Diplomats definitely don’t get enough credit
for averting galactic wars. Serving as an ambassador on an alien world is much like a
foreigner trying to understand local slang: just when you think you've got it, you
inadvertently insult someone's mother. Which is a really bad idea when
dealing with insectoid hive races. Welcome back to another Sci Fi Sunday
here on SFIA, where we examine concepts popular in science fiction and ask if
they could one day become science fact, and what that might look like. Today’s topic is
about Alien Ambassadors, both aliens who might visit us as diplomats and our ambassadors to
them, and even entire worlds devoted to serving as meeting grounds for many alien civilizations
to meet, trade, and work together. Or possibly meet to debate how they’ll conquer the galaxy.
We’ll also deep dive into the embassy aspect from a couple well known sci-fi settings like
Babylon 5, the Citadel of Mass Effect, and settings like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Stargate.
Almost as soon as we started dreaming up alien civilizations we imagined meeting with them, and
wondered what a sustained interaction with those civilizations might look like. These tended to
draw on embassies and consulates from past and present along with various analogies to the
United Nations or other multi-state bodies and confederacies we’ve seen in our history. In
our last episode, Fermi Paradox: Interdiction, we looked at aliens who stay far from each
other purposefully and interact little, with huge buffer zones of depleted
space around them, and today we’ll go the other direction, tons of aliens everywhere.
While we see plenty of multi-species empires in well known franchises like Star Trek and Star
Wars, and indeed once did an episode on it, embassies tend to get less focus. They really
should be given more attention, not merely because the bureaucracy in such empires is a nightmare
because of paperwork, but more so because deciding who gets the bigger office is a delicate matter of
interstellar importance, one that could seriously result in a diplomatic galactic-wide incident.
In fiction, either establishing an embassy is another job for an exploratory crew encountering
aliens in their journeys, or its a one-episode plot device where the alien ambassador is
just there to introduce a new crew member, get a crew member in trouble, or give some
vague and foreboding information about some other mysterious civilization or region of space.
Deep dives on the concept itself, of an alien embassy or ambassador, are fairly uncommon, but
it is a fascinating concept and essentially the reverse case of this week’s earlier look at
Interdiction Hypothesis, again where alien civilizations interact minimally. So I thought
we’d look at 3 cases for today, one where we have a big United Nations in Space where all sorts
of aliens come and meet, a singular embassy on our one world from an alien civilization, and the
idea of us having an embassy on some alien world. Probably the best known example of that first
case is Babylon 5, the space station in the series of the same name from the 1990s.
It was an O’Neill Cylinder where tons of aliens had their embassies, and the Citadel
from the Mass Effect video games, which seems to have drawn on Babylon 5 for inspiration.
Alternatively, we see an alien civilization with an embassy here on Earth in another 1990s
sci fi TV series, Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict, where an advanced and seemingly
peaceful and friendly alien civilization arrives and offers us a hand and sets up a few
embassies to assist in integrating their technologies and ideas into our civilization.
I don’t think we see too many cases of life as an ambassador to a single alien civilization too
often, usually the writers want to move onto to other strange new places after an episode or two
on one alien world, but Star Trek: Deep Space 9, also from the 1990s, while focused mostly on a
space station next to wormhole from which many new aliens are met, has seven seasons and during that
gives us a very deep look at the life of Benjamin Sisko, the station’s commander, who is essentially
the ambassador to the Bajoran civilization the station is located in the territory of,
and the Cardassian Empire, who previously ruled over the Bajorans and border the station.
That series centers on life on a space station next to the only known stable wormhole in the
galaxy and allows travel to the other side of that galaxy in mere minutes where their normal warp
drive would take decades. It is very rare we see any sort of alien embassies where we don’t have
fairly casual FTL - Faster Than Light Travel, and yet we tend to assume on this show that it isn’t
very likely we’d ever have that, though to be fair we tend to assume we’ll probably never find
another alien civilization in our galaxy either. So for today, while we will discuss some
no-FTL scenarios for lots of aliens sending ambassadors or merchants, such as in Alastair
Reynolds’ Revenger series, we are going to relax our usual no-FTL rule, it is, after all,
Sci Fi sunday, and speaking of relaxing, don’t forget grab a drink and snack, and hit those
like and subscribe buttons while you’re at it. Now an awful lot depends on how close everyone is
and how common, and in your classic space opera setting, whatever the actual spacing of the stars,
you can usually get around the region of space everyone is from in something like days to
weeks, and it has dozens if not hundreds of alien civilizations in it, as much as the special
effects and costume and makeup budgets permit. You may or may not have instant communication like
we do now, which very much alters the dynamics of what sort of powers your ambassador needs to
have to be useful, as well as what their job is. An ambassador's job description would likely be so
varied that you half expect 'interstellar barista' to be in there, because somehow, making a perfect
Glorfnakian espresso is key to maintaining peace. A lot of times nowadays, especially if the two
civilizations are on relatively friendly terms, this is one part envoy, one part spy, one part
tourism spokesman, one party party host, and several more parts for handling visas, visiting
citizens in trouble, public relations in general, and a lot of law and contract oversight.
