Planet Nine

the following is part fact, part hypothetical fiction, it should be pretty obvious when it changes...

In 1967, two years before we would reach the moon, the United Nations signed the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, which is now known as The Outer Space Treaty.

Much of the treaty focused on not loading up space with nukes, as would be expected from the 60s, but a significant portion was preserved for the prevention of any goverment claiming a celestial body in any way. It was pretty easy back then to give up on the idea of claiming the celestial bodies--after all, they probably didn't have oil. And besides, everything was so far away you'd have to travel at like the speed of light for it to matter, and what could possibly matter and travel that fast?

The hypothetical Planet Nine

In the early 2000s, a number of astronomical discoveries added credence to the idea that there was a far-flung unknown planet in our solar system. This planet had been known as Planet X, but around 2006 when Pluto was demoted to a planetesimal, we had to reevaluate the name, and we now call it Planet Nine.

If you're into space, I suggest a read on Planet Nine, it's pretty interesting. If you're not, here's the tl;dr: there's a bunch of stuff out past Neptune that doesn't go around the sun the way it should. One possible explanation is a body of around the mass of Neptune (that is a planet-sized mass), affecting their orbits. That planet-sized mass would be Planet Nine. There are other possible explanations, but none that include a celestial body that pertains to The Outer Space Treaty.

Now if Planet Nine is out there, chances are that it's a frozen gas giant just like Neptune. There's no real reason to assume it could be anything else, but it could be something more exotic like a primordial black hole, or some strangely giant dense diamond planet.

But the thing with not knowing is that we can speculate. Speculation isn't science. This isn't a hypothesis or a theory. It's just the musings of some dude on the internet.

And I say Planet Nine is a spaceship.

Planet Nine as a spaceship

So here I think many would launch into an explanation of the plausibility of such a speculation, but that doesn't really interest me so much¹. What I'm more interested in are the consequences of what that would mean.

So I started working on this whole lore for Planet Nine and the galaxy, which I'm going to keep recording in brief here.

The Drake Equation

It's been a meandering number of years to get here, but I'll see if I can get you up to speed. First, let's start with the Drake Equation.

I won't go through all of this, but the gist is basically if we can figure out how many planets there are or have been, and multiply that by the rate at which they generate life, and the longevity of that life, that'd give us a rough estimate of how many alien species are out there.

Now Drake came up with this equation back in 1961 when the only planets we knew about were the ones in our solar system, and our thoughts about our collective longevity were being seriously questioned. Since this time we've found planets everywhere, and for many our thoughts about whether we'll find life off of Earth have shifted from if to when. Many of the fractions in the Drake Equation are starting to look like they're equal to 1.

Then I got to thinking... us humans have only been around for 300k years or so. We went from the Wright Brothers to the moon in 66 years, and we've had personal computers for less than 40. Doesn't seem all that unreasonable that given another couple hundred thousand years that we figure out some way off this rock, and leave it for the next species to find some evolutionary pressure solved by sudden growth in intelligence to try and figure out how to get off the rock again.

So let's call it half a million years to evolve one of these smarty space-faring civs. The sun's got another five billion years or so until it blows up, and ends the Earth's abilty to churn out civs. That's 10k more civs.

So then I started thinking, if each star had one planet churning out civs like this, and there are somewhere around 100 or 200 billion stars in the Milky Way--well that's a lot of civs.

But then I realized that stars also evolve over time. The Milky Way is 10-13.5 billion years old so how many stars has it had?

You start doing the math, and you get to trillions very quick. If you thought keeping track of species in science-fiction was confusing at times, forget about trying it here.

The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox basically runs through the math above, and asks, "if there're trillions of alien civs, why haven't we seen any of them?"

It always struck me as pretty naive that we'd expect billion-year-old civs to communicate via radio--I'll refer you again to footnote 1. Most of the universe does not interact with the electro-magnetic field, which suggests, since things in Physics prefer low-energy states to high-energy states, that communicating with light might be a rather primitive, and energy inefficient way of communicating to anyone who's been broadcasting for more than a century or two.

