General Patton: I don’t want any messages saying ‘I’m holding my position.’ We’re not holding a goddamned thing.
What is the best strategy for a hyper-advanced space civilization to guarantee its survival?
A hyper-advanced space civilization will need to have mastered nuclear fusion, molecular nanotechnology, AI and genetic biotechnology and all physically possible science, technology and space propulsion.
If the speed of light is an actual physics limitation that cannot be surpassed regardless of technology that this could set up a MAX technology situation. A civilization would exponentially advance until technological limits are reached. However, there are hard limits and there are things that can be circumvented. We are exploring ways to go beyond the diffraction limit for telescopes.
Build up Dyson Swarms Around Every Star
With mature molecular nanotechnology, AI, space and energy technology then it would easy to create self-replicating robots and capture all the energy of a star. Space colonization waves could be sent out to seed other solar systems and deposit self-replicating systems there.
IF hyper-advanced civilizations determine that once a solar system is fortified that it is impractical for even an opposing galactic civilization to mount an effort to dislodge a fortified solar system. The strategy would then be to fortify as many solar systems as possible.
This would also mean maximizing production of self-replicating ships and fleets to send them out in colonization waves.
Our Sun is an average sized star. There are bigger stars, and there are smaller stars. We have found stars that are 100 times bigger in diameter than our sun. A blue giant star can put out 10,000 times as much energy as the Sun. Hypergiants can shine millions of times brighter than the Sun, and they often have a diameter several hundred times greater. HR 8752 is a quarter million times more luminous than the Sun. There are 12 known hypergiants in the galaxy.
Fortifying solar systems with blue giants or other giant or hypergiant stars would increase the power of certain solar systems beyond the average stars.
Avoiding Unwanted Attention and Fights
A hyper-advanced civilization could determine that blocking light or shifting gravity beyond a detectable threshold is a bad idea. The determination could be made that there could be other bigger and badder civilizations.
The strategy could be to expand as close to the speed of light as is practical but do not alter solar systems in a distantly detectable way. This would be an expansion wave in all directions like a sphere expanding at near the speed of light. Expanding alien civilizations encountering each other would be the intersections of these spheres. However, would the spheres be very solid or would they be sparse shells. The sparser the colonization wave then the easier it would be for the spheres to overlap without conflict. If they are sparse enough then they expansion could pass over without any interaction.
If molecular nanotechnology and nuclear fusion and other technology is good enough then there would be no disadvantage to living in artificial spaceships at all times. There might never be any need to colonize planets. Resources could still be gathered but they could take interstellar comet clouds instead of planets. Planet and stars could be skipped over entirely. Development of planets and stars would be the most detectable activity. This could be deemed to be reckless. This would also explain the Fermi Paradox. Why have we not encountered aliens. Aliens could have determined that doing things in the bright sunlight zone of stars is unnecessary and reckless.
Even if only 10% of alien to alien encounter ends in conflict and the result of the conflict is a loss 10% of the time, they could determine that conflicts are never worth the hassle.
If there is no distance limit to travel where resources for refueling are readily available, then a strategy could be just expand out. If a hyper-aggressive and destructive civilization was encountered, then only the nearby part of the expansion wave would be lost.
If expansion is only or mainly in spaceships, then the spaceship fleet in the area can rapidly leave in all directions if there are stronger opponents. Planets could be viewed like cruise ships on Earth. They could be developed but always with enough spaceships (life-rafts) to evacuate completely and rapidly.
If the colonization wave was at 95% or more than the speed of light and in all directions, then after a few hundred years or thousand years it would be virtually impossible for any opponent to hunt down the expanding waves.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
So looking at the illustration of star sizes made me do some math. Exact sizes are uncertain but, going by volume, it looks like if Betelgeuse was a billionaire, the Sun would only be a millionaire.
Turning it around, most people would be brown dwarfs. That’s a bit sobering on several levels.
Maybe all the really cool hypercivilizations hang out in interstellar, and intergalactic space. Lots of room, and heat sink. If you have cheap fusion power, who needs stars?