How much of these you are doing is also very dependent on your means of travel. For
instance, in a classic spherical expansion model of colonization, if we simplified by assuming
everybody had been roughly evenly distributed in homeworlds and all got started about the same time
and rate - which is very unlikely of course - you would have 12 neighboring alien spheres touching
you because you have three dimensions to work with. Not many countries have 12 nations
bordering them and those are usually ones much larger than their neighbors and not very compact.
Russia and China share the record at 14 neighbors each, including each other, and are the first and
third largest country by land mass, whereas Canada and the United States, at second and fourth
largest, don’t have very many neighbors… of course it gets more confusing if we talk about
overlapping sphere of influence out in the ocean or some colony somewhere on another continent, and
France comes in 3rd for borders at 12 because it includes Brazil and Suriname in South America.
Brazil itself is 4th, at 10 land neighbors. If you start including practical borders of shared
seas, then that number would jump a lot and I would imagine the British Empire at its height
would have had dozens of neighbors, especially as countries tended to be smaller in the past.
In space, that ocean analogy is a lot more appropriate, as while we can draw a big blob of
a map with all of a civilization's stars in it, the conceptual spacing there would be like
an archipelago whose dozen or so islands were scattered across the whole Pacific Ocean. They’re
not really in a position to meaningfully claim that ocean or prevent others from moving through
it. And indeed space is far worse, as even some system populated way out to the edge of is Kuiper
Belt bordering 12 other systems that did the same is inhabiting something like a trillionth of that
territory, and someone passing through on there way elsewhere probably wouldn’t come within
a thousand times the distance from a system that it’s inhabited zone was wide. Space borders
are very much like trying to fence in the ocean: a bold statement of ownership with practical
implications that are, at best, philosophical. Even ignoring that it would be very unlikely
civilizations would all start spreading at the same time, given the age of the galaxy and
timeline involved in evolution, it is also very unlikely an actual civilization
would end up very spherical either, as it would have more room to spread in some
directions than others and spread towards valuable real estate like star clusters more energetically.
The other aspect is that we wouldn’t really expect a single ambassador from a single species to be
the norm. Expecting a single representative for an entire sprawling civilization is like expecting
one waiter to handle a restaurant during lunch hour: overly optimistic and a recipe for disaster.
I think, even with FTL, it would be pretty hard to get a single representative from just one
planet, let alone one developed star system. Spreading that out to some civilization sprawled
over a million systems for a few hundred light years all around and it gets really dubious
that one nation per species would be common. And this is assuming the classic warp drive that
takes you through normal space, but just way faster than light travels. The dynamic changes
a lot if we’ve got stargate-style wormholes in play, where everyone in that gate network has
the equivalent of a phone number you can dial, and even other distant networks for other galaxies
might just be adding on a long distance area code and cost. Nobody is really your neighbor in
a situation like that, especially as it is planet-to-planet direct travel, so you don’t
necessarily have much of a presence in space. Your spaceships exist for taking stargates
to other planets you’ve identified as either good places to terraform or particularly handy for
resources or trade. As we discussed in our episode on Stargates last month, depending on how big
you can make and operate a portal like that, it might be something where you have one per
planet for moving at most a few thousand people and a parallel amount of cargo around a day to
various places in the galaxy, like we might see in Stargate SG-1, to where you can pop open a mile
wide portal for dumping oceans from oceanic worlds to arid planets to get two more livable planets
out of both. That’s two very different ends of a wide spectrum of options for how much throughput
you can get through your portals and it very much alters what those civilizations and their
relations with other civilizations looks like. How you make your portals matters a lot too,
as in the case of the portals from Stargate or the wormhole from Deep Space 9, those are
easily defended and static locations that make an invasion through them well-nigh impossible
by brute force. Massive technology advantages, treachery, and trojan horses are another story
of course. Alternatively, if you can pop open a portal wherever you please on someone else’s
planet, you can dump a few divisions of shock troops or just a variety of nukes, chemical
weapons, or robotic killamajigs through. Strategies for defense tend to rely on mutually
assured destruction coming in retaliation from secret bases full of doomsday devices, and is
actually the situation in the fictional setting of Frank Herbert’s Dune that the various film
adaptations tend to leave out to explain why they use relatively small and elite infantry
units, they all have huge nuclear stockpiles hidden around space, so the militaries are a
personal bodyguard, police force, and pack of assassins and commandos. The additional factor of
the Spacing Guild further limits major battles, and so their empire’s ten-thousand year history
is punctuated by long vendettas and wars of assassins, and their equivalent to a UN is the
Landsraad and CHOAM, their league of nobles and merchant association respectively. Lots of
maneuvering, very few open wars, especially at the grand scale or using scorched earth tactics.
