I’ve had scifi on the brain for a bit now, something about current events making me long for some aliens to show up and just want to get to know us. And I’ve been thinking about what they might tell us, why they decided to make contact now, and decided it’s essentially because we’re at the beginning of a very crucial phase and we are fucking blowing it.

I think if we ever meet intelligent alien life, they will have their own version of the internet, and the creation of the internet will be considered a major inflection point in the culture of their species. Up until the internet came about, communication between groups separated by great distances was inherently limited by that distance, which greatly reduced how efficiently information could travel through the global population. With the internet, that limitation is suddenly minimized to the point where anyone with internet access can access information produced across the globe effectively instantaneously. An example that comes to mind is when people saw tweets about an earthquake before they felt the earthquake itself. This fundamentally changes how people can interact with one another. Instead of primarily interacting with the people in my immediate vicinity, and relying on the occasional traveler or news report to hear from (and almost never respond to) news farther away than I’m willing to drive, I can now hop on my computer and have a near-realtime conversation with someone on the other side of the planet. More to the point, I can have a near-realtime conversation with anyone on the planet, provided they have the same equipment and access. It’s the informational equivalent of inventing a cheap, room-temperature superconductor, and its effects on society are monumental.

If the internet is invented before a species achieves interplanetary habitation, it enters a special period of its history where it’s technologically possible for every single person to communicate with every single other person in near-realtime. This universally synchronous mode of communication allows for ideas to spread and change in ways that are impossible when the time delay of distant communication is anything above effectively zero. Assuming FTL communication is impossible, this might be a thing that happens at most once; once the distances become too great, the species reverts back to asynchronous modes of communication forever.

During these unique periods of history, a few important things can happen that are virtually unheard of outside of them. One of these things is that the establishment of an effective world government becomes far more likely. The structures of the world government tend to be an amalgamation of existing national governments, though occasionally a particularly charismatic leader of the time may have significant if not totalitarian power in the new world government, and style the new government according to their tastes. In other cases, a collective global pseudo-government forms, where the global population organically evolves a strategy for mutually beneficial concerted action, regardless of what their local laws or leaders dictate. In a few cases this phenomenon has abruptly ended world wars, because enough of the soldiers and citizens on both sides simply agreed not to fight anymore. In still others, an official “universal democracy” is formed and becomes the commonly agreed on and effective world government. These systems often self-congratulate on having achieved “world peace”, and while they generally do solve much of the open warfare, they are frequently plagued by regulatory capture, voter disenfranchisement and other rights abuses, and political factionalism.

In other cases no global governing body arises before the internet is captured and zoned off by regional powers, and news can only travel between them by illegal means. While these boundaries are never perfect, they are effective enough at slowing communication between groups that they revert back to an effectively asynchronously communicating species.

Some species find a path quickly and stay on it during this period of synchronous communication, others may cycle through several of these models. However, this period of dramatic, universal change ends when the species establishes a colony on a planet distant enough to make lightspeed communication noticeably slow. Once this happens, if a species-wide governing body has not been established, it is unlikely ever to form.