No Flying Saucers Required

From Bunker Class to Actual Breakaway Civilization

An alien reproduction vehicle (ARV) in a secret facility.

[Spoilers for a 64-year-old movie]

Kubrick Got There First

At the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the destruction of human civilization is inevitable. A US nuclear bomber jet has struck a target in the Soviet Union. Despite on-going high-level diplomatic coordination between the US and Soviet leadership, the explosion itself has triggered a doomsday device that will, over the coming weeks, render Earth’s surface uninhabitable for the next 100 years. There is no stopping it. But there is time to prepare.

Dr. Strangelove, a former Nazi scientist now working as a scientific advisor to the US President, has a plan. Top scientific, military and government leaders will take up residence in deep mineshafts for the next hundred years. Their primary mission will be to re-populate the human species in preparation for a return to the surface. To that end, monogamous sexual relationships will have to be set aside, at least for men. The mineshaft lifeboat sex ratio will need to be ten women for every man, and because the men will be called upon to do extraordinary procreative service, the women will have to be chosen, by computer, for their youth, health, and attractiveness. Air Force General “Buck” Turgidson is intrigued, then enthused, and within seconds, a fanatic for Strangelove’s vision.

General “Buck” Turgidson (right - George C. Scott) digs Dr. Strangelove’s roadmap for civilizational continuity.

The Bunker Class

Last week, I wrote about elites who are pressing for a great technological leap forward for global civilization while also building or buying space in remote doomsday bunkers. Conspiracists like to portray the ultra-wealthy as a malignant cabal committed to the degradation and extermination of the mass of humanity. I find that notion fanciful and unserious. The elites, in my estimation, would prefer to live in a prosperous future where billions of humans live abundant lives and salute the pioneering visionaries who made that possible future a reality when so many people were expecting global conflict, environmental collapse, and high tech totalitarianism on the way to total human extinction. The tech elite would like for you to enjoy the abundance they see on the near horizon, but if push comes to shove, they’ve got bunkers and you don’t. Dems da breaks.

But as I understand it, nobody is planning to retreat into subterranean strongholds for the next hundred years. The Bunker Class’s larders are stocked, but not THAT stocked. Standard bunker plans assume the occupants will emerge when the immediate crisis relents and get back to building. In short, the elites with luxury doomstead reservations aren’t planning to break from the main of human civilization. Ultimately, our fate will be their fate once their food or fuel runs out, which it will in a year or two at most.

Network State Founders

Champions of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State concept envision a different relationship to the bulk of humanity. The idea is that capable, sensible people will form virtual polities online first. After that, they will secure a physical location where they can build and regulate their society according to their priorities.

Over time, as legacy societies see and envy the results the Network States achieve, they may take up the effective new organizational styles and in that way, the power of Exit, over time, turns into the power of Voice. By leaving societies they consider maladaptive, the Network State founders eventually acquire a powerful Voice within the societies they opted out of. This amounts to a gentle takeover. It’s not a case of the Network State founders abandoning the rest of the human population and leaving them to their fate. Ultimately, this idea still serves as a way to steer humanity onto an adaptive path.

Breakaway Civilization

UFO lore offers a different vision of elite ambition divorced from the common human fate. Richard Dolan coined the term Breakaway Civilization to describe a situation in which small factions control advanced technology reverse-engineered from crashed alien spacecraft. This faction draws upon the human talent and physical resources of the larger human civilization, but its members have ambitions that do not include the majority population. They have the ability to leave Earth, and in some versions of the story, this self-interested separatist faction already has bases on the moon and Mars and pursues an agenda that takes them outside of our Solar System.

What are their ultimate intentions toward the rest of the human population? What will our collective fate be if the Breakaway Civilization’s plans come to fruition? Unknown. There are Space Brother, lovey dovey versions of UFO lore, and there are demonically dark versions of it. The ultimate fate of the mass of the human herd will depend on which valence of UFO lore you’re plugged into.

When Dolan formulated the concept of the Breakaway Civilization, I think he misnamed it. It’s more of a Breakaway Faction, not a whole civilization unto itself. A civilization does not just consist of its elite members. It’s more than the recorded history of the law, literature, art, music, philosophy and religious traditions that emerged over the course of its development. You could pack a digital record of everything the contemporary global civilization knows about itself into some compact digital archive and take it with you when you abandon the planet, and you would not be taking the Civilization with you. You’d have a static snapshot, at best.

No matter how past and present elites despised and exploited the masses, they knew that they needed them, and not just for labor. A civilization is more than its official curriculum. It is shaped by class antagonism and competition. An elite institutional class parses the cultural expression of a civilization, enshrining parts of it and denigrating others. This clerical class can consign some expressions to the cultural margins, but it can’t eliminate them. Their official account of their civilization’s achievements will remain incomplete.

As children grow, some of what they learn and internalize comes through explicit instruction, but much of what they incorporate is ambient, informal and inchoate. Even so, a Civilization reconstructed with only the official, endorsed curriculum will remain incomplete and, in some sense, counterfeit.

If a breakaway subset with the means and the will to truly abandon the rest of us succeeds, in time, as their numbers grow and new traditions coalesce, they will form a unique civilization of their own, one that shares an obvious lineage with ours but which is its own thing. Perhaps that is acceptable to the Breakaway Faction, but they won’t be a breakaway civilization when they leave.

Most UFO lore formed before most of the people interested in it were thinking deeply about the implications of artificial intelligence. Transformative AI might eliminate the civilizational snapshot limitation. It could allow the Breakaway Faction to take more than just the static record of the parent civilization’s cultural achievements with them when they go. It could take a dynamic simulation of the parent culture with it.

Not every individual in the simulated masses would need to have full inner lives and vivid subjective experiences for the simulation to do its job. Most could be the equivalent of non-player characters running on simple behavior routines. For all you know, you might be one of the deluxe sims in that active simulation. I’m not suggesting that you are, but it’s conceivable.

If the true Breakaway Civilization can have their civilizational cake and eat it too, they would likely want to manage the dynamic simulation of their ancestral civilization from both the inside and the outside. They would pop in to inhabit the lives of the elites of the simulated world to manage it according to the regulatory mechanisms native to the simulation, and they would manage it with brute force techniques that seem to violate the known laws of physics when necessary or merely convenient. These interventions would be the simulations’ anomalous phenomena; its UFOs, ghosts, demons, telepaths, time travelers as well as its extra-dimensional, shape-shifting, reptilian overlords.

If this fourth state of affairs isn’t already a done deal, the proposal is now on the table. It is now a possibility to organize your faction’s breakaway agenda around. Abandon your species and your parent culture to a fate you don’t share, but keep an active representation of it to revisit and manage as you see fit. You escape the parent civilization’s fate and get to inhabit it at your will and leisure.