And we see similar scenarios where you are comparing warp travel, where you can attack from
anywhere in huge 3D volumes of space, and have to guard all approaches, to those where you are
limited by some equivalent to the trade winds, like the hyperspace lanes we see in Star Wars,
that make travel along them much easier and safer and give you a place to focus your defenses.
Given that an awful lot of diplomacy is based around loose and opportunistic agreements not to
beat your neighbor up and take their stuff, the diplomatic landscape shifts a lot based on what
travel around the galactic landscape looks like. In Mass Effect for instance, everything is based
around the Mass Effect relays that let them toss spaceships around the galaxy very quickly. They
have regular FTL they can use to travel many times the speed of light in whatever direction
they wish, but the ancient and enormous relay network lets you move between any of those
relays in the galaxy nearly instantly where the FTL systems they have only permit you to
travel several light years per day, meaning you could get to Alpha Centauri or other neighboring
stars in a day or less, but crossing the galaxy by FTL rather than relay might take decades,
and intergalactic travel several centuries. Needless to say those rare relays are incredibly
prized and because travel between them dumps you out at random at an unpredictable location and
vector in a zone near them many thousands of kilometers wide, they become impractical
to robustly mine and fortify. The nominal central hub of the relay system is a giant space
space station called the Citadel that’s become a hub for diplomacy and trade. For various
plot reasons I won’t spoil, none of these civilizations are very old or developed -
by the standards of this channel anyway, where a Kardashev-2 civilization is considered
unimpressive and yet could single handedly have wiped the floor with every faction in that
game simultaneously including the big-bads. In that setting humanity ends up on the
galactic stage after an unintentional war with one of the big 3 powers in the galaxy
and on the Citadel, and eventually manages to make its way into joining them to be the Big 4,
forming the equivalent to the UN security council, with dozens of other minor powers who have
been on the galactic stage themselves for some centuries, but nobody’s been around for
many millennia, though the galaxy is covered in lots of habitable planets and alien ruins.
The same is the case for Babylon 5, or B5, where we have the big 5 instead, of which humanity
is basically the tough new kid on the block, and a league of unaligned civilizations that
are the various UN equivalents. They have a giant space station there too, which provides
gravity by spin, just like the Citadel does, and thus has higher and lower layers with
differing gravity that they can pump different atmosphere mixes into for various alien biologies.
Though for budget constraints, we hear about most of those more often then we see them.
The realism of that is of course a handwave so that a humanity not too far in the future
can realistically be a significant player on the galactic stage, so none of the other
empires are too old or big and the ones that are have strange and mysterious motives. The
Vorlons, one of the Big 5 on B5, play that role, as do the Minbari to a lesser extent, and the
station got built after humanity got into a very one-sided war with the Minbari and technically
won after the Minbari mysteriously surrendered after winning basically every engagement.
The war was found to be over a regrettable misunderstanding and humanity decided that
to avoid future such incidents, they would help build a giant space station around a neutral
and apparently uninhabited planet and administer it to be a place of diplomacy and trade, and the
show is about the principally human command staff trying to run a mix of the UN and a pioneer
outpost, with the ambassador and aids of the other 4 major powers being major characters too.
