Melbourne, Australia – In recent years astronomers have discovered hundreds of planets circling other stars. At this point it seems likely that most stars have planets, many in the ‘goldilocks’ zone where water is a liquid and thus favorable to life. This makes it all the more likely that intelligent life has evolved elsewhere, including in star systems not too far away. So why, then, has no-one come to visit? And why, despite decades of searching, have we not even received a message?
Biohistory may provide an answer to this question, and it starts with the observation that our modern Western culture is very odd, indeed. The whole of human history, and what we know of pre-history, has been a fierce struggle for survival. Successful peoples expand, wipe out or drive away their neighbors, seize their women, dominate and enslave them. We are the survivors of billions of years of physical and then cultural evolution, in which the weak give way to the strong.
Compare this to our present age. For the best part of a century no Western nation has fought a major war. Public opinion in most countries is strongly pacifist. We have given up our colonial empires, often without a fight. Rather than expanding at the expense of our weaker neighbors, we invite millions of them to live with us. And we need to do this, partly because our own birth-rates have dropped well below replacement level. Further, we embrace other cultures and increasingly abandon, sideline and dilute our own. In historical and even in biological terms, this is very strange.
A key point to note is that these changes took place just as we developed the technology to destroy ourselves and depopulate our planet. The key date is 1945, which saw both the defeat of Nazi Germany and the first nuclear weapons. The assumption is often made that advanced technological civilizations must be peaceful, but this is simply not correct. German scientists and engineers of the 1930s and early 1940s were brilliant, but the regime they worked for was violent and genocidal. If not for the peculiar lunacy of driving out or murdering their highly capable Jewish citizens, the Nazis might well have developed the Bomb in 1944. Thus, in one sense, we have been extraordinarily fortunate. If our technological age were as violent as most of our past, our cities would already be rubble and expansion into space impossible. Our sudden surge towards pacifism may have saved us.
Biohistory proposes that these changes in temperament happened at this time for a reason. Advanced technology is driven by the temperamental trait known as ‘infant C’, which involves strict control of very young children. But infant C, along with industrial wealth also undermines V, the aggressive factor responsible for war. It is thus a quirk of our peculiar human physiology that our technological civilization suddenly become peaceful.
There is no reason to suppose the same applies to alien beings. Surely, the standard pattern in the universe is that the struggle for survival continues as technology advances. The more powerful the weapons the worse the destruction, until the species is either destroyed or so impoverished that space travel is impossible. Perhaps this is why there are no intelligent aliens speaking to the stars: intelligent life tends to destroy itself. The notion that intelligent beings must be peaceful and co-operative is an illusion, born out of our own peculiar modern psychology.
We humans face a very different challenge. Our technological civilization is in decline as people within scientifically advanced nations begin to lose the “technological temperament”. This issue is further exasperated by the fact that people in these nations are no longer replacing themselves demographically. As explained in my books, the long-term result will be a successor society too rigid and impoverished to again dream of space.
With modern science we now have a chance not only to understand why these changes are taking place, but, just possibly, develop the means to reverse these trends and create a stable society both technologically brilliant and peaceful. It is therefore imperative that Biohistory gain widespread support. The future of our world may depend on it.
Dr. Jim Penman
Dr. Jim Penmanis the pioneer of ‘biohistory,’ a revolutionary new scientific theory examining the physiological underpinnings of social change and its probable effects on civilizations. To date, Dr. Penman has co-authored ten peer-reviewed papers in leading journals including Behavioral Brain Research and Physiology and Behavior. Dr. Penman currently lives in Melbourne, Australia.