Posted on 01/07/2002 8:19:37 AM PST by dead
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As scientist extraordinaire and author of an empire of science-fiction books, Arthur C. Clarke is one of the farthest-seeing visionaries of our time. His pithy quotations tug harder than those of most futurists on our collective psyches for their insights into humanity and our unique place in the cosmos. And none do so more than his famous Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
This observation stimulated me to think about the impact the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would have on science and religion. To that end, I would like to immodestly propose Shermer's Last Law (I don't believe in naming laws after oneself, so as the good book says, the last shall be first and the first shall be last): "Any sufficiently advanced ETI is indistinguishable from God."
God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Because we are far from possessing these traits, how can we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely from an ETI who merely has them copiously relative to us? We can't. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than we are, then by definition the deity would be an ETI!
Consider that biological evolution operates at a snail's pace compared with technological evolution (the former is Darwinian and requires generations of differential reproductive success; the latter is Lamarckian and can be accomplished within a single generation). Then, too, the cosmos is very big and very empty. Voyager 1, our most distant spacecraft, hurtling along at more than 38,000 miles per hour, will not reach the distance of even our sun's nearest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system (which it is not headed toward), for more than 75,000 years.
Ergo, the probability that an ETI only slightly more advanced than we are will make contact is virtually nil. If we ever do find an ETI, it will be as though a million-year-old Homo erectus were dropped into the 21st century, given a computer and cell phone and instructed to communicate with us. The ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid--godlike.
Because of science and technology, our world has changed more in the past century than in the previous 100 centuries. It took 10,000 years to get from the dawn of civilization to the airplane but just 66 years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing.
Moore's Law of computer power doubling every 18 months or so is now approaching a year. Ray Kurzweil, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, calculates that there have been 32 doublings since World War II and that the singularity point--the point at which total computational power will rise to levels so far beyond anything that we can imagine that it will appear nearly infinite and thus be indistinguishable from omniscience--may be upon us as early as 2050.
When that happens, the decade that follows will put the 100,000 years before it to shame. Extrapolate out about a million years (just a blink on an evolutionary timescale and therefore a realistic estimate of how far advanced ETIs will be), and we get a gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for how godlike these creatures would seem. In Clarke's 1953 novel, called Childhood's End, humanity reaches something like a singularity and must then make the transition to a higher state of consciousness. One character early in the story opines that "science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now."
Although science has not even remotely destroyed religion, Shermer's Last Law predicts that the relation between the two will be profoundly affected by contact with an ETI. To find out how, we must follow Clarke's Second Law: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." Ad astra!
Michael Shermer is founding publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and author of The Borderlands of Science.
A: I'm afraid I don't follow.
Shucks. From your posts I thought you would get it. The Alpha and Omega? God is All? It was an attempt at humor. From God comes all things, to God go all things. Therefore no matter how many things you add together they all add up to one thing. God.
I was going to throw in an even more difficult spiritual mathematic equation but I guess I'd better not.
Yes, but the old scientists often fight that change almost as hard as the church went against Galileo.
You know, by the way, one of the cardinals told Galileo he was free to teach the heliocentric hypothesis as a computational method, he just couldn't say that it was the way things "really were". Of course it took several centuries before the heliocentric model was refined to were it was as accurate for computation as the geocentric model of Ptolemy.
Though it was proven by proving it is modular. But you knew that, didn't you?
A computer so fast it can perform an infinite loop in 2 seconds!
C'mon now. Don't be an historical dogmatist. Name me one religion that hasn't changed over time.
Can't say that I did. I really don't know anything about the proof, except that it uses methods of hyperbolic geometry (don't know anything about that either). But the world's smartest human, that vos Savant women, suggested that we can't know if the proof is valid, because we don't know if hyperbolic geometry is true.
The assertion chain starts out as flat binary, but becomes as 3-D as English semantics before the end of volume 1. IMHO the Principia is a non-orientable manifold.
Over and out.
The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.
I was thinking about multiplication!
(And I was sure in your 1+1=1 analogy you were going to say you meant the union of a man and wife -
that is, after all, God's math on that matter!)
PS - We need to spend more time together.
The question of whether mathematics is "invented by man" (i.e. a posteriori) or not (a priori) is one of many interesting questions addressed in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It's a bit of a sticking point at that interstice between philosophy and theology, and a deep indicator of how one sees the universe: to a religious purist it doesn't matter because if man invented it, God invented man; to an atheist it doesn't matter because if God invented it, man invented God. To the rest of us it's a little more opaque.
I am not sure why you refer to Banach-Tarski. These things, as far as I understand stem from the Axiom of Choice and should not be THAT surprising: once you accept it, you are stuck, for instance, with non-measurable sets.
Because the logic of mathematics exists apart from man, I will say 'invented.'
You have successfully ignored that. Welcome to the club. : )
Interesting.
You are correct sir, e.g., tensor analysis for general relativity, and functional analysis for quantum mechanics.
: ) You know that, honey. But in your equation 1+1=3 or more. It's an area of study that deserves volumes of research. Much repeated testing and random manipulation of many variables. Shall we apply for a grant?
Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is only indistinguishable from God to those who do not know God to begin with.
I sometimes toy with the idea of writing a SF story of the turmoil that would happen if an alien civilation was at last discovered, and their religion exactly matched one specific religion found on earth, esentialy proving it to be true. Can you imagine what the scientific community would do to surpress that, and the chaos when the info got out, the reaction of other religions etc.?
Sadly (or perhaps not) I just don't have the time.
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