It’s an excellent show and they try hard to keep the aliens very alien in appearance
and behavior rather than the traditional new-forehead-of-the-week we see in Star Trek, but
they have the same budget and writing limitations. That war for instance gets started because the
Minbari encounter a human expedition and initially we’re just told vaguely that their way of showing
peaceful intent is to have their gunports open on ships encountering other spaceships and
an equivalent to the empty-hand extended for a handshake, to show no weapon in hand.
Unfortunately the human crew interpreted it as a hostile act and fired, and the Minbari’s supreme
leader was there and got killed in the damage to the ship, so they declared war and refused to
negotiate. Great show but the writing on this part of the story got more confused and weird as the
show progressed until we see the actual event and the war that followed and essentially the huge and
advanced Minbari ships encounter the small human exploration squadron and scan them so hard they
screw up their sensors and controls, so that it seems like an attack, and they fire back, damaging
the sensors, and flee as soon as they as that happens. The Minbari ignore all communications
from humanity after that and murder everyone. And the scene comes off like an alien ambassador
arriving on Earth and walking down the ramp of his ship firing a machine gun off wildly in the air
and then acting the aggrieved party because we thought it was a hostile act and shot him. Taking
disproportionate vengeance by then blowing up several of our cities or even the whole planet.
This is a problem with writing scenes like that and very common in a lot of scifi, because you
want alien-acting aliens but also relatable ones, and a lot of time the alien stuff comes off as
irrational to us, which is good, but then as it gets explored more, it just comes of as truly
irrational rather than operating under an alien morality we didn’t understand yet. That’s why
alien diplomats will get training on how to handle being offered a cup of Earth coffee or tea
without triggering an intergalactic incident over caffeine tolerance, or passed what to them was
the equivalent of molten lava in a crucible. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle explore that idea
in their classic novel the Mote in God’s Eye where they encounter an alien ship for the first time
and it fires on them and damages them badly, and the human ship’s commander fires right back
and methodically takes the alien ship apart. When the slightly-strawman scientists yell at him
afterward for firing on what they assume was an automated anti-collision system, the rebuttal is
that if you are going to send exploration vessels and probes out into the galaxy, the burden is
on you to make sure they have at least some safeguards in place to avoid firing on a ship
that clearly is an artificial construct, not a meteor, or not to ram into planets and so on.
That still leaves a lot of room for error and misunderstanding of course, so it definitely makes
sense to approach other civilizations cautiously and with protocols built around de-escalation
rather than escalation. There’s obviously no guarantee they would view it the same way.
This also isn’t one of those things we can handwave to math and science being
a universal language. It is very likely any place where complex life has evolved will
have a clear idea of what aggression is, along with escalation and de-escalation, I
wouldn’t go so far as to say those are all inevitable under evolution but they would seem
right up their with things like curiosity where it would be hard to imagine any planet producing
a civilization without these. Nonetheless it is going to be an abstract and variable concept
that might not paste well onto other species. For instance, eyeballs are likely to be common
in the universe, given how many separate times they’ve apparently evolved on Earth, and how
useful they are, but while on Earth staring at someone is mostly a sign of interest and
frequently of aggression, it might be viewed as no such thing by another species, which might also be
fine getting one foot from you and staring at you, or glaring at you, which might not even vaguely
imply a lack of respect or menace by them. Interacting with an alien species with completely
different social cues is like trying to understand modern internet slang as a Victorian: baffling,
slightly horrifying, but profoundly educational. Alternatively they might be mortally offended
at you constantly exhaling near them or dropping dead skin cells everywhere. We’re also all
still animals for most of our thinking, and even if you’re expecting a given behavior
and know it is innocent, you might feel constant anxiety just being in the room with a two-ton
alien monster with fangs as long as your hand, and whose hamster cage by their desk
is their equivalent of a snack drawer. On the flipside, you walk into see another of
your colleagues and show off your new pair of leather boots and they go into shock or flee to
corner, even if you tell them its vat-grown or synthetic leather, because hanging out with
a species that wears other animals skins is to them like having Pinhead from the Hellraiser
franchise as an officemate. Again even if they’re not off a once-living animal, it might be
like a creepy coworker keeping a jar full of glass eyes on their desk and assuring
you they don’t use real eyes anymore[a]. The reality is that a human and an alien from
an entirely different evolutionary origin might find each other’s presence in the same room
almost unbearable, and minor differences in temperature and oxygen composition, assuming they
even operated in an atmosphere like ours, might be very uncomfortable. So it isn’t very likely many
aliens would want to share a home or workspace with other aliens or us. That doesn’t mean they’re
any less capable than we of consciously stepping back and setting aside evolutionary behavioral
differences and biologically unsettling traits, but that’s a lot easier to do with some distance.
