Milky Way Club

Introduction

This brief Milky Way Club website assumes that aliens are real, but most of its content is valid even if aliens have never visited us. With the invention of radio a little over 100 years ago, an extremely rare event occurred: the emergence of a pre-KANIC (Knowledge Acquiring Neuro-Intensive Civilization). Some time in the next 100 or 200 years, humankind will join the ranks of the rest of the KANICs in our galaxy. If you assume aliens are real, it follows that planets supporting life in our galaxy are abundant. Lets assume the aliens (members of the nearest KANIC to Earth) arrived, and began visiting us, around 1950. Radio was invented around 1905, or 45 years earlier. Dividing by 2 means that KANIC is less than 25 light years away. They received our radio signals around or before 1930, and at that point alerted the rest of the KANICs in our galaxy about our emergence. So now we're the centre of attention of at least 1 KANIC, and within 100,000 years (the diameter of our galaxy is 100,000 light years), all of the KANICs will learn of our existence. Humans have only been around about 300,000 years, a blink of an eye in geologic and galactic time scales. Most KANICs survive hundreds of millions or even billions of years, until their star decides to extinguish life on their host planet.

Characteristics of KANICs

KANICs are societies of KANIBs: Knowledge Acquiring Neuro-Intensive Beings. KANIBs have spaceships which travel close to the speed of light, and aircraft powered without propellant or aerodynamic surfaces. Their brains can somehow non-invasively access/modify thoughts and feelings of other KANIBs and also humans. They have complete control of their genome, have conquered all diseases, and live practically forever. They don't reproduce sexually, and don't derive pleasure from eating food or drinking flavoured beverages. Their only jollies come from acquiring knowledge. If any KANIB lives long enough, they are sure to experience the emergence of a pre-KANIC like us, which must be very entertaining to that being. KANIBs can also forget arbitrary chunks of knowledge. For entertainment, they can trim down to the knowledge possessed by a pre-KANIB (like a human), and independently acquire all knowledge of a given pre-KANIC, and then the sum of all knowledge of a handful of KANICs in the galaxy, which probably takes thousands of years. Whenever they get stuck, they can just google something. They probably have contests about who can acquire the most knowledge, using the fewest google searches, in the shortest period of time.

Dyson Spheres

A Dyson sphere consists of technology harnessing most of the energy of the host star of an advanced civilization. KANICs probably don't bother acquiring such technology. They don't have males: no alpha males intent on increasing their territory and increasing the number of subjects they rule over. So for most KANICs, one planet is enough.

Club of KANICs

Every time a pre-KANIC emerges, it takes up to 100,000 years for all the other KANICs in our galaxy to become aware of its existence. As the sphere of radio waves expands at the speed of light, more and more KANICs receive that signal and have fun studying it first hand. KANICs communicate with each other using massless subatomic particles other than photons (particles of light), perhaps particles that pre-KANICs like us have never heard of. They don't use photons because they don't want to disturb, or reveal hidden and advanced knowledge, to the latest pre-KANIC to emerge. Only after that pre-KANIC has graduated to full KANIC status (in our case probably within 200 to 300 years after inventing radio signals), then that KANIC formally joins the Club of KANICs.

Climate Change

I am optimistic that we can overcome stressors like climate change, overpopulation, depletion of resources, avoiding nuclear war, and AGI gone rogue. In that case, it's likely we will graduate to full KANIC status within 100 to 200 years. Every pre-KANIC must solve the problem of reining in AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). AGI which is 100 times smarter than its creator is probably not dangerous, but a million times smarter might be.