The rapid development of Intelligent Life may depend on a smaller rocky planet, not too water rich, right temperature range for solid/liquid/gas, at the inner range of the habitability zone (to expose land), a planetary tilt that allows not-too-extreme seasons, a moon large enough to stabilize that tilt & cause tides (but not too massive), w/tectonic plates (only planet in our Solar System & vital for cycling carbon), & a magnetic field (to protect from solar & galactic radiation). Life may need a sufficiently metallic (3rd/4th generation), relatively quiet (yellow/white dwarf) sun, with a not too slow/fast rotation rate, outer gas giants (to act as shield for the inner planetary habitability zone) & a circular galactic orbit, in a bubble mostly free of galactic material in a quiet galaxy. Reasonably getting off the planet means it can’t be much more massive than Earth, but with enough gravity to retain an atmosphere & oceans. That may be no more than 1 or 2 intelligent species per galaxy. If the production of phosphorus varies widely as a function of the size of the supernova that seeded heavier elements into a new star system, so might the likelihood of life in the system. Life gets very difficult w/o abundant phosphorus.
I’m not sure it’s wise to share are plans of a galactic land grab. Super intelligence and technology will probably move on to other interests. With faster than light technology, space tourism might be a top interest.
IMO there are other species. There are 100 billion galaxies, each one has about 100 suns and there are even more exoplanets.
We are not enough technologically advanced to know more.
IMO probably we could go faster than light, but we don’t know that yet. We must first colonize another planet,….
We have a lot to fix here on Earth.
This year is terrible here in Europe. I don’t recall a year with so many devastating supercell thunderstorms as we have now, not even close. In Italy there was record hail. Some towns get one supercell and after a few hours another one again and again. I am a mountaineer and watch weather radar images all the time. In last 30 years I don’t know if thunderstorm broke 1 of my trees until now. Now in 1 week 5-7 my strong trees broke. One would expect that if air is cooler(less updraft) after 1 storm that there won’t be another one. One higher elevations air is warmer and that helps supercells to get enough fuel to continue.
I hope we are not going towards Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar scenario.
No one has self replicating machines capable of seeding other star systems in this galaxy. If they did have them, they would own the whole galaxy already. Once you have that technology you can take the whole galaxy in a few million years assuming you wanted it. The only way you could end up with a sustained conflict if both sides were perfectly matched (which they will never be). If they aren’t matched the exponential curve of one side will quickly overwhelm the other side.
I suspect advance civilizations have developed some type of total conversion reaction and don’t require the output from stars to exist. Our sun is converting 4 million metric tons of mass to energy each second. These civilizations have figured out how to do the same thing without lugging around the other 2×10^27 tons of stellar mass.
Surely fission and fusion aren’t the only ways to release this energy, we just haven’t found the other mechanisms yet. We’ve only been working on nuclear energy for a hundred years and don’t have dark energy and matter in the equations yet. It is very likely that once we have a better understanding of physics other pathways for the conversion of mass into energy will open.
Now combine these two technologies. Let’s say the side with self replication technology who holds control of billions of suns decides to launch trillions of probes against a single star. Those probes are designed to do a single thing – convert any mass they find into energy. Keep this attack up and they will convert all of the non-stellar mass in the target system into energy.
I agree with your final conclusion, if self-replicating expansion exists in a galaxy, that technology will control the entire galaxy. There is no possible defense. Whoever is higher on the exponential growth curve always wins.
I agree; The time to spread across the entire galaxy, making reasonable assumptions, is so short compared to the life of the galaxy, that the odds of two technological races arising close enough together in time to actually fall into conflict is very small. You’re either the first, or somebody already owns the whole galaxy.
If you’re lucky they maybe have a different idea from you about what makes for a nice place to live, and you get their scraps so long as you don’t become too annoying.
The odds are we’re the first in this galaxy.
I don’t expect to have to worry too much about alien civilizations. They would pretty much need to be in our local group (of galaxies) and the fact that we have gotten even as far as we has seems to indicate there is a very good chance that we are the only ones to get this far, at least in the Milky Way. Once we start to spread beyond this star, any subsequent species become as unlikely as a new sentient species evolving on the island of Manhattan. So we grab all the good real estate (if there really is any) but why don’t we keep on expanding, building space habitats in almost every star system?