This also doesn't mean you have to go to the Interdiction Hypothesis level of things, where
you only maintain the loosest diplomatic ties, but it might mean pretty much all contact
is conducted virtually rather than face to face. Or that we might use filter layers where AI
translates your appearance and reactions into the alien equivalent for them, and vice-versa. Or
that a lot of business might be conducted with everyone in space suits. After all, a spacefaring
civilization with more lightweight garb than we have nowadays might already lean in pretty heavily
on wearing full body suits when traveling to other locations just to minimize spread of germs.
On the other hand, humans might be an anomaly at wearing lots of clothing. I’ve heard
clothing presented as a Fermi Paradox filter before but have never found it very compelling,
even if I would expect a lot of aliens to wear pouches and belts around. Thus they might find
wearing masks or other gear near their breathing orifices or sensory organs even more upsetting
than we tend to. Spacesuits are not actually a necessity for space exploration, you can use
a travel pod like a landing module or diving bell and just use remote control robot hands for
interacting. Indeed as we’ve discussed elsewhere, an android ambassador remote controlled from
back at the ship and set to mimic basic human appearance and behavior is entirely plausible.
So a human-looking alien stepping out of UFO to greet us and ask to be taken to our leaders
doesn’t imply improbably convergent evolution, just that they’ve seen our movies and decided
it’s best to avoid mass panic by revealing their true Lovecraftian Cthulhu tentacled form.
This is also exactly when space habitats are preferable, as the moment an alien steps
out unprotected into a planet’s ecology, there’s a high probability they’ve both been
dangerously contaminated. Especially if they can actually survive in that environment, as
it implies the microbes they’ve got can too, and vice-versa. Viruses are less of a
concern, those tend to have problems jumping species let alone biological kingdoms, but
a bacteria might do just fine, and a few decades later have saturated that planet with itself.
Green gooing a place as opposed to Gray Goo. High-tech civilizations will tend to have a lot of
options for managing and containing such problems, but opting to make your diplomatic city on a
space habitat instead of someone’s planet makes a lot more sense, and it also is very easy for
them to bring their own smaller space habitat to connect to the big one so that they can just
live and work there mostly, interacting remotely, and only show up to formal and special events in
the flesh, or in their ceremonial environmental suit or android. That might be preferable,
because diplomacy with aliens is a delicate dance, where stepping on toes might not just be a
faux pas, but an actual diplomatic incident. But getting back to the ship opening here
on Earth that lands on the white house lawn or in the UN’s Gardens, again there’d be nothing
surprising about that critter strolling down the ramp looking entirely human, and indeed it would
be surprising if it didn’t speak English or the primary language of whatever land it set down in.
It probably blinks and breaths like one of us too. But it probably didn’t learn that language much,
unless it was fairly heavy on cybernetic mind augmentation that made picking up languages as
easy as opening a file. Rather a team of experts will have pieced the languages together and
created an AI to do the translating. We shouldn’t take for given that every spacefaring civilization
has several hundred different languages like we do but it probably wouldn’t be unusual either.
An ambassador coming to a planet might take the time to learn their Lingua Franca or main
trade language if they’ve got it but probably more as an attempt at a better understanding, and
would likely use an AI translator for speaking and hearing anyway. And that’s a good idea. There’s
a classic Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man”, that when they find out how to translate the
alien language makes them realize the giant and seemingly benevolent, if creepy, aliens
who came to Earth are migrating humans off Earth with the intent of eating them, the
title being the name of a book the humans find and eventually realize is a cookbook.
The problem is, with an alien, that might actually be a regular set of euphemisms in their
language, much as “Eat me” was pretty common when I was growing up. But if you encounter a race
of shark-people or something, they might be entirely civilized and sincerely friendly and
eat only synthetic meat and not understand or care that we were disturbed they’d added human
to the menu and freely joke about it and hand off a case of synthetic shark-people steaks to our
ambassador with a quip about how it was his turn now since he’d been on the menu last week, after
they’d grabbed some of his DNA before dinner. And honestly, that’s on the non-grisly side,
there’s no reason to assume cannibalism is rare out in the universe given that it isn’t rare here
and there’s no special reason to think it would always carry health downsides either. So they
might think it weird we don’t eat our dead or that we keep pets. And it's realizing that something
like that gets baked into the language at a very deep level, as does everyone’s base psychology,
even those bits they think of themselves as having outgrown and become too civilized to really do.
