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.
Pretty sad story. Sounds like an end-life crises: Mead brings everyone down (except Einstein) by not saying... really anything. And when he does --- such as when he speaks of the Schroedinger cat --- he does not show understanding of the issue. Statements like "generations of students were driven out of physics becasue they no longer could comprehend it" (to wit) are very revealing: plenty of students who wanted to be theorists "switch out" after the first year once the grades are in; he was probably one of them. I wonder whether he can even read modern theory work. Again, statements like "70 years of darkness" do not suggest he can or he has done so. I guess, he feels that ranting is his last chance to make a theory contribution.
That's an interesting point. Perhaps you've seen something. But what you're talking about here I would call the Holy Spirit. I believe God, the Father, is greater than our impression of reality and so is beyond it.
"The Timaeus takes the same view of the universe as St. Paul's observation that "we see things as through a mirror darkly," the argument Plato also makes in describing the images of visible space as like the shadows cast upon the wall of a dark cave. The problematic feature of Plato's argument (and St. Paul's) on this point, is that a rational comprehension of the fuller meaning of this was not available in any available written source until Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation, On The Hypotheses Which Underlie Geometry. In Riemannian physics, the real, unseen universe is a continuous manifold. The images seen in that real world, the continuous manifold, are "projected" as visible events of sense-perception into a distorted spherical mirror, such that we see the continuous manifold projected onto that "mirror" in the form of apparently discrete objects moving about in empty, Euclidean space. This "mirror", called the discrete manifold, is a subsumed feature of the continuous manifold, and exists as if it were a mirror everywhere embedded within the subsuming continuous manifold."
PP> 172-173.Will this man become president?
Lyndon LaRouche
New Benjamin Franklin House (1983)
I am a casual collector of crackpot books.
There are no problems in Gods universe. There are only flawed human perceptions. But thats no problem either, except for humans
Ah, Gnosticism. Christian Science?
It was cool to run across George Gilder again too. Thirty years ago his book, "Wealth and Poverty" changed me from a mush brained liberal to the rabid conservative I am today.
What do you accept in that regard?
I accept that God created the universe out of nothing: He said, "Let it be", and it was. That He exists totally apart from His Creation. That problems (sickness, poverty, injustice, war, etc.) are the result of man's disobedience. That God, being utterly apart from the problems is in a position to solve them (redemption). That (thank God) He has instituted a plan to do just that. Thanks for the question.
No doubt the product announcement will appear in The Onion.
I ain't.
A very brave statement, and one that I happen to agree with entirely.
This is somewhat puzzling. The Bible indicates that God fills all space, is ever present and created us in His image. If this is true, how (and why) would He be totally apart from us? And how could we (the image) be so different from our Source?
"Free will" is not the answer because God must have free will and God does not choose evil - if man is His image, man would not choose evil either.
His creation is material. He is Spirit. That sets Him apart from us.
He states point-blank that all have sinned and come short of the Glory of God, and that our sin has separated us from God. That, too, sets us apart.
The fact that we are in His image and likeness probably refers to the fact that we, too, are spiritual beings, individual, willful and able to "create" -- but these characteristics in us are measured, finite. Not so with God, who has all without limit or measure.
So, if you're right and I'm wrong, what's the upshot? My sin is that I'm God and didn't know it? On the other hand...
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