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.
There's an interplay between math and physics, so it's like what came first, the chicken or the egg.
In the case of general relativity, Einstein was floundering around for how to mathematize it until he happened upon tensor analysis. Same thing for quantum mechanics; the Hilbert space was there first, and turned out to be an excellent fit.
Sometimes it goes the other way, e.g., physics first, as with Newton and Fourier.
With boundary?
Albert Einstein said that "World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones".
There is a lot of wisdom contained in that statement, I think (and fear). The fallacy that Einstein is refuting and that the author of this article instead embraces is that progress, technology and civilization proceeds in an ever upwards direction. In some ways, this is the same fallacy that propelled the stock market to stratospheric heights a scant 2 years ago. The reality is that this is not true, as demonstrated recently by the stock market collapse, and historically by the rise and fall of many great civilizations. An ancient Roman or Greek could probably not fathom that things would get so bad during the Dark Ages. But they in fact got very bad indeed. And there are evidence of advanced civilizations such as Crete and Minoa that predated Greece and Rome.
The facts are, recent history aside, that things don't continuously get better and better, just like stocks don't always go up and up and up. All this talk about a "singularity" in the article sort of proves the point. Singularities are theroretical maximums or minimums of infinite height (or depth) that are either never achieved or achieved only under quantum or relativistic conditions e.g. black holes. Far more likely, it seems to me than our technology reaching a "singularity" is that something will derail the train, and history will resume the up and down cycle that it has followed since the beginning of time.
To think otherwise is to believe in the promises of tulip bulb mania, or in utopia, or world peace or in all these other absolutes or infinites that people always seem to talk about, but never seem to really occur in real life.
Lacking even a simple thing such as a single center. You can start with any two assertions and derive the rest. Although it is easier with four.
Furthermore, you could argue against the point of Riemannian geometry also by pointing out that Gauss was fond of measuring distances on the surface of the Earth. He too, thus, was compelled by rather practical considerations.
On the other hand, these are relatively basic mathematical constructs to begin with. I suspect that the area under, or the slope of, a curve is not exactly tensor calculus
Not to argue here --- this is after all a question of taste --- but this remark is rather curious. I never thought that tensors, to the extent that Einstein needed them, were any less "basic" than integration. Should we no judge how "basic" these notions were at the time of their invention?
I'm not sure about any point with B-T. It was an example, (in your favor) of a well-established mathematical fact which you would never expect to describe a physical phenomenon.. Thanks for the clarification on this. Interestingly, this is exactly what people said about the work of Lobachevsky, Gauss, and Riemann in mid 1800s: what can this geometry possibly do with the real world?
Can't say it isn't. I think we are opening a new view of the cosmos. It might not pan out, most times these things don't work out.
Nice counter to the religion of quantum uncertainty. I read an article once where the author claimed that God DOES play dice and MUST play dice because even He cannot get around the uncertainty principle.
Observer determined quantum reality is a widely believed crock.
Well this thread has touched on just about every non-trivial thing I've been privy to in the last few days, including Collective Electrodynamics
So there. My secret's out. I hope you feel proud of yourself.
As far as I know, tensor analysis before general relativity was a rather specialized field of pure math being pursued by people like Ricci and Levi-Civita in Italy. There was some good work done in what could be called Riemannian tensor analysis by the German Christoffel around the time of the Franco-Prussian war. He came up with the celebrated Christoffel symbols which give the Riemannian case of Levi-Civita's parallel translation.
Minkowski was the real deal in relativity. Tragically his life was cut short. Physics might be a different place if he had another 20 years.
Any sufficiently advanced semantics is indistinguishable from the truth.
:-) Sorry, couldn't resist. It was a joke, BTW
The truest things are spoken in jest... (or however that saying goes)
Ok, got it.
......and gee, like, um, if the Rebel guys had, like, you know, nukes 'n' s**t, they coulda won the Civil War against the Yankee dudes 'n' all...........and......and if the Romans had, like, machine guns, they'd'a conquered like everybody and we'd all be, you know, like eating spaghetti 'n' s**t every night!!
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