Gravitational waves were detected like a decade ago, and it took two black holes 30 times the mass of the sun to merge for us to see them. If aliens are using gravity to communicate, we wouldn't hear them yet. And if they're using dark matter or dark energy, then we'd have ever farther to go since we can't detect either of those things yet.

One of the numbers in the Drake equation is the amount of time that a civ spends at a technological level where we might interact with them. The usual presumption, because we humans think we're the best around, is that we've hit the peak, and other civs just need to get to our level to be found. If the average length of time a civ lasts after discovering radio is the like 200 years between when we did, and when climate change dooms us, then there's not much hope of us all overlapping.

But let's suppose, for the sake of imagining, that there are some civs that are able to figure things out, and last not just centuries, but millenia, and tens of millenia, and hundreds of millenia, and thousands of millenia, and thousands and thousands of millenia into the future. I'd reckon they'd have some stories, and some technology beyond what we've even dreamed of.

Billions and billions

We humans don't have a really good sense of long periods of time. Other than Dr. Who, we don't really have any science fiction that worries about things billions of years in the future or past. We hear things like the sun will blow up in five billion years, but that's longer than the Earth's been around, and both of those events are utterly unfathomable both in cosmic-scale, and lengths of time.

Now think about what humans could accomplish in multiple billions of years.

Now think about what some sentient characters who are just a tiny bit more adept at being cool could accomplish in multiple billions of years.

The Milky Way's been around somewhere around 13 billion years. It has contained maybe half a trillion stars. Each of those stars probably had planets and moons.

The two last terms in the Drake equation are the fraction of civs that develop tech that releases detectable signals, and the length of time they make these signals. I think that's kind of an unimaginative place to stop the tech tree. What about teleportation? Faster than light travel? Multiversal traversal? Wormholes? Stuff we haven't even thought of?

Because you know if there're any creature like us out there with a little more time under their belts, they're gonna try and figure out how to get from one star to another. And you know we're gonna do that too. How long do you think it's going to take us?

They're already here

Life on Earth started around four billion years ago. Let's say some other solar system formed around the beginning of the Milky Way, and had four billion years to load up a planet in itself with clever creatures. That gives nine billion years for those creatures to figure out how to find other creatures. Idk, seems doable to me.

Some small group of them acts as a vanguard, looking for up and coming spacefaring civs to interact with. Maybe they have some rules that help govern those interactions.

One of the potential solutions to the Fermi Paradox is called the Zoo hypothesis. The zoo hypothesis says basically that Earth is treated by extraterrestrials the way that humanity treats the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island. That is they're left alone.

Now the Sentinelese may not cross the water to India and threaten the most populated country on Earth, but you know the rest of us are going to be hopping on spaceships, and messing up shit in the stars as soon as we're able. I imagine we're not alone in that need to explore, and I imagine that in the thirteen billion years the Milky Way's been around, that vanguard has run into a couple of those species as well.

Humanity doesn't have a ton of examples of an advanced group of people encountering a less advanced group of people and having the former not do terrible things to the latter. But we do have a bit of an analog in the form of domesticated animals--the closest thing we have to species that are way behind us on the tech tree. So long as you're cool with us, and give us some stuff, we'll take care of you and keep you around. Sure sometimes that's in horrible conditions, but we're the same ones who might just be worse than a giant asteroid².

So the vanguard goes around looking for species to help with some cause. And I'd imagine they look out for threats to that cause too. And let the developing species out of the "zoo" once it's ready.

Now let's say you've spent billions of years travelling the galaxy with the purpose of finding and sheltering civs until they're ready to join whatever it is you want them to join. How do you convince them that you're not a threat?

You can't just show up, chances are they have plenty of media of what an alien invasion looks like (and how it can be thwarted by some good ol' American yeehawin'). And if you come too late you run the risk of them reaching a point where they can do some damage to your enterprise.