So you really want an AI able to translate the right way, not literally or even just switching
in the euphemisms for the alien equivalent. Nor would you likely have a shared language aliens
in a region of the galaxy all agreed to speak. Expecting aliens to agree on a common language or
system of measurement is optimistic. Humans can't even agree on metric versus imperial. Imagine
negotiating that with a species that uses random quantum fluctuations as a unit of measure. There’s
no real need to do this, though. A computer can easily translate back and forth between thousands
of different systems of measurement or calendars and expressions like ‘1 in a million odds’ might
sound weirdly specific to an alien the way them saying ‘1 in 16,777,216’ would to us, when if
you have a base-8 system because you’ve only got four fingers on each hand, is 8 to 8th power
and likely a significant number in your language. There’s also ulterior motives for folks moving to
embassy-town, so to speak. Much as we wonder what the Kanamits want of humans in that twilight zone
episode, or what ulterior motive the Taelons have for visiting us in Earth: Final Conflict,
and helping us out, you have to wonder who agrees to live on an alien planet, or a literally
cosmopolitan city full of folks from all over the cosmos. Curiosity can be weird, and while we can
contemplate eating alien food out of curiosity, in most cases you’d likely need a major overhaul
to your biology or massive doses of medications so as not to get sick from it, let alone enjoy its
flavor or derive nutrition from it. Especially if it were full of microbes like yogurt or beer
might be, and now those are in your gut. Not to say lots of folks might not do it anyway, as we
like to say on the show, alien beer is to die for… Or to write a whole extra spontaneous episode for,
that actually came out two months before this one. But without even venturing into the headspace of
someone who would get themselves augmented to be able to eat and drink and enjoy alien cuisine,
or the terrifying implications of Rule 34 of the internet moved into the alien arena, xenophiles
might be as mentally disturbed as xenophobes. The embassy motto might be that you don’t have
to be crazy to work here but it sure does help. Now to close out, we should shift this
into what we would think of as the most probable scientific case, and that is the
absence of FTL travel or communication, and a scenario in which aliens evolved on another
planet are pretty rare, none within at least several thousand light years of us, which still
allows hundred of civilizations in this galaxy alone. I would be surprised if alien civilizations
were even that numerous in an entire supercluster. But it still means huge territories of tens of
millions of star systems. In cases like this, where a civilization is constantly mutating
as it spreads out into the galaxy, when it bumps into aliens, it’s on the leading edge
of two expanding spheres so that your borders are two-dimensional surfaces with some depth, and
one between two civilizations 10,000 light years apart might have several, which could include
a million star systems that counted as border or near-border systems. Yet these may be
founded by chunks of your civilization, and were tens of thousands of years divergent
from their homeworld or those cousins of theirs off on the other side of that border region.
Very occasionally you’d have smaller volumes where three or four alien civilizations met
too. And there’s no communication back and forth to the homeworld here, nobody is waiting
10,000 years on a message to get home and back. Civilizations expanding and bumping into each
other makes for a cosmic game of 'I call dibs!' with the added challenge of no one having a
universal rulebook. So what you really have is ten thousand local interstellar empires, each
of which has some friendships and rivalries with its lateral neighbors, and relationships with
a handful of alien empires of common descent to each other nearby. It’s a big and diverse
enough volume that you could be mostly at peace while across that border surface a thousand
different wars raged between this and that alien empire and a local human one, or two
humans fighting one alien, or an alien and a human realm fighting as allies against a few
alien kingdoms, or every combination imaginable. Which goes up when you keep in mind that the
nominal ‘human factions’ might include entire star empires founded by uplifted dolphins, chimpanzees,
cyborgs, AI, and so on, and the same for the aliens. And all of these are likely to have border
stations, with both the actual aliens and each other, that are meant to serve as neutral ground,
or even third-party controlled monitors, not too mention there own seedy-undersides for smugglers,
contraband, refugees, mercenaries, and all the other dystopian window dressing of your typical
sci fi setting near a border or neutral zone. Now the good news for space opera fans is that it
is exactly the sort of environment where you have tons of aliens nearby even if you all trace your
origins back to a shared homeworld. You could have some local star clusters like the Pleiades where
you’ve got around a thousand stars packed into a 40-light year radius, and even denser near the
core, which might easily be some sprawling and overlapping collection of Dyson swarms by the year
12,000 A.D., ten-thousand years from now, settled by any number of human clades, both direct genetic
descendants and our various spiritual children and accidental monster-babies exiled to deep space.