1) There could be a concern about filling space with subluminal trash.
Suppose we send out explorers at a sizable percentage of the speed of light?
That’s fine. Unless something goes wrong and they smack into something. A small one might exterminate a life-bearing planet. A big one could disturb planetary orbits and make everything go to hell.
For exploration it’s probably an acceptable risk. But now we start sending big ones out to start colonies. And those colonies occasionally send stuff back to us. How much traffic does this result in? What are the risks of an unfortunate collision? Even if it misses and continues on past the system, then what? Can any of them come back after near encounters with, say, the gravity wells of black holes or something? Or another star system. Odds are low, but now we have to start looking at time spans that encompass centuries, millennium, or even millions of years or more. This isn’t like space junk in orbit; you can hide from that. You can’t hide from this. And how about if one of those former colonies decides to cleanse the universe by targeting lots of things at other systems?
Maybe the safer thing is never to build much in the way of off world colonies.
2) Maybe we don’t want the human race dividing into multiple species over time. Maybe we don’t want to create potential enemies. Especially if we become a hive mind and don’t want more out there.
3) Maybe we are unwilling to travel that far away from where it is all at, or be cut off from the concentrated mass and energy near a star for that long.
5) Maybe we prefer virtual realities to real ones.
6) Maybe we come to a point where we see little purpose in expanding for the sake of expanding. Especially since this would burn through resources we might want to preserve to get through the next several trillion years.
7) Maybe we realize that the only path to really long term safety is to move to a star that is exiting the galaxy and heading into intergalactic space as life inside of galaxies is rather hazardous by comparison (especially if the black holes of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies should create a quasar when they merge in 3 billion years or so).
8) Maybe we ascend to other universes or some such.
9) Maybe we all hibernate, waiting for an epoch of the universe that is more favorable to, say, information processing.
Interstellar relativistic travel is sufficiently energy intensive that even a K2 civilization is unlikely to be casual about it. You don’t have to worry about the traffic becoming heavy. I’d say that you’d probably only be sending a few ships to each system. But once you’ve built the infrastructure to do it, you’ll send ships to every system within plausible range. Only the colonies that are particularly distant, and which prioritize the capability, will be sending out their own colonies, because everything near them will have already been colonized from the home system.
And the density of matter between the stars is low enough that collisions with anything larger than a grain of sand are likely to be rare. We know this from the very fact that we can see the stars!
Fair enough, but over millions of years, accidents could become a near certainty. Especially when subluminal artifacts not moving outwards to explore would be specifically targeted at other inhabited systems.
Millions of years might seem like a long time to us, but it would be an eyeblink to a life-bearing planet. To an observer on that sort of timescale it might look like life-bearing planets were all getting hit at once by a shotgun right after our diaspora.
And, again, that presumes no one crazy takes over somewhere and starts launching stuff on impact trajectories with everyone else.
Maybe. Maybe not:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg0YLxT_Rbg
I am reminded of an SF story where mankind has spread across the galaxy pushing both clockwise and counter-clockwise around the galactic center along the various spiral arms of the Milky Way. This continues at sub-light speed for 100,000s of years until we finally get the far end of the galaxy at the opposite side from Earth. There our latest colony finally encounters another intelligent alien species.
After much confusion and threats, we finally realize that the “aliens” are us. They are humans who have migrated the opposite direction around the galaxy, with evolution and genetic engineering changing them to survive on 100,000s of alien worlds with different environments. By the time both branches of humanity meet on the opposite side of the galaxy, neither is recognizably human any more.
There isn’t such an sf story. You would have liked to write it but you never had time and are not a talented enough writer. Not a bad idea, though.
No, I vaguely recall reading a story with that premise years ago. Don’t recall the author, though.
I need to get some ashes.
RE: Mining out mercury to create a Dyson Swarm of solar power satellites .
The numbers are actually interesting.
