Interstellar Responsibility Quarantine
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The Interstellar Responsibility Quarantine (IRQ) posits that there is an inevitable test any intelligent life form must successfully pass, before it can travel to other solar systems. (See F(l-i-c) x L aspects of the Drake_equation). The important aspect of this test is that it is not self-imposed, nor is it imposed by any sort of over-seeing outside force or intelligence, but rather, it naturally occurs as an inevitable stage of normal intelligent life-from development: a kind of built-in adolescence for an entire species.
The IRQ is caused by the inevitable time difference for a civilization between the following two periods:
1 – The point in time at which an intelligent civilization can achieve practical interstellar travel.
minus
2 – The earlier point in time when that civilization’s intelligent life-form first came to dominate its home planet.
This time difference creates the Interstellar Responsibility Quarantine or “IRQ”.
Since the problem of interstellar travel is significantly more difficult than that of home planet domination, both the:
1 - order of these events
and
2 - a significant time lag between the two ...
... is virtually inevitable for any intelligent civilization.
Given that we have yet to achieve practical interstellar travel ourselves, it is safe to say a species will likely dominate its home planet for thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands, before practical interstellar travel is possible.
During this IRQ time window, the intelligent life-form must successfully steward its domination of the home planet though a host of difficult tests ( such as nuclear holocaust, environmental destruction, Malthusian collapse, etc ) before it can hope to escape to any place else. In effect - due to the IRQ - a civilization with the ability to destroy a planet and the inability to refrain from doing so, will inevitably be quarantined to its own home planet first - causing it to destroy itself - and thus end its ability to spread the damage elsewhere.
In short - should the species fail to responsibly steward the home planet, it simply never achieves interstellar travel, since either itself - or the long term advanced civilization necessary to launch such an effort - is destroyed.
If the species does succeed in these efforts to the point of practical interstellar travel - given the host of challenges over long term planetary stewardship - it is very likely it has done so because it has responsibly stewarded its planetary dominion over a very long period of civilized time, and past some very difficult tests: in fact, it is quite likely that it has repeatedly done so.
Given the thousands of years time window of the IRQ, it is unlikely that interstellar travel will be launched simply out of an immediate necessity for natural resources (unlike earlier exploration conquests on this planet) as any civilization that manages to achieve the travel capacity would long since have faced repeated resource crunches at home and - if it manages to survive to the point of interstellar travel - would have long since learned how to deal with the issue, making it unlikely that resource acquisition would be the dominant motivation.
[edit] Fermi Paradox
There is one frightful possible answer to the Fermi Paradox provided by the IRQ, and it is: the natural test provided by the IRQ is simply so difficult, few (if any) intelligent civilizations ever pass.
