DARPA RFI Response

This was a little rushed and I didn't get time to go back and do any editing, but I got the basic idea out to them. This is my response to this request for information.

One day late - fifty years ago yesterday

DARPA and Temporal Autarky

DARPA wants to travel to the stars.

Fair enough - and very good in my mind. What I find even more intriguing in their Request For Information for a 100 Year Starship Study is that they are specifically interested in a business model that I've long maintained is an insurmountable problem for long-term investments. The RFI says:

"The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has initiated a study to inspire the first steps in the next era of space exploration—a journey between the stars.1 Neither the vagaries of the modern fiscal cycle, nor net-present-value calculations over reasonably foreseeable futures, have lent themselves to the kinds of century-long patronage and persistence needed to definitively transform mankind into a space-faring species... We are seeking ideas for an organization, business model and approach appropriate for a self-sustaining investment vehicle. The respondent must focus on flexible yet robust mechanisms by which an endowment can be created and sustained, wholly devoid of government subsidy or control, and by which worthwhile undertakings—in the sciences, engineering, humanities, or the arts—may be awarded in pursuit of the vision of interstellar flight."

I would love to respond to this RFI. Max submission is five double spaced pages, so it might be feasible. The problem is I have no clue how to surmount this problem. It's precisely this temporal externality that frustrates me so much and the best I can come up with is a government solution. That is riddled with problems itself, of course.

Anyway... I'm thinking on this now. The response has to be in by June 3rd. Would it be inappropriate to just submit something alleging there's no obvious solution and for the time being you have to rely on public investment (and make a case for why that's the case)?

The Realism of Interplanetary Human Civilization in "Firefly"

Over the last week, we've been watching Firefly on Netflix and are about halfway through. It's a really great series - I'm enjoying it a lot. But one thing that's struck me is how faithful I think it is to what we can actually expect when we settle space. I'm not a sci-fi guru - I came at my interest in space late in the game and from a more non-fiction angle - but of the sci-fi that I know I think Firefly best presents what our descendants are actually going to experience. A few key facets of the series that add to the realism:

1. First and foremost, humans live on other planets by terraforming them on a massive scale in the series. They don't magically find atmospheric compositions and pressures on planets that are appropriate to sustaining human life.

2. That terraforming process is risky business. We're not even that far into the series and there have already been episodes with health effects for residents from the terraforming. Of course anyone that has seen the movie Serenity (based on the show) knows that the Reavers are the product of terraforming gone wrong as well.

3. There are no aliens so far as I have seen (perhaps some come up in later episodes). Not even unintelligent species. It's mostly humans and when you do see animals they're familiar to Earth - mostly cows and horses (for those not familiar with it, it's essentially a Western set in space). This makes sense if we're terraforming other worlds as well. I think it stands to reason that aliens are out there, and I don't think it's implausible that some day we'll make contact with them. But in all likelihood the universe is sparsely populated with life. If, as in Firefly, humans settle a near-cluster of planets (which makes sense - why would we wander far?) it's unlikely you'll see any life you haven't already seen on Earth.

4. Inequality will still be with us. The inequality between core and periphery planets is a major theme of the show. This is something that a lot of sci-fi seems to ignore. Visions of our interplanetary future are often utopian. There's no good reason to believe that. By the time we actually get out there, we will be unbelievably wealthy and advanced - but that doesn't mean all human settlements will be.

5. Religion will still be with us. A preacher is a primary character on the crew, and lots of the people they come across on these planets are religious. Like the inequality point above, a lot of sci-fi white-washes religion. We will probably be more secularized but I don't think there's a good reason to believe religion won't still play a major role in human life. As a side note - this is an interesting blog post on the role of Mormonism in the work of a former NASA administrator.

6. Our interplanetary future might not be all-American. There are clear hints in the show that the Chinese were a dominant civilizational force on Earth at the time of the terraforming. Essentially, the show has quintessentially American characters who intersperse their conversation with Chinese exclamations and swears, and who apparently read Chinese (but speak English). You can only do so much in a TV show before resorting to sub-titles. But I think the point is still there - by 2517 the Earth will look different. I've noted in the past how important it is for Americans to be at the forefront of space exploration, to guarantee that liberal democracy is maintained. But I'm under know illusions that the dance of the great powers is going to be static.

7. People will still truck, barter, and exchange, and they aren't going to like tyrannical, centralized states any more than they do now. This is essentially the premise of the show: Firefly is a smuggler/trader/transporter (depending on the day), and they are hostile to Alliance rule.

