the rarity of 

intelligent life

With true federation space encompassing over a region of space over a hundred and fifty light years across, and exploration of over a hundred light years beyond this inner border, the number of intelligent civilizations is particularly rare. With only four member races the federation has often considered the specific rarity of space-faring civilizations.

The rarity of other civilizations ahs been considered along two lines, the first addresses the rarity of suitable places for intellectual development, and the species requirement for intelligence. The second and more complex theory in many ways examines the likely lifetime and interests of a star faring civilization. Though the former theory would perceived as the strongest, it is actually the brevity of the second that is most important.

Within inner federation space life seems abundant, there are hundreds of known worlds with apparently indigenous life. In spite of very fragile tolerances (relatively speaking) life seems to be commonplace, more so than one would expect for a natural environment, this itself set up an argument that the relatively high abundance of life was artificially instigated by a very past race, or races.

The most important factors for the existence of life is the stars around which planets revolve, bright hot stars may have large habitable regions, but their lifetimes are correspondingly brief. Cooler dimmer stars may last a great deal longer (dwarfs may live for hundreds of billions of years without great changes in luminosity) but their habitable regions are correspondingly small, and such proximity tends to lock the planet to the sun, which is not ideally suitable for life (though does not rule it out). Even with these limitations of star types (generally F-K) there are still a great number of these locally, and these are by the way of commonest home for advanced life.

Not only do stars dictate suitable abodes for life, their chemistry of formation is also important, a star system poor in rocks and metals will not be able to support many good terrestrial planets, where as very high metallicity may promote the formation of many excessively large terrestrial planets, who take longer to cool down, and more volcanically unstable, and prone to a greater frequency of collision. The federation seems to exist in an optimal region of chemical distribution, being further away from the core to have bright new stars, and a good but not excessive metallicity.

These above two requirements are in the way the most important dominating factors behind creating habitable star systems, but there are many more important factors that encourage life. Most of these minor factors are quite evident, things like an unstable sun, high numbers of asteroids, and high orbital eccentricity are contrary to supporting life. But there many less evident but important factors. Large moons are quite important, these large bodies prevent locking to the star, and maintain a stable rotation, and axial inclination, as well as providing tides, which open up new interfaces between land and ocean. Jovian planets are also quite important, although their direct influence on planets is nothing compared to a large moon, they act to soak up and expel troublesome asteroids after planetary formation. Also these gas giants also provide a second abode for life, there large gravitational influence, and often-attendant family of moons can create tidal heat amongst otherwise star distant worlds.

Exploration of this region of space has confirmed that where the above instances are met life nearly always succeeds, as if it was an inevitable result for a planet having the above conditions. Life has also succeeded on worlds which are contrary to the supposed above rules as well, so there is no lack of life supporting worlds which could support thriving civilizations.

The second to the first theory considers why intelligence is so rarely adopted by species in biology. Intelligence seems to only evolve when necessary, preprogrammed instincts and stupidity are in the way the most commonly exploited method. Like The factors that govern whether life can emerge on planets, intelligence also seems to have certain factors.

Environment is very important, a steady stable environment is not conducive to developing intelligence, as simple instincts can cover the conditions. But a changing environment where organisms have to adapt and develop new modes of living is conducive to intelligence.

Also the rarity of the organisms preferred food is important, if for example it prefers fruit, and individual fruiting plants are scattered widely and fruit only in some parts of the year, the organism requires an ability to carefully remember where the plants are and when they fruit to be efficient and getting its energy, this is conducive to intelligence. Likewise feeding methods such as grazing, do not require on the whole large amounts of intelligence to gather there food, though seasonal changes may dictate migration to better grounds.

Social circumstance are also important, a species that mass produces offspring, and invests very little in parental care, hoping that a combination of robust instincts and terms of acceptable loss will be sufficient is unlikely to become a sentient civilization species. Rather species that invest much time with few offspring, with extended periods of infant learning non-inherent skills from parents are more likely to be intelligent.

This kind of reasoning can be done throughout an entire ecology to successfully identify potential intelligent species, and therefore give an estimate of number of potentially civilizing species per ecosphere. Even if this number very low (as is the norm), there should still be plenty of species engaged in constructing civilizations.

This is where the second important theory comes in, it is not really the number of intelligent civilization potential species that is important, but the actual length of civilization compared to the evolutionary time to generate these species. Astro-archaeology suggests that space-faring races rapidly gain technological prowess, and that technological development is not a significant factor in a species lifetime. It is also found that most civilizations do not die out of catastrophe (despite the Great War evidence), but because of a voluntary choice of transcension, where a civilization has achieved so high an ability that there is nothing of challenge in this universe, and instead of remaining trapped to one universe, they embark on one of their own design, and disappear from this one in entirety (though there are many other finer points to transcension). This means that there is a narrow window of time for two civilizations to meet as a space faring culture. In fact this window is incredibly narrow, so much so that the seemingly miraculous co-development of the federation races actuall becomes more of a near natural impossibility.

The consequence of these theories not only highlight the fact that other intelligent civilizations are rare, as has been observed, but also the existence of the federation races so incredibly rare that they almost without question the artifact of some greater design.