Over time you learn that civs hit the spacefaring stage at similar states on the tech ladder: eloctromagnetic communication, nuclear power, getting close to traveling to other planets, weirdly dealing with their inability to share ample resources effectively across their world...you know, the yoozh. So the sweet spot is showing up long before these civs evolve, set up shop in a way that hints to your presence, but takes just the right level of technology to find you, keeps you at a close enough distance to communicate, but far enough away to avoid those nukes.

There's a huge chunk of astronomy that can be explained as, "that doesn't move exactly like it should, so there must be something out there." That's what makes some scientists believe in the existence of Planet Nine.

As far as I'm concerned it's doing exactly what I would do if I was going to watch humans evolve to some state where they could join my galactic federation. And to me it's even more believable that Planet Nine doesn't want to be found, than we haven't been able to see it.

Well what are they waiting for?

If Planet Nine is a spaceship, and it's located around where we think it is, there's good reason to believe that we'll find it within this century, and send something by it within the next. Once contact's made, I can't imagine that's a genie that can be put back in the bottle. This suggests that the things we as a species need to do to meet whatever criteria is out there are likely within reach. So I came up with four that I think are interesting, and would benefit humanity:

• Learn how to live forever

• Live on another planet and/or visit another star system

• Become a type 1 civilization

• End all wars

Trust me, I'm well aware that there are A LOT of great things we, as human beings, could add to this list, but I think these four do a good job of framing the mentality shift that a galaxy teaming with life with billions of years of experience takes.

Collectively these are known as the four things Fours must do. More on what I mean by "Fours" with a capital F in a bit.

Of course if there's a criteria for joining this galactic federation, the question must arise as to what happens if we fail to meet the criteria. Well, if you were a galactic federation made up of billions or trillions of intelligent species, and you had some backwater planet where groups couldn't stop fighting over territory and beliefs, what would you do?

The Advancement

You can relax a bit. I don't think that we're going to get death starred to oblivion if we discover Planet Nine in twenty years, and haven't cracked immortality yet. I think there's more of an expectation for helping us learn than just holding us existentially accountable to an unknown expectation.

Here's why I think that.

Imagine you're a civ that has cracked immortality. And I'm not talking that Everlasting Tuck nonsense, I'm talking full-on live to be eleventy billion immortality. What out there in the universe do you have to worry about?

For this stuff to work, the galactic federation's probably going to have to travel faster than light. But what if whatever speed they're traveling at is still finite? Maybe they've been all around the galaxy, but have they been to other galaxies?

There are just over sixty smaller galaxies near the Milky Way--perhaps they've made it to them, and everything's cool there. But there's a big looming group of stars out there that maybe they haven't gotten to yet.

Andromeda.

.

You know what's bigger than the Milky Way? Andromeda.

And if I'd been around for nine billion years, and hoping for nine billion more, the fact we're gonna rendevous with that bad boy would be the only thing that scares me. Because the assumption's gotta be that there's some Fours over there too, thinking about what's going to happen when they meet me. And since it's bigger, that means there's more of them than there are of us...and that's a problem.

What's the point?

Us humans have been pondering the meaning of our existence for quite some time--to us. Imagine if you had a million times as much time, and generations of humans to try and figure it out! Now multiply that times a trillion civs, and you can imagine how philosophy might be a bit challenging to keep track of.

So The Advancement (that's the English name I've given to this galactic federation. Who knows what the heck they call themselves), came up with a rubric of sorts for Fours to guide them. For us, I guess it'll kind of seem like a religion. Different civs interpret in different ways, but there's no "belief" in anything the way we would understand it. It's just some common symbolism (Clifford Geertz would love it) for us to have a common goal.