Let's not make ours a one-planet grave for a culture too orthodox to chase after a positive externality

From xkcd. The alt-text: "The universe is probably litered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

Hopefully this projection does not pan out.

NASA vs. Ag Subsidies

Previously on here I've promoted a practical and hopefully widely appealing way to address externalities: ditch ag subsidies and double NASA's budget. Food is a product where virtually all the costs and benefits one can think of are internalized - particularly in today's day and age where it doesn't contribute all that much to macroeconomic volatility. Alternatively, there are lots of positive externalities associated with space exploration. The two budgets are roughly comparable, which makes this deficit-neutral budget plan convenient to think about.

Oddly enough, then, this post at the Space Politics blog directly ties NASA to agriculture subsidies!

In a lot of ways, they're absolutely right - and they hit on one of the many interesting externality/collective action questions swirling around NASA. I've talked about the positive externalities (the diffuse benefits and concentrated costs) of space exploration here before. But there are also concentrated benefits and diffuse costs to think about: namely that NASA is a boon to Florida, Texas, and Alabama. That's part of the reason why you have a Tea Party candidate from Florida backing manned space flight.

I think this poses more of a risk in terms of tying NASA to old ways of doing things that are associated with Cape Canaveral, Houston, and Huntsville. It doesn't seem to be presenting a huge risk of over-investment in space exploration.

Still, it's interesting. There are negative externalities wrapped within positive externalities. And the sorts of things NASA spends most of its time talking about in externalityish lingo - their "spin-offs" - aren't really externalities at all!

Externalities everywhere

Every day I become more and more convinced about how central externalities are to modern human society. It should not be surprising, given the modern turn towards the individual, that social welfare would be less well served by modern institutions than individual welfare. This is not even a bad thing - the growth we've experienced since the individualist turn strongly suggests that there's something substantial to the idea of modern individualism that ought to be maintained vigorously! But that still means that modern institutions might not be well equipped to address the welfare of parties external to the interactions of individuals. I think of human progress as the fulfillment of the difference in welfare from what we are to what we could be in the future. Two social technologies - the market and modern science - are the best tools we have to maximize that progress. But each of these targets specific kinds of welfare improvements, so that modernity is something like a net that catches a lot of opportunities for progress but lets certain opportunities systematically slip through. Externalities are not "exceptions to the rule" - they're a natural and pervasive part of life. And one of the reasons why I hammer thinking about property so hard is that it's precisely our natural embrace of status quo property arrangements that makes us ambivalent towards externalities. If you see human progress as a positive (if ambiguous) thing, that strikes me as an odd position to hold.

I have two points on externalities.

First, Russ Roberts' recent podcast with Dani Rodrik has an interesting discussion of externalities that I've never thought of. On his blog, Russ writes of it:

"Along the way, Rodrik argued, to my surprise, that starting a new venture in a poor country has a positive externality that leads to market failure. He gave the example of a call center–suppose a country has a work force that would be good at working in call centers. An entrepreneur who starts a call center will thereby provide information to other entrepreneurs about the quality of the work force."

Pigou meets Kirzner. It would be a productive meeting, but I'm afraid there would be a lot of resistance, at least from modern proponents of Kirzner. Information asymmetries in hiring are very well understood - the step that I haven't heard anybody take that Rodrik takes here is to point out that because information is welfare-enhancing in labor markets with asymmetric information, entrepreneurs who hire in these markets (providing information on the wage and skill distributions of the population) generate positive externalities for other entrepreneurs.

My other point is to note that I've started writing a short article that I want to submit to a journal called Space Policy on the (mis)use of externalities to justify NASA. NASA's heart has been in the right place in their self-justification to the public. For a very long time they've touted their "spin-offs" - NASA technology that is useful in the private sector. They even have a regular publication dedicated exclusively to featuring these spin-offs, which has covered something like 1,600 spin-offs to date (and they note that this is not exhaustive). The effort is well-intended, but this is not really an externality - or if it is an externality ("information goods" like technology are so strange it's hard to think about them in the same way as non-information goods), it only scratches the surface of the externalities that NASA addresses. I plan on going over three more traditional externalities of public space exploration that NASA does not talk about as much as spin-offs, but should to provide what economists would consider a legitimate justification for public provision of space exploration. The articles in this journal are shorter than in others, so hopefully I'll be able to wrap it up in the next couple weeks (depending on other workloads). And sorry Evan - I know you'll be disappointed to learn its an Elsevier journal.