Given Mercury’s total mass, that is 70% metals and 30% silicates (almost like the core of a larger planet), and assuming that only 50% of the metals (35% of the total mass) is recoverable through mining operations (done by robots digging tunnels through the planet lie a giant anti-hill):
3.30E+23 kg total
2.31E+23 70% kg metals
1.16E+23 50% kg recoverable
Further assume that each SPS is a simple, easy to construct, rugged solar collector, essentially a giant mirror concentrating sunlight on a power generator instead of fancy-pants photo-voltaic cells (which wear out in a few decades anyways), and conservatively assuming that the a mid range material density is equivalent to steel (though many metals will be used in construction) , and for the sake of long term rugged durability the mirrors are 1 cm thick – they can cover a sphere with a surface area 237 time greater than the surface of the sun:
8.00E+03 kg / m^3 density of steel
1.44E+19 m^3 total volume of metal
1.44E+21 m^2 mirror surface area at 1 cm thick
6.09E+12 km^2 surface area of the Sun
6.09E+18 m^2 surface area of the Sun
237x the area of the sun
Assuming I didn’t do a bone headed math mistake, that is amazing.
Put the SPS swarms in orbit at the same distance from the Sun as Mercury and their mirror area can cover 3.4% of the orbital sphere
5.79E+07 km radius orbit
4.21E+16 km^2 area of sphere
4.21E+22 m^2 area of sphere
0.034
The Sun generates 3.8E+26 j/sec. Assuming that we can capture 3.4% of that and the entire energy producing process is only 50% efficient:
3.80E+26 J / sec
1.20E+34 J / year
2.05E+32 J / year recoverable
Currently, Humanity uses 4,00E+20 j/year of energy. A Dyson swarm as described can increase that by a factor of 500 BILLION:
4.00E+20 J / year current Human energy use
513,700,653,207 x
Then again, blocking out about 3% of the sunlight reaching earth could trigger another ice age.
It’s going to need one heck of an environmental impact statement.
The “statite” approach is a bit different. Most of the surface of each unit is just mirror, with a small section designed for power conversion. You put them in orbit around the Sun’s equator, and they start providing you with power to build out the rest of the system.
You then add rings next to the equatorial ring, but orbiting with the same period. They use the reaction from reflecting the sunlight to maintain themselves in a stable orbit despite the fact that the center isn’t identical to the gravitational center of the sun.
As the band of mirrors around the Sun gets wider, the Sun gets brighter, because of how much of its output is reflected back at it. As this happens you can reduce the orbital velocity thanks to the increased light pressure, and it gets easier to build rings further from the equator.
As you approach full coverage, the rings come to a stop, fully supported by the light pressure of all the light bouncing around inside them. Essentially a balloon inflated with photons. While the light converting system only covers a fraction of the interior, it’s still handling the full output of the Sun, because the internal reflections compensate for the small area.
The planets don’t go dark; You keep them illuminated with spotlights built into the statites. So the whole process is essentially invisible from Earth. The power generated gets beamed anywhere you need it, in the form of microwaves, perhaps, or laser light, capable of being converted to electricity or whatever with high efficiency.
Mercury is easily enough mass to build the whole system, because most of it is thin film mirror. But not horribly thin, because the increased amount of light due to internal reflections means that you can have ten times the area density you’d get away with in a system that relied on just normal sunlight for support.
A galactic civilization wouldn’t bother with a mere sun as an energy source.
They’d tap black holes, especially for travel.
I’d like to recommend the “Cool Worlds” YouTube channel by Dr. David Kipping.
In particular I would recommend his proposed Halo Drive, wherein a starship the size of a planet could be propelled to relativistic speeds by means of a hand-held laser pointer and a sufficiently large black hole rotating at nearly the speed of light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFqL9CkNxXw
Which is what a black hole does, because the stars that collapse into black holes always have some kind of spin to begin with and spin faster and faster as they get smaller and smaller due to conservation of angular momentum (like an Olympic figure skater who pulls her arms in and spins faster). In fact, they spin nearly as fast as the speed of light:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/08/01/this-is-why-black-holes-must-spin-at-almost-the-speed-of-light/?sh=5c219e487735
Which results in frame dragging of space time in the region around the spinning black hole. Space-time itself gets warped and resembles water spinning down a sink’s drain pipe.
