no benefits from relativistic time dilation.
  • Time of flight between neighboring stellar systems in the Disk will average on the order of decades for the vessel’s crew.
  • Even if physiological longevity is greatly extended, starships will probably have to call at intermediate ports to take on fuel and fresh crews.
• Even vessels able to pull 99%c won’t do significantly better.
  • For such starships, the time dilation factor will cut trip time down to about 14 shipboard years per 100 light-years of travel.
  • While it is certainly possible to imagine traveling for decades without pausing to refuel, resupply, or recrew, the longer the flight time the less likely starships will not stop at intermediate points.
• In other words, starships limited to 99%c or less probably will not be able simply to aim at target star systems anywhere in the Milky Way and journey directly towards them (though "leading the target", of course, to account for proper stellar motions during the journey).
• Rather, since the distances are so vast and the travel times so long for the crews, manned trading missions most likely must follow certain prescribed routes as they crisscross the Galaxy engaging in interstellar commerce.
• (Unmanned robot cargo ships are another matter — they can be "aimed and shot.")
• Regular ports will be visited and many planetfalls made as starvessels "hop" from solar system to solar system along paths calculated to cost minimum time or energy.
• Eventually these may be legislated into law as a matter of convenience by the ET Interstellar Transit Authority.

Intragalactic trade routes may also be fixed in accordance with physical heterogeneities
in the Galactic environment.

• For instance, hydrogen gas is an order of magnitude more plentiful along the spiral arms than in the interarm regions. Hence xenologists expect that Bussard ramscoop vehicles might adopt trade routes called "ring routes" by network theorists.

• Ring routes follow a clockwise or counterclockwise pathway around the circumference of the Galaxy (the arms of the Milky Way) and then follow a radial route inwards to the final destination.
• Using an external ring route the trip path will be about 250% longer than a simple direct (straight) route; using an optimized internal ring route, however, this excess distance may be reduced as low as 37%.²⁶²⁹

It will also be recalled that the number of habitable star systems (classes F, G, and K) is only a few percent higher in the spiral arms than in the interarm regions, so self-fueled starships will not tend to follow trade routes aligned with the Galactic spiral structure. To an economic galactographist, the Galactic Disk is essentially uniform with useful star systems. However, there are certain clumpings of stars which impart valuable heterogeneity to the intragalactic environment. One example of this is the galactic or "open" cluster.

Galactic clusters contain from a few dozen to nearly a thousand suns,
usually confined to a more or less spherical volume ranging from 5-65 light-years in diameter.

• About 500 clusters are known (see table above for a few of them), and it is estimated that there are about 20,000 scattered throughout the Milky Way.¹⁹⁴⁵
• While this imples a mean distance between them of about 1000 light-years, this figure is very misleading because clusters are largely confined to the spiral arms.
• Taking this into account, the true mean separation works out to perhaps 100-300 light-years.

Galactographic considerations suggest that civilizations located in clusters may form close-knit economic units.

• This is possible because solar systems in galactic clusters typically are separated by a mere 0.5 light-years.
• Which is an order of magnitude closer than normal stars (such as our Sol) in the Galactic Disk.
• Interstellar trade routes may be designed as a series of overlapping arcs connecting series of galactic cluster trade associations around each spiral arm.
• (Each cluster may represent individual political units, small pockets of interstellar civilization scattered across the Galactic wilderness.)

There are many other nonuniformities in the galactic distribution of stars which may have economic implications for galactic governments.

• Stellar belts, associations, and galactic star clouds (bright "knots" of suns found in Cygnus, Scutum, Sagittarius, etc. in our own galaxy) are more diffuse aggregations than clusters but may serve to concentrate trading activity to some degree.
• Globular clusters, metal-poor and probably also planet-poor, may be exploitable without danger to sentient lifeforms (since such clusters most likely harbor none).
• With 10⁴-10⁶ Population II stars each, globulars (Table 21.5) represent rich lodes of fusionable hydrogen and a possibly very lucrative mining venture for industrious galactic entrepreneurs.

Another major heterogeneous feature is the general density gradient of suns in the Galactic corpus.

• Stars are about an order of magnitude more numerous near the Core than in the outer Rim regions of the Disk.
• As we move inward from the Rim, number density rises continuously. Stellar metallicity is also about ten times higher in the Core than in the Disk, so more planets, lifeforms, cultures, and mining ventures are possible nearer the more central regions of the Galaxy. (This is also where globular clusters are most abundant.)
• Economic and sociopolitical activity is expected to concentrate towards the Core.

Galactic communication routes may tend more to be line-of-sight than trade routes. These systems may be organized hierarchically with extremely complex network designs.²⁹⁹¹ One writer suggests the following:

Local terminals handling ten worlds are constructed in space, presumably circling a star for free energy. The civilizations in touch with each terminal might range from a few hundred to a few thousand light-years away. The terminal receives signals from each and rebroadcasts them to the other members; in addition, it bumps a duplicate of the signal to a junction station further up the network hierarchy. From the junction it receives, and passes along to its member worlds, the full output of the galactic network, a great glut of information, perhaps edited in advance for potential interest to each idiosyncratic world. The more complicated junction stations in turn report to a large central station. A network of one central station and 1000 junctions, each in turn corresponding with 100 local terminals, could handle 1,000,000 worlds. Each society then would require only a single antenna, aimed at its local terminal.²⁶⁰⁷

Other designs, perhaps analogous to the decentralized nonhierarchical military ARPANET system or the ALOHANET packet radio network, may be more practical for complex interstellar communications.^2484,2483