But for this morning - time to write more about the engineering labor market.

Private spaceflight news

1. The FAA is asking for a budget for a prize fund for advances in "space access" associated with commercial space transportation. Prize funds make good sense when you have market failures associated with innovation. Joe Stiglitz has talked a lot about the economics behind them. Prize funds also played a role in American industrialization - they were very popular in a variety of industries in the early republic. This is classic American industrial policy.

2. Southwest Research Institute has announced contracts today to fly a payload of three scientists into sub-orbital space. Apparently this is the first time this sort of thing has been contracted out by a private firm. This is a very important development - the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. Clearly we're seeing a growth in demand sufficient enough not just for NASA to contract out, but for private companies to as well. That means greater division of labor, greater specialization, and more innovation.

Ditch Ag Subsidies - Double NASA's Budget

A little while ago I proposed that we should be able to get decently broad agreement on at least one deficit neutral budget proposal: eliminating all agricultural subsidies and doubling the size of NASA's budget. They're roughly the same size, and the contrast in their justifiability is stark.

Agricultural subsidies make everyone furious. They hurt the developing world. They hurt relations with our developed trade partners. They hurt small farmers. They hurt the environment. Oh, and they're completely insane when it comes to the economics of the question. I'm not aware of a single economist - left, right, or center - that likes agricultural subsidies. But they have concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, which makes the whole mess work out politically.

Space exploration and colonization is exactly the opposite - it has concentrated costs and dispersed benefits. That means it's the sort of thing government should consider doing, which is ultimately why the government is doing space exploration. But it also means it's going to have a very different set of incentives. Government has created concentrated benefits in the space programs with jobs (if you are from Florida, Alabama, or Texas you like NASA no matter what party you're from). But for the most part, the benefits accrue to future generations. Future generations don't vote, nor do they participate in the market. That means we underinvest - both publicly and privately - in space exploration and colonization. It's a market failure and a government failure, if you like to use that terminology.

I put together a few graphs, which I highly encourage people to repost, share, comment on and write their own posts on if you agree with me. The data is from Wikipedia and an agricultural subsidy data resource, which in turn derive it from OMB sources. One day I'd like to get into the original data myself, but for now this will do.

First - you'll see that nominal spending on agricultural subsidies and NASA are roughly on the same order of magnitude. Agricultural subsidies are somewhat more erratic, because they are influenced by price levels.

Sources for NASA here and USDA subsidies here.

What could a doubling of the NASA budget do? All kinds of things. It would be a good down-payment on Mars (even more so if we keep that spending level up). We are seeing a movement towards private space exploration, which is a very important trend. We could establish lots of prize funds with an extra $15 billion or so.

The last time NASA's budget was doubled from its steady state level we did great things. Here is the budget of NASA since 1958 in constant 2007 dollars:

When we made it to the moon in the late sixties, we were essentially doing it from scratch. We have much more groundwork laid today. If we could make this switch from subsidizing activity we have done for thousands of years to subsidizing frontier-expanding activity and maintain that higher level of spending in a deficit neutral way, we wouldn't have an Apollo program spike. We would have year after year of effort approaching what this endeavor deserves.

Eliminate all agricultural subsidies and double NASA's budget - spread the word, people.

Nobody has expressed the logic of overcoming externalities more eloquently than Armstrong: "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind".

Scott Kuhagen on Space Law

Scott Kuhagen shares a new title of the U.S. Code - title 51 - which deals with "National and Commercial Space Programs". Scott also provides details on what this entails legally - it's not the creation of any new laws, it's the collection of old laws into a new title.

He could explain the implications of that, but I think the mere recognition is an important sign that human society - and specifically American society - has a future beyond the Earth.

You can get a degree in space law from Ole Miss, and my alma mater (George Washington University) offers a degree in space policy. Ole Miss publishes the Journal of Space Law as well.

Alien Skepticism

The Bad Astronomy blog has had two good posts recently mocking people who think aliens have visited the Earth, here and here.

I've had posts on aliens before, so perhaps this is a good opportunity to clarify my position.

1. I think it's unreasonable to work off the assumption that humans are the only intelligent life in the universe. That strikes me as absurd. I quite firmly believe that alien civilizations exist in the universe, and I definitely enjoy speculating on their extent and nature.

