We are the final frontier

Copernicus, Darwin, Crick and Watson changed the way people see themselves. Ian Sample asks leading scientists what comes next

Humans have always thought of themselves as special, and with good reason. As far as we know, we are alone in the universe in churning out great works of art and literature, in formulating the laws of physics, and in creating the spectacle that is morris dancing. But our view of ourselves as the pinnacle of life has suffered huge blows at the hands of science. Every now and again comes an idea so revolutionary that it rocks the foundations on which our hubris is built.

At the University of San Diego, California, VS Ramachandran, director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, points to three major upheavals in scientific thinking that have served to remind us that we are not so special after all. First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Instead, he relegated our planet to one of many orbiting the sun.

Copernicus wasn't the first to come up with a heliocentric model of the solar system, but his description was backed up with mathematics that meant it was taken far more seriously. "At once, the whole notion that Earth was special was rendered obsolete and that must have been pretty humbling," says Ramachandran.

If Copernicus ruffled feathers by saying the Earth wasn't special, Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren't special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection, immediately suggesting that humans were just another kind of animal. "It meant we weren't the crowning glory of evolution, we were just hairless apes that happened to be slightly cleverer than our cousins," says Ramachandran. "It was a great shock. Victorian women fainted when they heard about it."

Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. According to Ramachandran, it led to a further challenge to human arrogance. We were, in short, simply vessels of self-replicating molecules, whose only purpose was to pass them on to another generation.

So what's next? What will be the fourth revolution? And will it, like those before, force us to question once more what it means to be human? To find out, Life put the question to some of the world's top scientists.

The leading candidates for the next revolution are enthralling, depressing and mind-boggling. Seth Shostak, of the alien-hunting Seti organisation in California, believes that we will become the first species to invent our successor, intentionally demoting ourselves to intellectual second fiddle. Others say we will finally understand the workings of the mind, and with it grasp fully the nature of self. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York, believes that we will discover parallel universes, perhaps floating just inches away from our own. Elvis Presley might even be alive and well in one of them, he says. The Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield sees a bleak future. We will see a melding of man and machine, she says, leading to the demise of the individual.

Whatever shape the next revolution takes, it may help humans to understand their condition rather than knock it down further. "The big question is why these revolutions don't make us profoundly sad. We're reduced to bags of chemicals with no free will, living on a normal planet, but people still find that exciting," says Ramachandran. "I think it's because with greater understanding, we see ourselves as part of some grander scheme. We're part of something larger than ourselves and once we identify with that, it is not degrading, it's ennobling."

'We will invent our successors' Seth Shostak, senior astronomer, Seti Institute, California

The amount of computing power you can buy for £1,000 doubles every 18 months. It's hardly speculative to declare that by 2020, your desktop will have more operational horsepower than a human brain.

Many people who work in the field of machine intelligence believe that, with the right arrangement of hardware and software, you really can build a thinking machine. Not just a device that beats everyone at chess: a machine that can write fiction, do physics research, or be amusing at parties. If you doubt this, then you are forced to concede that there's something miraculous going on under our hats. Is there some good reason that one organ of the body - the one in your skull - has a function that can't be replicated? That's hubris of a fine sort; a kind of self-defence concocted by the very organ under examination.

It strikes me as likely that, sometime this century, we will build a thinking computer. That machine will run the planet. Competitive pressures will ensure this (if we don't have a machine running our society, we'll fall behind those that do). We will no longer be the smartest things on Earth. Our mantle of superiority will be donned by our own creations.

Then what? Will the machines get rid of us? A machine that dwarfs our intelligence might regard us as we regard budgies or goldfish: diverting. Our role as second intellectual fiddle may be to serve as pets for the sentients in charge.

All of this would be dismaying enough if it were merely a science fiction story. But I suspect that the first steps will be taken by mid-century. We could well be the last generation of humans to dominate Earth.

'We will understand the human mind' John Sulston, founder of the Sanger Institute, Cambridge

Along with the late Francis Crick (see The Astonishing Hypothesis), and many others, I expect that in the coming century we shall understand in a general way how the human brain gives rise to what we perceive as the human mind. The solution will be interesting, very complex, but not in the end mysterious. It will be a great philosophical challenge to take on board, but we shall succeed because of our tremendous ability to adapt.

We should not be humbled by any of these revolutions. We should rather feel, first, a modest pride in our ability to achieve such understanding, and more importantly, a huge sense of collective responsibility in what we do with it. A humility that disclaims responsibility for its actions is dangerous, and offers a real risk that our wonderful journey of exploring the universe will be cut off just as we are beginning in earnest.

