The 7 Lost Civilisations
An account from 2710
Guild Space encloses some 10,000 star systems roughly within a sphere with a 100 light-year radius. This is a small volume compared with the New Probe Shell of 5.22 million surveyed star systems from an estimated 20 million, within a 1250 light-year radius sphere. Even the New Probe Shell represents less than 0.005% of the stars in the galaxy. Our impressive rate of exploration remains meagre when these scales are considered.
Even within our small sample, there are over 500,000 worlds that are deemed habitable. Most of these have conditions that are too hostile for the evolution of sentient lifeforms, but academics find it difficult to explain why such evolution did not take place on some 60,000 of them, beyond the mere 7 observed. Such observation proves that the rise of sentience is more unusual in evolutionary systems than theory would suggest.
The 7 observed civilisations are all in ruin, and it is the work of archaeologists, rather than emissaries, to bring us understanding of them. Since only one of these civilisations were space-faring, we can judge that we have been the most fortunate of them. We have survived to be the most technologically advanced of 6 of them (there are not enough data to establish the relative advancement of the 7th). We can also show that we are the most advanced within a 2,500 light-year radius, because none of our robot emissaries have encountered any others. Unless they have done so in the last 100,000 years, no other civilisations in the Galaxy have sent exploration probes. Why are we the only ones in a list of some 1,400 past and present civilisations? Even if only 1 in 7 achieve our technological level, it still leaves 200 civilisations with enough time to have filled the galaxy with their probes.
It seems likely, therefore that far fewer than 1 in 7 survive to our technological level. Those that have survived were not probe senders, unless we are talking about a recent civilisation. We can therefore judge ourselves to be miraculously fortunate.
This document makes a brief survey of the 7 other civilisations, evaluating the currently understood reasons for their demise, in order to posit a likelihood of making contact with another civilisations in the near future.
Yutani civilisation (Guild Space)
Environmental Collapse
The Yutani civilisation of Jericho Yutani, the 5th planet of the Jericho system is perhaps the best understood xenomorph civilisation for two reasons: it has been colonised for over 30 years; and it fell less than 2000 years ago, due to environmental collapse, so much of its remains are intact. For these first 30 years this was the only colonisable world with a previous civilisation on it, so the research interest has been fervent to say the least. Recently the interest has been dropping, because of a large academic migration toward The Slug Culture in the inner Von Neumann Shell.
The 30 years of research have, however, pieced together a very detailed picture of Yutani society.
The Slug Culture (Von Neumann Shell)
Nuclear War
the Slug Culture inhabited the 4th planet of the Yigeen System until 44,000 years ago. In its final form had a more or less continuous history of advance over a 2600-year period. Extremely militaristic organisation and stratification of society into definite castes remained strong hallmarks throughout. There remained little commitment to personal freedom or quality of life. There appears to be a very strong religious framework, that was more-or-less global in its extent over the last 100-year period
This same period saw a technological and population explosion of staggering proportions, and it seems likely that the biosphere of the planet would have been under great stress toward the end. There is some evidence of early space exploration, but anames probably never moved beyond planetary orbit. The launching of rockets into space, was probably commonplace. A capsule recovered from some sediment recently has suggested that it was orbiting while the final nuclear exchange was taking place.
Estimates made on the size of the nuclear exchange put it at between 4 and 5 thousand warheads of yields exceeding 40 megatonnes. The population of the planet would have been reduced to about 5%, with that remainder perishing over the following 2 years. With them all higher lifeforms perished in about the same time, and only very simple organisms remained. As some 44,000 years have passed, some recovery in the original atmosphere balance has taken place, and the radioactivity of most of the ruins are now only a couple of levels above background.
As this civillisation has only just been colonised, there is still a lot of work to be done to understand the circumstances surrounding their final conflict.
The Builders (New Probe Shell)
Nuclear War
As this world lies outside of Guild Space, there has been no human expedition. Robot probes have, however been able to determine that the Builder civilisation lived on the 3rd planet of the GSD-10-101+16 system around 19 million years ago. Despite the length of time, there is still a great deal of structural evidence and xenomorph remains.