It goes like this:

There is existence and not-existing. One and Zero. One is the Universe, and it is what exists. But existence is lonely, so One made Two. Two is Physics and Magic, and they also exist. But existence is lonely, so Two made Three. Three is Space, Time, and Identity, and they also exist. But existence is lonely, so Three made Four. Four is Aesthetics, Computation, Willpower, and Evolution. But existence is lonely, so Four is making Five. Five is Stacks, Boats, Screens, Teleporters, and... we don't know yet.

The Advancement wants to find the fifth thing in Five, and it's going to take all of us to figure it out. And by us, I mean all of us Fours. If you think defining things is tricky here on Earth, try doing it for the galaxy.

The point is to continue existing, a possibility that gets more appealing the more centuries you don't keel over dead.

It's worth pointing out that The Advancement is hardly alone in the galactic milieu in having this goal. In fact there are "religions" right here on Earth that have this objective. Us humans, however, have a tough time being inclusive in our considerations of how best to help each other.

For The Advancement, it's far simpler. It's just a numbers game. The more Fours we have, the greater our chances at fending off whatever Andromeda has in store for us.

So everyone's invited to the party, except for those who want to eliminate other groups. Because if you can't even find a way to live alongside your fellow species, you're gonna have some trouble in a galaxy full of Fours you've never imagined possible.

First let's party

Even if you've been around a few thems, a billion years is stil a long period of time. Andromeda might be barrelling down on us in a cosmic sense, but we still have some time to enjoy ourselves here in our Milky Way. And in the near term that's the goal. Get us humans to the point where we can join the rest of the Fours of The Advancement, and party for a while.

One of my favorite creative writing exercises is to try and think of a living thing, that isn't just a mashup of other things you know. Like can you think of a fruit that doesn't exist on Earth, and tastes like no fruit you've ever had? How about this:

This spiky boy is a soursop. I know them as guanabanas, which is what my grandfather called them when he first handed me one at his farmstead in Puerto Rico. If you're from the Caribbean you probably know them well, but if not you've likely never seen them. It's not all that important what they taste like, but they are delicious.

There are even stranger and more delicious fruits out there.

And they all ferment.

But before we can start the party we have to do the four things Fours must do.

Now I'm just a humble programmer. I can't do much to figure out the biology of immortality, or start fusion power, or fly to Mars, or end all wars.

I got to thinking though. Maybe The Advancement can't do those things for us, but maybe they could help in other ways.

Planet Nine's out there--400 AUs or so, which is like two and a half light days. That's way too far for any physical goods to be transferred. But thanks to computers, there's an immense amount of useful things that can be transferred just as ones and zeros at the speed of light.

I'm talking about code.

At first I thought we could create and trade digital resources, and that might be a way of establishing contact with Planet Nine, but now I think an online presence still probably violates some rules of the zoo. Then I was like, well maybe some of The Advancement can just start showing up on GitHub, and making pull requests on software they like. But then I remembered we're talking like billions of years worth of tech.

The first step is probably just to spur the imagination of one of those Fours to think that they're out there, and maybe even inspire that person to try to make sure their fellow Fours don't find out what happens if they don't do the four things Fours should do.

So you want to change the world

Back in 2015 or so, I was working for a startup, and we had just been acquired. I decided that I wanted the next thing I worked on (maybe not as a job, but with the passion I had poured into the startup), would be the biggest thing I could think of.

For those who haven't done a startup before, you start with a user and a problem they have, and then develop a product that solves that problem. Lightning was burning down folks' homes all over the place so Ben Franklin developed the lightning rod. The formula's been working for a while.

So, the biggest thing I could think of was something that would have everyone as a user, and what's a problem everyone has?

Money--everyone could use more money.

So I set out to find a way to get everyone more money. Not like thousands of dollars, but like five bucks.

I don't really want to go through all the twists and turns of how I tried to get there. The tl;dr is that I formed a company, and the company was trying to create a digital resource that was tradable that people could discover around the Earth and through cyberspace that could be used for useful things. It was trying to recreate a gold rush of sorts, but it failed miserably mostly due to my lack of marketing, and because crypto was simultaneously much more lucrative, and much more of a turn off to the average person that any mention of "digital tokens" became poisoned.