'The existence of parallel universes' Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, the City University of New York

The next revolution will be proof of the existence of the multiverse. Think of fish in a very shallow pond. They live in a two-dimensional world and feel comfortable swimming forward, backwards, left and right. But there are other ponds, and in some they could swim up and down, too.

Physicists believe that we spend our lives in a little pond of three dimensions, thinking smugly that's all there is, but there are other ponds out there. These universes might be right next to us, perhaps hovering inches above our own.

Some of these universes could look just like ours. I've been asked if Elvis Presley is alive in one of these parallel universes and it cannot be dismissed. Maybe Elvis Presley is still alive in a parallel universe and, as outrageous as it sounds, we physicists actively discuss these kinds of questions. It's mind-boggling.

'We will change our genetic makeup' Norbert Gleicher, director of the Centre for Human Reproduction, Chicago

The next revolution will come from a combination of huge advances in genetics and stem cell research. It will lead to a more egalitarian society.

Assuming that all humanity has access to these advances, everybody will benefit from regenerative medicine, which means we'll cure disease at an accelerated rate, we'll live longer and finally we'll be able to affect our genetic makeup. Once we can affect our genetic makeup we'll become more similar to one another because everybody will want the same thing.

We are not at the point yet where we can define genetically what makes Michael Jordan the greatest basketball player that ever lived, but theoretically, in the not too distant future, we'll understand what it was in the genetic makeup that made him such a talent. While genetics is not everything, we will be in a position to say that if somebody has these genes, that person's ability to jump or play music, or do other things will be advanced.

Once we identify the genetic background for any kind of human capability, we can, at least theoretically, manipulate the genetic makeup of humans by substituting that genetic background into the makeup of the person. It raises huge ethical issues.

There are strong voices in the community who do not wish mankind to achieve these abilities. But we're in an accelerated evolutionary phase and I don't think it can be stopped.

'We will find out if we are alone' Colin Pillinger, head of planetary and space sciences, Open University

Only 17% of people believe that we are unique; the other 83% believe that we can't possibly be the only ones. Look at the elements that are most abundant in the cosmos: hydrogen, helium and oxygen, making the most common compound water. Next come carbon and nitrogen. So, four out of the five most common elements throughout the cosmos can make the organic compounds we all know and love. That says to me that life is an accident waiting to happen. We would be completely and utterly arrogant to think that life hasn't originated elsewhere in this great cosmos.

What would be really fascinating would be if we were to go to another planet and find life based on another code, other than DNA. That would really be wiz-bang stuff.

How can we answer the question? We have to rule out receiving a message at one of our radio telescopes saying: "Excuse me, hello, we're calling from somewhere in the distant universe to let you know we're here."

We don't have the telescopes to check for life on planets round distant stars, so the first step is finding out if there is life in the solar system. How long until we discover that? In 2009, if they let me launch Beagle 3.

'Humans become a collective intelligence' John Barrow, professor of mathematical sciences and author of The Infinite Book, Cambridge University

We as a species have entered a new phase of evolution with the appearance of the world wide web. We share information collectively. You can find out almost anything you want to know at the click of a button, and this happened suddenly, nobody predicted it. This is a collectivisation of human information.

Once you start to act with other people, you can do things you couldn't do as an individual. You become a connected intelligence and just like joining computers together, that increases your effectiveness and power. Most people rely on the web for information to the extent that the memorisation of facts and figures and information is no longer required. In some ways, it's probably not a good thing, but it's how it is. For scientists, it means the world is now one giant research group.

'We'll understand thoughts and feelings' Steven Pinker, professor of psychology, Harvard University

My choice would be what the late Francis Crick called "the astonishing hypothesis" - the idea all our thoughts and feelings consist in physiological activity in tissues of the brain, rather than in an immaterial soul. Thinking is neural computation; wanting and trying are neural cybernetics (feedback systems, like your thermostat). All this means that humans are not special in having an essence that is separate from the material universe. It means no life after death. That, in turn, means no divine rewards or punishments in a world to come. It means that our minds, not just our bodies, were descended from those of apes and shaped by the morally indifferent forces of natural selection. It means that responsibility can't be equated with the notion of free will, if free will is conceived as autonomous choice utterly disconnected from any chain of cause and effect. It means that we may acquire new technologies to enhance mood, memory, thinking and personality by chemical means. It will take some time for many people to readjust their notions of meaning and morality to this revolution from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

The merging of carbon and silicon systems, such as the growing of neurons in integrated circuits, could be the next revolution. It would challenge our whole notion of living versus innate things. Many new technologies could lead for the first time to a "de-individualisation". Up until now, especially in the west, there's been an emphasis on nurturing the individual. This rise and rise of the individual might be the natural consequence of 20th century so-called progress, but the new revolution will challenge that for the first time. If you're constantly in front of a computer screen, you're the passive recipient of lots of information. You're just a consumer, living at that moment, having an experience, pressing buttons and reacting, but not having a life narrative any more. You're not defined by your family, or by what you know, or by specific events in the real world, because most of your time is spent in cyberspace. So what are you? Could it be that we just become nodes on a much larger collective thought machine?

