At the end of a podcast interview with a young host, Ayush Prakash, yesterday, he asked, “What is your advice to young members of Gen Z?” My advice was clear.
It is normal to complain about the past, because history is full of wrong ideas and wrong assumptions. We only have such a short lifespan, so we might as well make the most of it. Instead of wasting time on negativity towards the people who made these mistakes, let’s focus on building a better future for all of us, based on science and technology.
The engine of science is driven by the ability to imagine possible realities, followed by the curiosity to look for evidence that will decide which possibility is real. Without imagination we would be stuck in prejudices. Without evidence, we would be stuck in wishful thinking and virtue signaling, with no anchor for a factual arbiter.
By gaining a new understanding of reality through the scientific method, we are able to develop technologies that further our goals, within the constraints of reality. In the 19th century, French author Jules Verne proposed space flight and solar sails, long before science made these technologies possible. The dance between imagination and the limitations imposed by data is how we move forward.
Our historical woes arose from limited resources. With the help of science and technology, humans have been able to move from natural habitats – such as jungles, to artificially designed environments – such as cities, where the quality of life is under control. However, a global catastrophe such as a giant impactor or an unprecedented solar flare could wipe out our technological infrastructure. A better future is possible by leaving our planet and traveling to space. If humanity were to spend the $2.4 trillion a year currently spent on military budgets on space exploration, we could find our future in the stars.
Elon Musk’s goal of moving humans from Earth to Mars is a good first step. But it is not ambitious enough.
Both Earth and Mars are natural rocks left over from the formation of the Sun. Instead of limiting our habitats to what nature produces by chance in individual locations, we can design our habitat in the form of an artificial space platform that supports a better quality of life. With that perspective, the transition we have made from jungles to modern cities would be followed by a transition from Earth to an artificial space habitat built by humans for humans.
The intelligence of a civilization is measured by its ability to shape its physical environment to meet its needs, rather than surrendering to what nature has given it. Our obsession with the sun as a natural energy source should be replaced by building an artificial nuclear furnace that will keep us warm wherever we want to go. Instead of staying home because it’s naturally warm, we can turn on the heat in our interstellar vehicles.
To go beyond our limited imaginations, we could train our telescopes to figure out what alien civilizations were doing. These aliens might have had the privilege of living near a Sun-like star that formed a few billion years before the Sun, so they were already living in our future. If we look for them, we can save time because their technological achievements exceed our imagination and inspire us to do better.
In a second podcast, entitled ‘Event Horizon’, I was fortunate enough to have a conversation a few hours later with the brilliant Robin Hanson, who argued that we should take into account the powerful tail in the distribution of alien civilizations when assessing who visit us. I agreed that it would be natural to imagine humans as a typical member of the spread of intelligent civilizations within the Milky Way Galaxy. If so, how far could the tail of this intelligence dissemination reach?
The Central Limit Theorem in statistics states that for a large sample of independent units the probability distribution converges to a Gaussian (normal) form with an exponential tail.
If humanity is within one standard deviation of the average cognitive ability of Galaxy civilizations, then the brightest civilization in the tail of that distribution would be about 6.5 times more intelligent than us. This is the best you can hope to get from a hundred billion samples of a Gauss’s tail.
The technological achievements of the brightest members of our Galaxy family would depend on how much time they spend developing their science and technology, compared to the single century we have benefited from since the discovery of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
If they had a million years of science and technology, they could have gone beyond building their artificial habitat and sent technological ambassadors in the form of self-replicating probes with artificial intelligence to remote destinations. This would be similar to a dandelion flower spreading its seeds in the wind to replicate its genetics in distant fertile soils. Was human intelligence caused by an alien seed that arrived on Earth from interstellar space?
I told Robin that as a scientist leading the Galileo projectmy commitment is to search for alien technological artifacts near Earth. He recognized that academia is hostile to this search for unwarranted psychological reasons and that therefore the subject does not attract prestige and funding in universities.
“You have to choose your battles,” he sighed. I replied that I would give all the prestige and money in the world just to learn about a smarter member of our family of civilizations. I am personally prepared to die in that battle. After all, what is the benefit of academic tenure if it is not to pursue a question that would shape the future of humanity? The universe is much more imaginative than any university.”
