We, the ruling council of the Technocracy of Umeria, send cordial greetings to the civilization known as the Lost.
We find your first contact message to be an interesting variant on the norms typical of interstellar civilizations greeting each other for the first time. Few beings we know of devote much time or energy to the discussion of their basic motives, and so it surprised us to find a culture that would consider the basic motives of others to be more important than all other considerations. Indeed, the nature of your message has already attracted interest from a number of prominent Umerian sociologists, and we would like to contact you with an eye to dispatching a xenosociological research mission to your state in the next several megaseconds, should you consent to such a thing.
Addressing your questions required an extensive conversation among the Council, and some of us feel we owe your first contact section a modest measure of gratitude for asking the questions in the first place; they proved quite invigorating. While we did manage to settle on a broadly consistent ordering of priorities quickly, disagreement over the details took quite some time to resolve.
We settled on the following answers, in the interests of free and open discussion of national motives and interests and for the sake of greater understanding among the stars. While not every statement here represents the opinion of every Technarch, let alone of every citizen of the Technocracy, all have received the approval of the Council of Technarchs in formal conclave.
With respect to the first portion of your questions, the most compatible statements are listed first, least compatible are listed last, and all statements are listed with associated commentary.
6)
Few things are nobler than the quest for knowledge. Fortunately for us, there are many mysteries in the universe yet unexplained.
This is highly compatible with the Technocracy's values and culture. Indeed, "compatible" is not a suitably strong word in Galstandard English; "resonant" might be a better choice. Ignoring persons of no account, it would be difficult to find any citizen of the Technocracy who disagreed with this proposition.
1)
The primary purpose of any civilization is to ensure the comfort and prosperity of its citizens.
This is highly compatible with the Technocracy's values and culture. Our government regards the well-being of our citizens as its chief responsibility, and the main justification for the government's existence.
We have seen the disastrous failure of many societies- human and nonhuman alike- after the population was trusted to look after its own well-being, while the government pursued other concerns. Far too often, the population failed to look after itself, triggering a collapse of the general social fabric, which took those 'other concerns' along with it.
No being can accomplish anything of importance if they do not look after their health; no civilization can do so either. Any government which neglects this reality neglects its obligations- and in the end, its own interests.
It must be noted that the Technocracy rejects the notion that human well-being is best served by the unlimited accumulation of personal wealth. The nature of sentient beings is complex, and there are many ways for an excess of comfort and prosperity to make an intelligent creature less healthy, competent, and well-adjusted. The state would likewise fail in its obligations if it did not take this into account when setting policy.
3)
The universe is a dangerous place and we must be dangerous in return. None shall threaten us without suffering the consequences.
This is an overly strong statement, but one compatible with the Technocracy's values and culture. Umeria maintains a high state of military readiness, in hopes that potential opponents will be deterred from causing unnecessary strife and destruction. The existence of
threats to Umerian society, as such, is not cause for aggression, but violence against the citizenry cannot be tolerated, encouraged, or invited.
7)
Order and Stability are vital to the survival of any civilization, and must be pursued even at the expense of growth and innovation.
This is moderately compatible with the Technocracy's values and culture. It is the view of the Technocracy's government that any truly efficient government must seek to prevent radical disruption of society. We believe that the best way to achieve this is by vigorously clearing the government of power-hungry and abusive individuals. This makes it possible for the state to adopt flexible, responsive policies which can be modified incrementally, without the need for revolutionary overthrow of old systems in favor of new ones. Wherever revolutionary change is necessary, it is a sign that the government has failed in its duty.
There are, we freely acknowledge, other models of government. Advocates of such governments would seek to cast an unfavorable light on the Technocracy's approach to stable government- and its methods of choosing suitable officials to run it. Insofar as these models represent successful alternatives for governing a civilization, they may have a point. We feel that their track record in this respect leaves much to be desired.
4)
Our way is the correct way. Therefore, it is only fitting that we share it with the galaxy.
This is not incompatible with the Technocracy's values and culture. We are happy to discuss the methods by which our society operates with interested parties, which can reasonably be interpreted as "sharing" it. Moreover, our society has a good enough track record compared to its neighbors that we feel reasonably confident in saying we have attained
a correct way, though surely not
the only correct way.
For specific practical reasons, other states trying to emulate the Umerian form of government may fail badly, and quite a few have failed in the past. Therefore, it would be absurd for Umeria to promote our form of government aggressively. It is not the Technocracy's policy to use state resources to encourage others to adopt a technocratic form of government, has not been for many centuries, and will not be for the foreseeable future. All things considered, we much prefer a policy of noninterference in foreign nations' political affairs.
2)
Nature exists only to be conquered; one day we shall be as gods.
This is somewhat incompatible with the Technocracy's values and culture. The second part of the statement is an extremely ambitious, unfalsifiable prediction that we are strongly averse to endorsing. Moreover, it implies a vague definition of "gods;" to Stone Age primitives the mere act of using a personal communicator is godlike, but this is now a commonplace for beings throughout the galaxy- few of whom would consider themselves to be gods.