Comparisons of ages of detonations may suggest that two nuclear wars took place around a thousand years apart. Without more accurate measurements this is still far from certain, and far from what was considered theoretically likely. If true it looks as through there were two civillisations that rose to harness nuclear power, with the second successfully wiping out the race and all higher order flora and fauna with them.
It is from the extraordinarily widespread building remains revealed by the robotic surveys that the civilisation became known as The Builders: they contributed greatly to the planet's geology.
The Old Ones (New Probe Shell)
Climate Change
On a rather baked desert world lay remains of a civilisation from about 41 million years ago, there is too little evidence to report anything too detailed here. However the presence of tar in sea bed structures laid down in that period reveal a very strong greenhouse effect at around the time of the cessation of any archaelogical evidence.
The Enders (New Probe Shell)
Environmental Collapse
Originally thought to be catastophic climate change, but recent evidence has revealed that this world had been in its death-throws, owing to atmospheric losses. No life has been recorded on the planet's surface, and only fossilised remains exist with the most recent dated to about 9 million years ago.
Proto Navigators (New Probe Shell)
Unknown
Reports from the most far-flung probes so far have just been collected from the Wipervane Arrays (at the time of writing). The information collected so far establishes two intriguing lines of inquiry:
- it is the first non-indigenous civillization (therefore space-faring)
- it may be an ancestor of the Navigators
The planet lies just inside the snowline of GSD+55+124+27, and appears artificially enriched in ammonia and acetylene, with a temperature remaining below -54 degrees celsius. There are organisms on the planet that use an ammonia biological cycle. The construction on the planet is widespread with an architecture that resembles a cross between boab trees and geological mesas, but can range to more than a kilometre high.
The fossilised remains of the sophonts, reveal them to be a 2.5-metre digitigrade biped with a strage skeletal structure, being both inside and outside the organism. Aspects of its likely metabolism point it to being a distant analog to a fungas. A lack of eyes and the presence of a highly conductive organ composed of grphite carbon in the head indicate that it probably used some kind of magnetoreception for their primary sense.
There is no clear evidence of warfare or any kind of environmental collapse, so the reasons for this civilisation's demise remain unknown.
Discussion
While our sample is still very small, we have compelling evidence that self-destruction far out numbers natural calamity as the cause for civilisation demise. Only one of the 7 were destroyed by a natural calamity. As was discussed above, even in this case, the evidence is not unequivocal.
We could have under sampled civilisations that perished due to asturoid impact, where the impact may have erased all traces of the civilisation detectable so far. Asturoids of sufficient magnitude are, however rare and considered unlikely in the present discussion. Smaller extinction event asturoids have been detected on Earth and many other planets, though these have not coincided with the presence a civilisation.
No systems within the New Probe Shell have had close contact with a supernova in the last 200 million years, so this cause is probably underepresented in our sample. It is envisaged that a nearby supernova would shower a planet in much heat and radiation, which would become a source of heatwaves, storms, and radiation levels that would well exceed all known data to that point. It is a likely cause of mass extinction and would break the economy of any civilisation under development within 100 light years.
There are no expectations of detecting the remains of a civilisation that were extinguished by the death throws of their star, since such a calamitous event would likely erase the traces of such a civilisation. As has been discussed in the literature, civilisations that had become sufficiently space-faring to escape the immediate viscinity of that star, will have launched probes to other nearby stars, and left their traces. So far no such traces have been found. Clearly, we need to look for colonisation traces in the viscinity of young white dwarfs for evidence of this scenario.
There appears to be a slight preference in the data toward civilisations generally passing the so-called nuclear test, only to be derailed by their inability to manage their global environmental resources. This has typically come down to insufficient cohesion on a large scale, which has allowed the interests of individuals or minority elites to have their way over the common good. This was indeed true of Earth history, and it is either an abnormally robust biosphere, or a slightly enlightened humankind that eventually won humankind its survival.
Whatever the case, humanity remains in the minority as a long-standing surviving civilisation. It is Guild expectation that many more remnant civilisations will be uncovered amongst the stars, before we make contact with an extant one.