TITLE:
Cosmic Priors: An Agent-Based Model of Civilizational Development under Solitude, Uncertainty, and Extraterrestrial Plurality
AUTHORS:
Daniel Ward
KEYWORDS:
Agent-Based Modeling, Astrobiology, Cultural Evolution, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Human Exceptionalism
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.9,
September
7,
2026
ABSTRACT: Human societies have never developed under verified common knowledge that independently evolved extraterrestrial technological intelligence exists, or that humanity is cosmically alone. This study introduces Cosmic Priors, an agent-based model that treats solitude, persistent uncertainty, and extraterrestrial plurality as alternative epistemic genesis conditions rather than modern disclosure events. Identical synthetic populations coevolve cultural narratives and scientific, philosophical, educational, and political institutions across five matched worlds: solitude, uncertainty, plurality, uncertainty-to-solitude, and uncertainty-to-plurality. The primary experiment comprised 800 matched world histories, 1500 agents per world, and 90 generations, with common random numbers and a neutral fixed seed. Persistent uncertainty generated the greatest terminal narrative diversity (0.971) and inquiry investment (0.395). Plurality reduced species-uniqueness exceptionalism relative to solitude (0.445 versus 0.567) while increasing species-level identity (0.589 versus 0.444). Both late-resolution worlds experienced short-term worldview disruption despite converging toward genesis-world outcomes. The findings do not forecast actual civilizations; they demonstrate that cosmic knowledge can be modeled as a selection environment for cultural and institutional evolution, while separating the content of an answer from the historical cost of resolving foundational uncertainty.