I remember reading a while back, an article from lewrockwell that talked about if an advanced civilization were to make contact with us, they probably wouldn’t have a government, or at least nothing like we have.
That got me thinking. Can a civilization only advance to interstellar travel technology by no having a destructive entity like a government?
Maybe yes, maybe no. I used to think yes. They could not have a government to hold them back and steal and kill them to advance.
Unless…they had telepathic abilities.
Then, even if they had a very minimal government structure, they could not keep any secrets from each other. No deceptions, no lies.
I’m not sure what use sci-fi is to analysis of real-world problems. In any case, privacy or secrecy is a crucial component of human prosperity. The problem with government is not that it keeps secrets, rather, it is that the costs of its actions are socialized. This causes the government to become aggressive and expansive because the decision-makers within government reap the benefits of successes but do not bear the costs of failures.
Chances are equally likely that we’ll actually be the aliens making first contact. Be nifty if they’re all like “What is government? That’s a stupid idea how would a legal monopoly on legitimate use of violence solve anything?”
Good luck. It would be like a bunch of cavemen throwing rocks at IronMan. Most likely any aliens capable of travelling here also have invisiblity cloaks, which we are only just researching. I’m sure it’s also easy enough to doom a planet by making tiny alterations to asteroid trajectories.
“Unless…they had telepathic abilities.”
Voluntary sharing of information through telepathy would not be much different from using a telephone. And I don’t see how even non-consensual mind-reading would alter fundamental laws of economics.
The principle of the division of labor and free trade is universal. It applies to aliens, post-humans, robots, A.I. superintelligence, anything that thinks.
Government will lose all its power in space. Once people are free to traverse the solar system and then the stars, there will be no way for the state to exercise their authority over free people. Space is simply too massive and the state will be spread way too thin. There will be too many places to hide. In a way, it is the geographical considerations of living on a planet that has aided in the growth and success of the state. Once we break free of the Earthian paradigm, the state will either collapse, or become irrelevant to the day to day operations of free space-farers.
I’m afraid that would only set humanity back to a time when a thousand states existed but where so further apart that no one could easily emigrate. That is multiple dictatorships. Again, I’m afraid that fleeing the state, be it in space, won’t do it.
I’d even say that even if anarchy had been achieved on earth by then, the emergence of initially small communities so far apart would allow states to be born anew.