Must Civilization Belong to Humanity? Qualification Criteria for Non-Human Civilization

All confirmed civilizations are human, yet this empirical fact does not by itself establish humanity as a logical condition of civilization. Recent multi-agent AI research has begun to display partial phenomena such as machine-generated culture, emergent conventions, and persistent artifacts that outlive individual agents. This article places these developments in dialogue with classical theories of civilization and research on cumulative culture. It argues that civilization is not a mere property of high intelligence, social organization, or accumulated knowledge, but a public historical structure in which acquired cognitive, coordinative, and practical achievements can survive the limits of particular subjects and become usable by later, non-identical cognitive positions. Five presently identifiable minimal functional transitions are distinguished: autonomous cognitive generation, persistence across identity discontinuity, inheritance across identities, public integration and normative constraint, and generative renewal. The article then separates civilizational qualification from independent civilizational status. "Mechanism autonomy" and a counterfactual "necessary human intermediary test" are introduced to distinguish AI participation in human civilization from the formation of a civilization of its own. Finally, the article argues that durable civilization requires the co-evolution of expanding capabilities and relational coordination: a civilization that becomes ever more able to change the world yet cannot constrain its internal forces may become fragile precisely because of its own power. AI provides a near-term test of the framework, while radically heterogeneous extraterrestrial civilization serves as its limiting case. The framework offers a non-anthropocentric analytical coordinate for re-understanding the boundary of civilizational subjects under conditions of artificial intelligence and potentially heterogeneous civilizations.