'What if God lives in a part of our brain?' Nancy Rothwell, neuroscientist at Manchester University

The previous revolutions haven't necessarily made our place less significant. We are just discovering the complexity of the natural world. The fact we can begin to understand these concepts at all shows how advanced we are.

A breakthrough would be in understanding the complex functions of the brain, emotions, consciousness and imagination and how they are formed. We might even find that there is a biological basis for religion. Suppose we discovered that God "lived" in a particular part of the brain, and that religion was a biological function which had evolved to help us through difficult times. It's not impossible. For some, it would be fascinating and curious, for others it would just be dismissed. But others might find it very difficult indeed - it would shake their world.

'What it means to be a person' V S Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego

The next revolution will be understanding the organ that made all the previous revolutions possible. Your mind, your ambitions, your love life, even what you regard as yourself, all of it is the activity of little wisps of jelly in your head. Once we figure out the code, that's going to be a big revolution and another humbling experience. The ultimate triumph of the human mind is to understand what the mind is.

We'll understand what it means to will an action, what it means to be a person, what is the self. People say that if you know all that, it'll be terrible, but just because you know the rules, it doesn't mean that you can predict what everyone's going to do. That may happen some day, but in the next hundred years, we'll just know the ground rules. Knowing the laws of physics doesn't tell you exactly how a wave is going to break when it hits the shore.

How did the mind emerge from this jelly? Once we figure that out, we'll have a more mature understanding of the relation between mind and brain, and the nature of the self, which I think is the last great frontier.

'Conscious machines' Igor Aleksander, professor of neural systems engineering at Imperial College London

I think the next big revolution will be machine consciousness. There are buzzes in our head which are neurons firing away to give us a sensation of the world and our place within it. There must be a way of replicating that.

The assumption that as soon as you've made a conscious machine, you've made an evil machine, is absolute rot. If a machine is truly conscious, it'll be conscious of missions it's been given. A conscious machine will be aware of its own mission without worrying too much about trying to take over the world.

If we come up with something that's conscious, it'll be unimpressive. The things we'll build, even if they have mechanisms of consciousness inside them, may not be that much better than what we have around already. But if you take the classical idea of the mind and the body, that's going to take a knock. It seems the majority of people think consciousness is something intractable, that we can never understand it. I think we can. Certainly in 10 to 15 years' time, anyone who says consciousness is so mysterious, no science will ever touch it, will look a fool.

We might find out there are more than three dimensions of space. What is special about three dimensions? We've found that space can have higher dimensions in some places and lower dimensions where we are, so three dimensions might just be a peculiar property of where we are.

It's possible that there are extra dimensions and that we live on an object called a brane, which is a membrane in higher dimensional space. Just like a bead on a wire that can only move in one direction or the other, it could be that the three dimensions we see are special because they're the dimensions along the brane we are on.

We're extremely close to finding out if extra dimensions exist. At Cern, the Large Hadron Collider will look for particles which will be evidence of those extra dimensions. A lot of people will struggle with what it means to have extra dimensions. You can't see them, you can't experience them, so, to some extent, everyone will be disturbed by it. One amazing thing is that this expands your imagination.

'Humans are less miraculous than we thought' Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science

The sets of rules, or programs, underlying how humans work are no more sophisticated than the ones occurring elsewhere in nature.

Nowadays, the most common assumption about the special status of humans is that it must be something to do with the level of intelligence or complexity that we exhibit. Intuition tells us that getting the kind of seemingly sophisticated, rich behaviour we see in humans and society must take a lot of fundamental rules and ideas. But this may not be the case.

In a computational view of the universe, everything is run according to set fundamental "programs", analogous to computers carrying out the rules contained in software programs. But while software programs might be very complex with several million lines of code, the programs in nature could be very simple - maybe one line or less.

Even these simple programs seem to produce essentially the same richness that you would expect in vastly more complicated programs and in the kind of things that happen in nature. There's a whole universe of these possible simple programs and we have only had experience with, and studied in detail, a very small collection of them.

If it's possible to get so much from so little, we get to hold in our hands the very rules of the universe. Which means that there's nothing about the universe that is fundamentally beyond human understanding.

On the other hand, it perhaps seems a little unfortunate that there's nothing more. There's nothing miraculous that can go on in our universe or, more importantly, in humans.