So, take your hand-held laser pointer (only make it computer held for sufficient accuracy) and point to a region just outside the black hole’s event horizon and the laser beam orbits around the black hole and emerges on the other side and heads back towards your spacecraft. The encircling laser beam forms a “halo” around the black hole, hence the name of the drive system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC2pB29HHnc
The action is similar to what happens when one of our space probes (like Voyager) get a gravity assist from a close encounter to a planet (like Jupiter) and gets a “free lunch” increase from the planet’s gravity (not really free of course as Jupiter loses a tiny, tiny bit of momentum that gets transferred to Voyager – but it is “free” from Voyager’s POV).
Laser light however cannot go any faster than light. So instead of gaining speed it gains energy (blue shifting as it does). Send a few joules of energy around a massive enough spinning black hole (or binary black holes orbiting each other) and you get billions of joules coming back at you from the other side of the black hole.
The momentum of this powerful laser beam can propel your laser sail craft to 20% of c or more. There could be up to a billion blackholes in the Milky Way. Engage the Halo Drive at the right location to propel your craft to another black hole where the Halo Drive can be used again, this time to slow the space craft down. When you have mapped the locations and movements of black holes throughout the galaxy you can use the Halo Drive to create an interstellar railroad to any location in the Milky Way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZevUW__aMZE
We still have to get to a convenient nearby black hole. The video mentions that statically the closest blackhole could be about 40 light years away (though there is probably a much higher density of black holes near the galactic center with fewer out here in the spiral arms). Getting to the black hole would require other means (laser light sail powered by a Dyson Swarm of solar powered satellites around the sun seems to be the most practical – a larger version of Project Starshot) to get you there.
Then take your laser light pointer out of your pocket and start cruising the galaxy
And it turns out the black holes are perhaps the best places in the galaxy to colonize.
So, when you are done with “Cool Worlds” I strongly recommend Isaac Arthur’s “SFIA” YouTube channel, like the one where he talks about colonizing black holes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxa0IrZCNzg
Because the same trick used by the Halo Drive (or by simply dropping something into the black hole can be used by a civilization constructed on habitats or rings orbiting the blackhole at a safe distance. Unlimited, nearly infinite and essentially free energy for trillions of years. A black hole civilization could survive long after the last star has burned out.
You don’t need FTL for a vast galactic space civilization.
The best solution isn’t to go faster, but to make time go “slower”.
Alastair Reynolds’ “House of Suns” does this well by assuming three techs:
1. Biological immortality so that a journey of 10,000s years is a trivial fraction of a crewman’s lifetime.
2. Effective hibernation/stasis so that a crewman can “sleep” unchanged for millennia while awaiting a rendezvous with another ship.
3. Engines that can go near c so that time dilation causes the crew to experience only a few weeks of relative time during a journey of a thousand years.
As a result, time isn’t measured by Earth standard years but by cycles, the amount of time it takes Sol to orbit the galactic center.
And thousands of actual years could pass before you see your family again but only a few months might have passed from everyone’s relative point of view.
So you could have Capt. Kirk and the Enterprise – but next week’s episode would take place 3,000 years later.
Top speed in “House of Suns” was 0.9999 c, so the time-dilation is ~70. Which is plenty when you have easy biostasis for the boring bits. Karl Schroeder imagines a whole civilization using synchronised biostasis so travel between interstellar planets was “overnight” in his book “Lockstep”. A ratio of 360:1 means 30 years ‘asleep’ and 1 month awake, so for cruising between planets separated by 0.3 light-years only needs a speed of 0.01 c. Hundreds to thousands of interstellar planets probably exist for every star.
Hang on. I made an app for that years ago (computing relativistic time dilation and mass). Aha, at .9999 of c, 70.7 is the relativistic mass (relative to 1 at the rest state). The time dilation is 1.4% (of time measured at the rest state) so, for each year at the rest state, 5 days, 3 hours, 52 minutes, and 55 seconds would elapse on board.
So circumnavigating the galaxy at a distance of around 26,000 light years would be 81,681 light years and at .9999 light speed would take 81,690 years (rounded) for an observer at the rest state. On board, 1,155.24 years (rounded) would elapse.