2. I do not think it is likely at all that aliens have visited us in the last fifty years (when UFO sightings really picked up). I would wager that all the famous incidents - not to mention the obviously transparent ones - are naturally explainable phenomena, deliberate fabrications, or psychotic episodes.

3. However, unlike a lot of people that think the existence of aliens is reasonable, I don't think it's implausible that aliens have visited us in the last fifty years. The video in the second link, for example, makes fun of the idea that governments would keep aliens secret. I don't see that as entirely unreasonable, actually (perhaps if the blogger worked on any social science he wouldn't see that as entirely unreasonable either). Governments keep threats, sources of information, and new technologies secret from citizens all the time. There's very good reason for this (and sometimes not so good reasons as well, obviously). If there was an instance of alien contact I don't see why it's implausible that the government would keep it secret until they (1.) had a better understanding of the nature or the threat of the incident, (2.) were concerned about other governments making contact and reaping benefits, or (3.) were concerned that other governments would make peremptory strikes on R&D facilities if they knew we were developing advanced alien technology. None of this increases the likelihood that we were visited recently. I still think that almost certainly hasn't happened. It's simply to say that some of the seemingly (and suspiciously) convenient reasons why UFO enthusiasts can never confirm alien contact make sense to me.

4. If you think of the expanse of the Earth's history, a lot of Bad Astronomer's reasons for skepticism of visitation don't make sense anymore. That is to say, while I think actual visitation of Earth is highly implausible, I do consider various "ancient astronaut" theories more plausible than Roswell-type theories. That doesn't mean I'm one of those people that thinks the pyramids could never be built by humans. As a social scientist, I am constantly in awe of the innovation and abilities of the human species. I don't need aliens to explain anything I see. And I've never read a single page of Erich von Däniken. Nevertheless, when the ancients say "so and so came down from the sky, walked among us, and left" - I have no good reason not to entertain the possibility that "so and so" actually came down from the sky, walked among us, and then left. We really don't know either way. We have no way of confirming or refuting the account, and if we think it's reasonable to assume intelligent life exists in the universe we can't laugh off the idea.

5. I don't think it's unreasonable to think we may make contact with aliens over the next century (I do think it's unreasonable to expect that that is probable). We are obviously not going to get to them in the next century, but depending on how advanced they are and whether they're keeping tabs on us, they might come to us. Even more likely than contacting intelligent life, of course, is the chance that we'll find some tenacious fungus on Mars - which will settle the silliness about the fictitiousness of alien life once and for all.

Here, Michio Kaku provides very good reasons to (1.) think twice about many of Bad Astronomer's attempts at explaining why we should make a big deal of the fact that SETI hasn't found anything, while (2.) still being skeptical that they've actually visited us.



Having said all that, my mother-in-law's boyfriend moved out to New Mexico recently and my mother-in-law is moving out there this fall - we're going to visit soon afterwards and you better believe I'm taking a trip to Roswell while we're there. I don't care if everything suggests that nothing happened there. Roswell represents mankind starting to get serious about its cosmic significance (albeit, in a sometimes superficially unserious way - which is an interesting and ironic juxtaposition in and of itself... perhaps we need to be a little unserious to process such a serious underlying realization).

UPDATE: On the Colbert Report rerun last night, he interviewed Leslie Kean on her new book on UFOs. It was very interesting and one of the nice things is she seems to come from a skeptical position, and she's looked at more formal, official documentation of the events. Her point is (1.) most UFOs are easily explained, (2.) we can't say confidently what they are, and (3.) we also can't rule out that even recent events aren't extraterrestrials.

Space Economics

Excellent short article on the economic payoffs of NASA.

This is why (to my ears at least) when you argue that big externality-ridden, public goods like space exploration shouldn't be done because "if they were worth doing some private actor would have put his money on the line" you sound really, really dumb. This article deals mainly with the technology spin-off benefits which are hard enough to measure for the same reason that the benefits of information and research have always been hard to measure. It doesn't even begin to incorporate the economic benefits of making the human race an inter-planetary species.

And when you don't have costs and benefits markets don't function in the efficient way we apprecaite them functioning.

Martin Rees on "Life's Future in the Cosmos"

I'm having trouble uploading the presentation, but I suggest you download Martin Rees's address on "Life's Future in the Cosmos". Rees delivered this address to The Long Now Foundation, which seeks to "creatively foster long-term thinking in the framework of the next 10,000 years".

Rees's presentation is a mix of astronomy and speculative evolutionary biology, tied together with broad commentary on the place of humanity in the cosmos.