In that volume where communication everywhere takes less than a century and you’ve
got potentially a trillion times our current population there, you could easily
support a trillion different civilizations at least as unique as anything we’re used to
seeing in Star Trek, all of whom should have at least a million neighbors within a few months
of signal lag, and often a lot closer. So you really will end up with entire artificial worlds
given over to being neutral meeting grounds, and more of them than most space opera empires
have regular worlds. Choosing a location for diplomacy is like picking a restaurant for a
first date: neutral territory, but everyone's still judging based on the ambiance.
This will be even more true of Earth, as a lot of civilizations that left here long
back have lots of plausible motivations to keep or re-establish ties with us, and the good news is
that you probably could eat the alien cuisine in these cases or date the blue or green-skinned
alien gal from Orion, or the guy with two heads and three arms who likes to hitchhike
around the galaxy. With potentially millions of civilizations, the galaxy might just be the
ultimate definition of 'It's complicated' when it comes to interstellar relationship status, be it
individuals or neighboring interstellar nations. Our topic today being Alien Embassies, there
is that big question of how you find those other civilizations and let them know where
to meet, especially in a no-FTL Universe, and that’s something we discussed more in last
month’s Nebula Exclusive, Galactic Beacons, along with other uses you might have for
such beacons, how you might make one, and how we might find any that currently exist.
One of the big questions there though was how you keep one operating for potentially millions of
years, and we have that same problem for if some interstellar civilization or group of them
was seeking to protect a primitive world from interference, Prime Directive Style, and we
explore that in this month’s Nebula Exclusive, Machine Monitors. Where we also look at
other purposes you might need them for, how smart you want your machine mind to
be, and how you keep it on task and loyal even when your own civilization might have
changed its own mind or even gone extinct. Machine Monitors is out now exclusively on Nebula,
our streaming service, where you can also see every regular episode of SFIA a few days early
and ad free, as well as our other bonus content, including extended editions of many episodes,
and more Nebula Exclusives like last month’s episode Galactic Beacons, Crystal Aliens from
March, February’s Topopolis: The Eternal River, January’s Giant Space Monsters, December’s episode
The Fermi Paradox: Hermit Shoplifter Hypothesis, Ultra-Relativistic Spaceships, Dark Stars at the
Beginning of Time, Life As An Asteroid Miner, Nomadic Miners on the Moon, Space Freighters,
Retrocausality, Orch Or & Free Will, and more. Nebula has tons of great content from an
ever-growing community of creators, and we now have news and classes content. Using my link and
discount it’s available now for just over $2.50 a month, less than the price of the drink or snack
you might have been enjoying during the episode. I’m also glad to announce that lifetime
memberships for Nebula are again for sale, for $300, and gets you access to Nebula
for as long as you and Nebula both exist, while helping support further
improvement to the platform and more original content..
When you sign up at my link, https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur and use
my code, isaacarthur, you not only get access to all of the great stuff Nebula offers, like
Machine Monitors, you’ll also be directly supporting this show. Again,
to see SFIA early, ad free, and with all the exclusive bonus content,
go to https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur We’ll be continuing our look at massive galactic
civilizations and empires this Thursday, May 26, as we consider the enormous cosmic capitals that
might oversee them. We were also considering alien minds a lot today, and on May 26th we’ll
look at a different kind of alien mind, one much closer to hand, such as animal
brains, as we examine Alternative Intelligence, the other AI. Then we’ll take an extended look
at Space Freighters, what they’ll carry and who will crew them, on Sunday May 26th, before
wrapping the month up with a trip to Ganymede, the largest of the moons of Jupiter and indeed
the largest moon in our solar system, and we’ll ask if perhaps humanity might settle this moon.
If you’d like to get alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to hit the like,
subscribe, and notification buttons. You can also help support the show by becoming a member
here on Youtube or Patreon, or checkout other ways to help at IsaacArthur.net.
As always, thanks for watching, and have a Great Week!
[a]This is awesome :)
