Xeno-Archeology

It is possible that planetary civilizations seldom last for long. It may be that the galaxy contains many planets that have had a sapient species and a civilization for a few hundred thousand years, but with hundreds of millions of years in question, civilizations that are close in space may fail to overlap in time. The concept of Xeno-archeology could mean either of two things:

First space aliens turn up. Say a million years in the future. Too late! Human civilization has collapsed. Does evolution have a sense of direction? The absolute question: zero versus non-zero is hard to answer. But if evolution has a sense of direction, it is weak and statistical. After human civilization collapses, humans likely evolve back into animals.

So the aliens have turned up. Their ground penetrating radar shows interesting anomalies. Their away-teams land and dig, excavating the ruins of human cities. What became of the humans? Which of the various chimpanzee and gorilla like species are the degenerated descendants of the builders of the cities? What cultural flaws let it all go horribly wrong? How solid is the culture of the space aliens? They may think that the fate of the humans is an urgent question, because their own culture has cities much like the human cities once were, and culture wars much like the humans experienced. Xeno archeology is a poor source of knowledge about what active measures to take, but it contains time proven knowledge of what one should avoid doing.

Well, that is a bleak vision. Let us turn to the second meaning of xeno archeology. Humans leave Earth and travel to planets orbiting near by stars. An actual encounter with a living alien civilization seems to much to hope for, but it could be us inspecting the planet from space, noticing anomalies, landing and excavating. What do we find in the ruins of ancient civilizations? What knowledge of philosophy and the meaning of life? What did they do right? What did they do wrong? Why did they die out?

When it comes to xeno archeology we want it to be humans wielding trowels on distant planets, not aliens wielding trowels on Earth. That is a double edged aspiration. We aspire to leave Earth and explore the galaxy. We aspire to guess or intuit the vital knowledge of the civilization ending mistakes that we need to avoid. We don't need to guess exactly right, but we need to be close enough to survive. Then we get out there and our ability to survive gets boosted by exploring the ruins of other's earlier civilizations.

Much that is mysterious about the morality and the meaning of life will come into focus once we get out into the galaxy and excavate morality plays, played out to the final conclusion.