Yesterday, at the end of a podcast interview with teenage host Ayush Prakash, he asked, “What is your advice to young Gen Zers?” My advice was basic.
It is natural to complain about the past because history is full of wrong ideas and wrong assumptions. Our lives are so tiny that we should make the most of this time. Instead of wasting time being negative about 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 the ability to imagine possible realities, combined with the curiosity to seek evidence that will determine which possibility is real. Without imagination, we would be stuck in prejudice. Without evidence, we would be stuck in wishful thinking and virtue signaling, without the anchor of a fact-based arbiter.
By gaining a modern understanding of reality through the scientific method, we are able to develop technologies that achieve our goals within the constraints of reality. In the 19th century, French author Jules Verne imagined spaceflight and solar sails long before these technologies could be learned. The dance between imagination and the constraints imposed by data is how we move forward.
Our historical misfortunes have resulted from constrained resources. Thanks to 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 disaster such as a giant impactor or an unprecedented solar flare could destroy our technological infrastructure. A better future is possible by leaving our planet and going into space. If humanity allocated the $2.4 trillion a year currently spent on military budgets to 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 this 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 has randomly produced in discrete locations, we can design our habitat as an artificial space platform that supports a better quality of life. From this perspective, the transition from the jungle to up-to-date cities will 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 suit its needs, rather than submit to what nature has given it. Our obsession with the Sun as a natural source of energy must be replaced by building an artificial nuclear furnace that will keep us toasty wherever we go. Instead of staying at home because it's naturally toasty, we can turn on the heating in our interstellar vehicles.
To transcend our constrained imaginations, we could train our telescopes to find out what extraterrestrial civilizations are doing. These extraterrestrials may have had the privilege of living near a Sun-like star that formed several billion years before the Sun, and thus have already outlived our future. Searching for them can save us time because their technological achievements can exceed our imaginations and inspire us to do better.
In the second podcast, “Event Horizon”, a few hours later I was lucky enough to talk to the brilliant Robin Hanson, who claimed that when assessing who might visit us. I agreed that it would be natural to imagine humans as a typical member of the distribution of clever civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. If so, how far can the tail of this intelligence distribution extend?
The central limit theorem in statistics states that for a huge 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 abilities of the Milky Way civilizations, then the brightest civilization at the tail of this distribution would be about 6.5 times more clever than us. This is the best you can hope for from a hundred billion Gaussian tail samples.
The technological achievements of the smartest members of our Milky Way family will depend on how much time they devote to developing their science and technology compared to the one century we have enjoyed since the discovery of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
If they had a million years of science and technology, they could go beyond building an artificial habitat and send technology ambassadors in the form of self-replicating AI-equipped probes to distant places. It would be like a dandelion flower scattering its seeds on the wind to reproduce its genes in distant fertile areas. Was human intelligence triggered by an alien seed that came to Earth from interstellar space?
I told Robin this as the scientist leading the study Galileo projectMy job is to search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts near Earth. He admitted that the academic community is hostile to this search for unjustified psychological reasons and that is why this topic does not enjoy prestige and funding at universities.
“You have to pick your battles,” he sighed. I replied that I would give all the prestige and money in the world to learn about a smarter member of our family of civilizations. Personally, I am ready to die in this battle. After all, what is the benefit of academic work if not the pursuit of an issue that would shape the future of humanity? The universe is much more inventive than any university.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