Assault of Thoughts, Scientific Progress Edition - 7/22/2010

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

- Scott Kuhagen provides an update on the Commonwealth of Virginia's travesty of an Attorney General and his witch hunt in Charlottesville. AG Cuccinelli is tossing the very notion of academic freedom aside and targeting scientific progress at the University of Virginia. It's a cliche, I know, but it fits the bill: Mr. Jefferson must be rolling in his grave over this. It would be bad enough with any university, but the ideals and the mission on which the University of Virginia was founded make this especially sad.

- Andrew Sullivan links to interesting research that suggests that the technological gap between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa explains the majority of the difference in per capita income between the two regions today. Very powerful stuff, and I would say not surprising. But then they write: "78 percent of the difference in income today between sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe is explained by technology differences that already existed in 1500 AD – even BEFORE the slave trade and colonialism." This seems like bad reasoning to me. Presumably, the reason why the Atlantic slave trade took off, and the phenomenon of "white slavery" fizzled had a lot to do with the very technological differences this research has identified as important. So it doesn't really make sense to say (or really, simply to imply here) that "the difference in per capita income is due to technological differences, not slavery," because slavery itself is probably a very important mechanism through which technological differences made their impact. The two are very closely related. And not only that, but the damage to African society from the slave trade probably locked-in the technological discrepancy.

- Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has an interesting post on private space exploration. He reviews private contributions to space exploration in the early years, and notes a few different ways to think about the data. He concludes the obvious - that private space exploration is a very, very good thing. With shock only a person that believes or suspects Obama is a socialist could manage to muster, he also notes that it is "surprising" that President Obama has been pushing American space exploration in this direction too. I have a few issues with how Alex approaches this issue.

He starts out by quoting Matt Ridley, who says "Can you doubt that if NASA had not existed some rich man would by now have spent his fortune on a man-on-the-moon programme for the prestige alone?". This seems to me to miss the entire point about the nature of the public-private split in space exploration. First, there was nothing preventing private individuals from going for it on their own, which (since we haven't seen a man privately put on the moon) would suggest that there are substantial entry barriers. Second, private and public efforts at this sort of thing aren't really conflicting. Presumably the aerospace industry would benefit from scale economies, and there are almost certainly going to be knowledge spillovers; public and private space exploration are complements in this sense, rather than substitutes. So this whole implicit premise that "if only X" we could have had an even better private space exploration history seems (1.) wrong because there was nothing substantial preventing such private endeavors, and (2.) wrong philosophically because it inappropriately juxtaposes the public and the private as something we have to choose between.

OK, so I don't think this is an either/or situation - but what are the benefits of public exploration? The answer to that question is implicit in the record on private exploration that Alex shares. A lot of these exploratory initiatives where not motivated by profits at all. Of course we also have ample examples of advances in space exploration that are attributable to the profit motive, usually attributable to communications technology (in the future probably attributable to mining, etc.), but the point is exploration itself isn't necessarily going to be a profit-making endeavor. As a result, we shouldn't logically expect the price mechanism and the market to be able to zero in on an optimal level of space exploration. This is a mistake that you see in a lot of areas where externalities are important, like road building. Opponents of publicly provided infrastructure will point to examples of privately built roads as if that proves advocates of public infrastructure wrong. The externalities argument is never (or should never be) that there will be no private provision, because to say that important costs and benefits are externalized isn't to say that no costs and benefits are internalized. Obviously some are and there will be some private activity. But pointing out that banality does nothing to demonstrate that an optimal amount of private effort is being invested. That's my reaction here, too. It's fantastic and not surprising that there are privately funded observatories, satellites, etc. - it doesn't mean it's sufficient. Knowing how much of a good with fully internalized costs and benefits is "sufficient" is easy - the market will tell you. When the costs and benefits aren't internalized it's harder to say. John Stuart Mill, writing on colonies, made fundamentally this same externalities argument for public exploration and colonization:

"If it is desirable, as no one will deny it to be, that the planting of colonies should be conducted, not with an exclusive view to the private interests of the first founders, but with a deliberate regard to the permanent welfare of the nations afterwards to arise from these small beginnings; such regard can only be secured by placing the enterprise, from its commencement, under regulations constructed with the foresight and enlarged views of philosophical legislators; and the government alone has power either to frame such regulations, or to enforce their observance."