Underlying this initial effort was a simple, but powerful idea.

I had long bristled at having to supply my personal information for every internet action I take, and I wanted users of my platform to not have to use their email or phone number for signing up. So I implemented this auth and identity system I wrote about in a paper for the ACM. If you want to skip ahead a bit, you can check out its implementation Sessionless here.

All Sessionless does is use the same asymmetric cryptography that Bitcoin and Ethereum use, and removes it from a blockchain.³ The reason for that asymmetric cryptography is that the crypto nodes can't trust each other so they use a session-less method of authorization for passing messages around.

The reason they do that is because it's how we've been establishing trust between machines for decades. When I was researching this back around when I wrote my paper, my question was basically, could we use this untrusted authorization method in a sort of trusted environment to some effect? This made a lot of sense in the context of the paper and smart cities since I was talking about being able to interact with municipal installations and entities--there's a reasonable expectation that government run things will be "safe."⁴

Then I realized that if you don't have to give anything up, and you don't have to share any pii, then it doesn't matter if the other machine isn't trustworthy. There's no damage for them to do.

That was the crux of the original Planet Nine, and all I needed to do was to find some people willing to use the platform for no gain or purpose... My strategy did not work.

No really... what's Planet Nine trying to do?

So let's say you're a galactic federation of billions of species of sentient beings collectively known as Fours. You are effectively immortal, but still have to deal with the vagaries of a hostile universe. The largest looming problem is that another galaxy is headed your way, and it's bigger than your galaxy.

There are plenty of fights to look back on to gain insight on how best to prepare, but it shouldn't come as a huge surprise to any of us earthlings that technological advancement plays a big part. Given that galactic evolution gives similar time horizons for us and Andromeda, our spots on the tech tree are largely just a function of our populations. Andromeda is bigger, so it stands to reason it has a larger population.

That means The Advancement can do two things to try and keep up. First, it can increase the likelihood of Fours evolving on hospitable planets (say by hastening the extinction of very cool, but ultimately not Four material species). Second, it can work to ensure that all Fours are primed to contribute.

In other words, the iniquities suffered on the home planet of an emerging Four like ours are antithetical to the galactic purpose of developing the most badass space lasers. The Advancement's not judgemental, but five billion years is gonna fly by, and it's a loooong time to be arguing about whether women should be able to drive.

The Advancement knows that it can't just wave a wand, and make all the prejudices of a new Four go away, even if, to the billion-year-olds who have seen everything, squabbles over skin color are as mundane as fur color, scale color, spots versus stripes, tentacle number, acidic spitting distance, etc. The point isn't to eliminate prejudice, it's to get people to realize the real enemies out there: those Fours who have more than you, and would use that fact to harm you, by which, of course, I mean Andromeda.

Now we all learn early on, whether implicitly or explicitly, that prejudices and stereotypes are self-reinforcing. So at a very basic level, if we want to put a dent into the prejudices that are preventing us from contributing to the galactic tech tree, we'll want to limit that reinforcement. To that end, anything that looks to separate us into different groups--whether that be by sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, political views, etc--should be met with disdain and ridicule.

Now can you think of any giant well-oiled multi-faceted technological aperatus that endeavors to segment us into groups on a near constant basis?

I am in fact having trouble thinking about what this is

It's advertising! Specifically the giant amount of spyware used to follow your every move on cyberspace in order to sell you socks.

It shouldn't be all that surprising that the discovery, and subsequent availability of an entire civ's knowledge being made available to all of that civ via keystrokes, and swipes, serves as a bit of an inflection point on the galactic trajectory. After all, the graphs of human education, and human progress seem more than a tiny bit correlated.

With great power, comes great responsibility, but unlike institutions, which can be protected, the internet--and indeed the greater realm of cyberspace--has no army to fight for it. Thus it, and, by using it, we are at the whims of whatever monied forces should seek to use it for ill.