Of course, in the book, the purpose of these voyages is to make frequent stops to learn things and help people (and make money when possible) and still make it back to meet everyone else making these voyages every 200k years. Providing they can accelerate to full speed pretty quickly (as well as decelerate), and can hibernate for at least a couple of centuries at a time, the numbers appear to work.
House of Suns is is one of my favorite sci-fi books, certainly of those written by Alastair Reynolds.
Basic thermodynamics: You want your heat source as hot as possible, and your radiator as cold as possible.
So an advanced civilization would collect energy near stars, but would expend it as far from stars as feasible, to get maximum thermodynamic efficiency. A civilization which was trying to get the most out of a star’s energy would surround that star with a statite array, supported by the star’s radiation, radiating thermal infrared on the outer surface, and beaming power to sites distant from the star.
A REALLY advanced civilization might engage in practices like “star lifting”, where you extract matter from a star to shut down it’s fusion processes, in order that the fuel can be used over a longer period of time, rather than being wasted on the star’s own schedule.
Interestingly, the statite array used to efficiently capture stellar energy would end up raising the surface temperature of the star enough to enhance mass outflow for star lifting.
All of this, of course, is pretty premature, though in principle if we developed molecular nanotechnology we might begin building a statite array this century, and have it complete before the end of the next century.
I was also thinking about blowing up stars to keep them from burning out but I actually don’t think it’s worth the trouble as it only cost a few percent of the mass to let them burn.
What you want is a kugelblitz, a microscopic black hole that burns at 10000 degrees from hawking radiation. It is perfect matter to energy conversion.
Technically a “Kugelblitz” is a black hole where the original mass was in the form of radiation rather than matter, not that the difference means anything once it’s been made. I think you mean “quantum black hole”; Theoretically there’s a range of masses for a black hole where they’re still big enough to eat matter, and yet is evaporating at a fast enough rate to be a decent power supply.
Another possibility is exotic matter like quark nuggets, which could be used to catalyze the conversion of matter into antimatter.
I’ll have to read up on quantum nuggets. Is it a nuts as cosmic strings?
Among other sufficiently advanced technologies are force fields. If they are strong enough you can compress anything into fusion. (A bench press where you pump in hydrogen, and take out a slab of iron)
But the direct mater to energy conversion of a black hole is hard to beat. Maybe field modification, where you could modify a universal constant. For instance fiddle with the strong nuclear force.
Quantum nuggets are to quarks what neutronium is to neutrons. A degenerate form of matter composed of a quark fluid. They could have formed in conditions around the time of the big bang, and hung around since, as they’d be fairly stable. They’re one of the candidates for dark matter.
It’s possible some of the asteroids would have quark nuggets at their centers, which you could mine from them, since quark nuggets in theory are stable in contact with conventional matter, albeit absurdly dense. Might also be quark nugget collections at the core of various planets, but they’d be inaccessible by any conventional means.
Anyway, in theory you can use quark nuggets as the basis for both fusion to higher elements, and even mass/energy conversion.
“All of this, of course, is pretty premature, though in principle if we developed molecular nanotechnology we might begin building a statite array this century, and have it complete before the end of the next century.”
Oh good just in time for the population collapse.
The population collapse we’re starting into may actually BE the great filter. Maybe most intelligent species, once they can control their own reproduction, just find better things to do than reproduce, and die out…
Sad if the end is is just the game is not worth the candle
Humanity is becoming obsolete as a workforce, kids are a bad investment (monetary). USA in constant war, Russia a gangster land by and china threatening to destroy Taiwan. And now WrongThink is doing rounds.
Geez
If a civilisation like this ever develops from humans, and grows through a singularity, it will be so far beyond what humans are capable of, and so needless of human control, that if humans do survive it then they’ll be hanging on like rats.
Rather than hanging on like rats, I like to think any transhuman society would want some human communities to survive, as control groups, if nothing else.
These might be something like current day Amish communities, if a bit more isolated. Reservations for those who choose to cling to the old ways, as their ancestors did, but (hopefully) still offering the ones that want it a way to uplift themselves into mainstream humanity (or transhumanity) if they are willing to forsake the enclaves.*
*Possibly possible. I believe one of the former Science Advisors to the President (I don’t recall which, but it was some years back) was a scientist (distinguished of course) who had been born in an Amish family.