The point is, private exploration is important and good for the same reasons the market is always good, but it's not sufficient. We know most private activity has been charitable, indicating there is little profit in space exploration. This is likely due to the externalities involved, which opens the door to public space exploration. Public space exploration should be flexible, though. It should draw on the private sector's ingenuity, it should leverage private interest with a prize-fund, and it should give the private sector considerable say in the goals and destinations. And while some externalities are unavoidable (i.e. - the externalized benefits to future generations), we should shore up the ones that are avoidable by establishing clear property rights in space.

What to expect from alien contact

In his Discovery Channel series, Stephen Hawking recently made two important statements about alien life: (1.) that it almost certainly exists, and (2.) that trying to contact it would be extremely dangerous. His point is simple - that alien life in all likelihood would see the Earth as a source of resources, and would come here to destroy us and take what they need.

Despite the clear thinking that Stephen Hawking has done in the past on the place of humans in the universe, I think his point here is problematic. Drezner raises a number of concerns with Hawking's point as well - many of which revolve around strategic considerations. But I think he even misses another important point.

We shouldn't discount the prospect that alien life will have evolved cooperative, friendly, rational, altruistic tendencies and a robust sense of universal rights - perhaps even property rights. And just as a considerably more advanced alien society can be expected to have stronger biological and technological faculties than humans, we should expect them to have more advanced social faculties. Daniel Dennett highlights the fact that while life evolving on other planets will of course be considerably different from life on Earth, there are many "good tricks" that evolution will "discover" again and again. He gives the example of eyesight (for organisms evolving in a transparent atmosphere) as a feature that is so advantageous it is almost certain to evolve elsewhere. Other things, like a base-ten number system - are considerably less likely to evolve again and again because in all likelihood it emerged solely as a function of our ten fingers.

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I would guess that cooperation, trust, and the recognition of some collection of universal rights are memes that would almost certainly evolve in an advanced species. Daniel Dennett reviews Dawkins's theory of memes here, and specifically points out the role that memes can play in overriding the underlying impulse to thrive and reproduce* (which itself is probably an evolved meme, or at least an evolved cocktail of hormones). Dennett focuses on destructive memes - like Wahhibism - but he also mentions more constructive memes, like the idea of memes itself! One of the most obvious "successful memes" is the ability to trust others, to cooperate, to exchange, and to recognize these things called "rights" which have no substantive or tangible basis but are nevertheless extremely important in human society. A great deal of research has suggested that it was precisely this ability of humans to trust each other and engage in mutually beneficial exchange (which is impossible without an understanding of property rights) that allowed them to dominate the Neanderthals (who did not have trade networks). Of course, this highlights the fact that cooperation and violent competition are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Yet in the last hundred years humans have worked to make the two mutually exclusive.

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Why wouldn't we expect aliens to evolve that ability to trust, cooperate, exchange, and recognize rights? It seems like one of those "good tricks" that evolution will discover again and again. Certainly any civilization advanced enough to reach and destroy the Earth probably depended on some version of property rights and exchange to get to its advanced state.

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Obviously, none of this is certain. We don't have a lot of evidence to draw from. Some form of trust and exchange seems quite essential to successful evolution: trust and exchange to the exclusion of violence and domination seems much less important and far more tenuous, based on the experience of our own society. But I think there's reason to be optimistic. As Adam Smith said, "the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market". Because trade, exchange, and cooperation are networked-based activities, they become more beneficial as the network grows. This is why I think there is an underlying tendency towards a global economy and a global government: and this tendency is implicit in the nature of trust, exchange, and cooperation. If it is implicit, then a unified planet operating on the basis of trust, cooperation, and exchange shouldn't be all that inconceivable. None of this is to say that a Spartan meme wouldn't also be evolutionarily fit. We seem to have demonstrated by experience that a Spartan meme completely devoid of out-group cooperation and trust is not evolutionarily fit - but who knows? I think Hawking is jumping the gun to just assume that aliens would be dangerous. They could be dangerous, but there's also good reason to believe that if they're more advanced than us, we may very well be the trigger-happy, belligerent ones.

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*Dennett's characterization of the impulse to thrive and reproduce is somewhat problematic and at odds with another Dawkins idea - the idea of the "selfish gene". Ultimately, it is selection at the genetic level that drives evolution, not at the level of the organism. Many organisms themselves have evolved the tendency not to reproduce because it facilitates the reproduction of their genetic code through other close relatives. Dennett glosses over his point here, but I don't think it changes the argument substantively.