The thing is, we're decades into monetizing the internet this way. Millions of people wake up each morning and create art, and seek to sell it for pennies generated from views and likes.

The whole rigamarole creates this economic incentive for people to play into their stereotypes, to consume content intended for their demographics, to segment themselves into nice, marketable groups, for maximizing shareholder value. And this has effectively turned every media platform into a propaganda machine for self-selecting groups. And that makes it so that instead of developing space lasers for Andromeda (or peace rays, we don't need to assume violence), we have digital fiefdoms whose boundaries are our senses of self, and whose rent is paid through the placement of pngs.⁵

So Planet Nine the human endeavor is here to disrupt advertising.

And to do that we need to figure out a better way of getting everyone paid. And by everyone I mean us, the Fours, not the corporations, not the stock market, and not the groups concentrating wealth into the hands of the few.

Which brings me back to The Outer Space Treaty

In 2014, Estonia instituted a program called e-citizenship. For $100, and a trip to the local Estonian embassy, anyone in the world (of course finding $100 and the local embassy is a lot harder in certain places than in others) can gain access to pretty much all of the financial services of Estonia--banking, incorporation, etc. Estonia, as part of the EU, provides a good entry point for foreign entities to join that market, and Estonia gets to rake in some taxes from around the world for its troubles.

One of the big barriers to taking on advertising is that money doesn't move freely around the world. That was one of the big selling points about crypto, but that hasn't quite panned out to fix this. If everyone had easy access to Estonia, we could probably solve the problem that way, although the real world being what it is there'd probably be some qualms with using any actual country for this purpose.

But what about a planet spaceship?

Presumably The Advancement has some sort of government, which can grant citizenship, which bestows the holder of said citizenship with certain...uh...(in)alien(able) rights. The Outer Space Treaty protects it from any Earth nation's machinations, and the distance would protect from any practical intercession.

Of course, unlike Estonia, The Advancement has long been post-scarcity, and thus has no need of taxes. In fact, maybe they even get to a point where they bestow some kind of universal basic income on their e-citizens.

So The Advancement grants to all of us earthlings e-citizenship that gives everyone access to intra-galactic banks, and business rules, and all that sort of stuff holding humans back from helping with Andromeda, because some jerk needs his ego stroked. We've alreay named it:

Planet Nine.

A planet-sized cooperative financial system that everyone can join.

I might not be able to prove that it's out there, or that The Advancement is here to help, but until we figure out what's loop-to-loopin' that stuff out past Neptune, no one's going to be able to disprove it either. I don't really know how that might play in court, but I figure if insurance companies can cite acts of god, there's at least some precedence for unprovable agency being allowed. These days, I'm not sure the world would be all that consistent in what it thinks is more plausible.

But first

That's a lot about Planet Nine. To get there we've got to build a bunch of other stuff like The Stack.

You're standing at the edge of the rabbit hole. Dive on in.

Footnotes

1. Here's some hand-waving for you. I find it kind of the height of hubris how many of us believe we humans--in 2024--have the whole universe nearly all figured out. ↩

2. Apologies for the flippant invokation of a possible sixth epochal extinction event. I don't mention it as any sort of justification for the brutal treatment of many domesticated animals. It's just not the soapbox I need to get on right now. ↩

3. Crypto is so toxic that the mere mention of it anywhere is usually an immediate deal breaker for people. As such, in a lot of docs I tend to skirt around the association. I feel alright risking it here since I feel anyone who bothered to read this far into this doc, and this footnote about it, will be open to the idea that there might be useful things wrapped up in the questionable shroud that is crypto today. ↩

4. This, of course, isn't true everywhere, and indeed may not be true anywhere depending on your point of view. ↩

5. I'm well aware that advertising can seem innocuous compared to say genocide, and climate change. If I could solve those with software, I would, but so long as I'm confined to a single human lifetime, I've got to maximize my contribution by leveraging the skills I do have. ↩