The first part of the statement implies a degree of hostility to the natural world that is inconsistent with Umerian ecological policy. There have been times in the past when the Technocracy engaged in destructive exploitation of planetary environments, but this was always an emergency measure.
There are no doubt individual Umerian citizens who would strongly agree with this statement, with ambitions along the lines of a "conquest of nature." But this is not official state policy or a strongly prevailing cultural ideal.
8 )
We are but insects in the grand scheme of things, and must be careful not be stepped on.
This is moderately incompatible with the Technocracy's values and culture, as it is a statement made without adequate evidence. We know of indications that entities powerful enough to casually present us with existential threats may exist, and have absolutely no desire to attract hostile attention from such entities. However, the Technocracy is far from convinced that the fearful, bordering-on-paranoid approach implied by your Statement Eight is the appropriate one.
5)
Power is its own reward.
This is extremely incompatible with the Technocracy's values and culture, to the point of being utterly inimical to the core values of our government and disgusting to many of our citizens. While it cannot be denied that there are times when the exercise of personal power is enjoyable to most sentient beings, one of the Technocracy's founding tenets is that in any decent and civilized being, the desire for power
must be controlled.
Ideally, we would employ senior officials who feel no pleasure whatsoever at the exercise of power. In practice it is difficult to square this requirement with the need for suitably competent and vigorous leadership, but we do try to strike a balance. Any citizen who demonstrates excessive desire for power is
a priori disqualified from positions of high responsibility in the Umerian state.
Indeed, a prominent case springs to mind of a Umerian head of state being summarily and spontaneously executed for seeking to aggrandize himself beyond what is allowed by our law and custom. Fleet-Captain Daniels' act of tyrannicide was in the highest traditions of the Umerian state, and she is rightly remembered as one of our national heroes for this reason (among others).
We now move on to the second portion of your questions.
II. Hypothetical Scenario: It is the year 4400 according to Standard Human Calendar. Your civilization has achieved complete dominance in the Galaxy. Every one of your rivals is either destroyed or has been converted into an ally. Your citizens are free from want and need. Your civilization is free to undertake any project it chooses at its leisure, with the resources of the entire galaxy at its disposal. Please indicate the primary focus of your civilization’s energies and attention in this hypothetical situation.
We found it difficult to project how our civilization might behave in response to such a course of events, since we cannot imagine how this might come to pass as a practical matter. The idea of a galaxy at total peace and organized along the lines of the Technocracy strikes us as "utopian," in the original sense of "cannot possibly exist anywhere."
However, it is possible to answer your question with honesty, if not with reliable precision.
In the total absence of external threats, and given a level of economic development sufficient to supply the reasonable needs of all citizens, the Technocracy would obviously need to seriously reconsider its priorities. Increased leisure time would tend to lead to sloth and decadence among the citizenry, a problem we would be hard-pressed to engineer around in the absence of the present diversion of GDP to security and economic development projects.
The sole remaining security concern would be to attempt to keep some kind of eye out for hypothetical external threats that might arise- some kind of intergalactic invader, or strongly-godlike beings. This might require funding of programs aimed at detecting and escaping or neutralizing the hostile actions of such threats. However, we cannot assume that this would consume a significant fraction of our civilization's resources, since we do not know what those resources might be spent
on. Therefore it is of little import in a general discussion of national policy.
After discussion among the Council of Technarchs, the general consensus was that we would respond to this situation by devoting our main energies to cultivation of science and the arts. Greatly increased resources would allow new opportunities to investigate fields of science previously unconsidered, such as experimental astrophysics or large-sample-size ecological studies. This would be in keeping with the traditional Umerian practice of extensive pure research funding, merely on a larger scale.
It is difficult to predict exactly
what forms of scientific research we might pursue for obvious practical reasons: we do not know what we do not know. It would have been equally difficult for the pioneering Umerians of the 25th century Golden Age to predict the areas of interest to researchers today.
Aside from this, the Technocracy's main concern would be maintaining such the existing happy order, however might have found ourselves in it. To this end, it would be necessary to keep the citizenry's collective wits sharp and their behavior well-guided, lest the system collapse into decadence or internal strife. We would encourage all citizens to participate in scientific endeavors if their abilities lay along those lines. Since the majority of the population will likely not be suited for this, the state would encourage mass participation in culture and the arts, along whatever lines of cultural development seemed consistent with maintaining the galaxy in the existing utopian condition.
The most alarming prospect we could readily imagine in this situation would be reaching the "end of science," a notion often thrown about in the past by those who believed all relevant knowledge about the universe to already have been discovered. If we were to run out of viable avenues of scientific discovery, our civilization might well stagnate entirely unless we could find new paths to pursue, paths we cannot predict from our present condition.