Science has a way of painting God out of the picture, and putting humankind in its place. Nicolas Copernicus launched the Copernican revolution in about 1530: Galileo continued it; Isaac Newton completed it more than a century later. It began innocently, when Copernicus tried to make a timetable for the positions of the planets. The calculations added up best if he assumed that the sun was the centre of the universe and that the Earth, like Mars, Venus and Jupiter, was just another planet. This upset the Ptolemaic scheme, which for more than a thousand years placed the Earth at the centre. Christian theology also had the Earth at the centre. So Copernicus offended both the Catholic Church (which listed his book as banned until 1835) and the reformer Martin Luther. Cosmologists now talk of the Copernican principle, which is that there is nothing special about planet Earth, in space or time. Humans are just little specks of sentience on an accidental planet in a corner of the cosmos.

The Darwinian revolution, too, was a 100-year story, and it began long before Darwin. Religious orthodoxy called for a young universe, specially created with its present inhabitants. But miners, canal engineers and natural philosophers kept finding puzzling evidence of creatures that existed long before human history.

Geologists such as Hutton and Lyell proposed an ancient Earth, subject to continuous change. Charles Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wallace, quite independently) went a stage further: life itself was ancient, and subject to continuous change, in which random mutations in inheritance were selected or dismissed by the pressures of the environment. This, too, shocked some churchmen. But humans now see themselves as just another evolutionary by-product, cousin to the apes.

The clinching proof of this has been in the DNA revolution, launched 50 years ago. Where did these mutations happen and how were they transmitted? In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick began to crack the riddle. They revealed the structure of a long molecule, detectable in almost every living cell, which spelled out the genetic code. Comparison of DNA in living humans provides clues to ancestral kinships. It also confirms that all life is linked to one last universal common ancestor.

Science has exposed the machinery of creation, and taught humans a lesson in humility. None of this, however, yet explains why the universe began, or how and why life started in the first place, seemingly only on one planet. Tim Radford

Despite all their training and ability, these prognosticators cannot predict the moving force of evolution: environmental pressures. That's why eugenics never really gets off the ground. We can selectively breed or splice genes all we want. But whether these changes will be adaptive generations down the road is anybody's guess...and that's what this is: guessing.

Hijacked by who? The fundamentalist religious whackos who stubbornly believe humans are humans and animals are animals? Can't they see we are just animals who talk to each other on computers, travel into space, ponder the existance and thoughts of God, cure disease, are not bound by mere instint. Hell, I should be zoo exhibit! Watch the human make his coffee in the morning and his problem solving capabilities are marvelous, watch him unclog that sink. What whackos! I'm a beast!

humans are animals, hank... do you presume to be "nearly equal" to god and hence "special"? accept that you are merely a beast and you are a step closer to understanding that you and your knowledge of god will always be imperfect. then maybe you can cease being arrogant and learn the lesson jesus was trying to teach mankind: humbleness....

I think we may be part of 'someone's' (e.g., God's) experiment. Like a colony of bacteria in a Petri dish (Earth), with the experimenter wondering what will result after many generations of reproduction.

'The end of the individual' Susan Greenfield, neuroscientist, Oxford University

This poor gal is a victim of a 1950-1980 Sci Fi fad. The end of the individual. Funny how it coincided with the pinnacle of collectivism.

She's too smart to respect what Reagan tried to teach the world, that there is strength in the individual, strength in freedom and free will.

It's also interesting that she see the Internet as a device in this. IMO, if the Internet does anything, it empowers the individual further. Want a "collective thought machine" watch CNN/CBS/ABC/MSNBC/BBC/PBS.

and learn the lesson jesus was trying to teach mankind: humbleness....

While I agree that Jesus came to teach humility, true humility is not acknowledgement that one is just a thinking animal. True humility is knowing who God is, who you are, and what your right relationship is to Him.

Regarding the article, it's a bit fanciful to think that conciousness is just a matter of computing power. The simple fact of the matter is that we don't even have a scientific model for conciousness as of yet, so how exactly do we propose to know when or if we will be able to duplicate it? It's like predicting when we will invent warp drive without having the foggiest theoretical notion of how we might go about beating (or cheating) the speed of light. If you're just writing science-fiction, great. If you're actually trying to be legitimate in your speculations, you have to admit ignorance where it exists.

"Want a "collective thought machine" watch CNN/CBS/ABC/MSNBC/BBC/PBS...and ABCNNBC_BS."

Truest words, ever said on FR...on the outpost of FReer Speech. :^)

Please spare me the humans are animals lecture, it's ridiculous.

Yeah. Just because we share the same physiological traits and there is no chemical difference in human and animal physical makeup -- just different DNA -- it is silly to say that humans are animals. I mean, it must be false, because if it were true, we would feel less "special" and since things that we don't like can't be true, it's false!

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