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.
I love this question!
I think math is an invention. I believe this because our math is very "imprecise". For example, the number (or value) psi is 3.14.........
It goes on forever. If our math system was accurate there should be a true, finite, value for the length of a circumference. After all, the circumference exists in merely 2 dimensions, but the best we can do is an approximation.
Likewise, the imaginary number i. This number contradicts fundmental real number characteristics, but is necessary to cover an embarrassing inconsistency, ie the square root of a negative number. It's duct tape applied to a leaky exhaust pipe.
And don't get me started on logrthyms, or natural "e". These numbers, although they work (roughly), bear no resemblance to the elegance manifest in every facet of the natural universe.
I believe this is the reason why no human manufacture will ever be perfect in the way a simple blade of grass is perfect. I also believe that language is another invention that likewise prevents us from approaching perfection.
Perfection will only ever be found in God.
They proved it by voting for clinton twice!Clinton raised my faith in the Word to make me a fundamentalst Christian extremist.
But, that's not the supernaturlist way.
There is no doubt that boy is a life-changing experience.
Though is it? The more deeply we look, the more uncertain things become. The electron orbital position of a constituent proton is precluded by information on its momentum.
So the universe is fundamentally uncertain, though we've yet derived a pretty accurate representational way of describing it.
A hand, or pneumatic hammer may not ultimitely be the best way to drive a nail. But they work.
Actually, I am an engineer, mathematician, and scientist (all three, depending on what hat I'm wearing). Don't confuse engineering and science, which merely USE mathematics with mathematics itself. A lot of the simplifications and empirical equations used in engineering and science are a way of dramatically reducing the computational complexity of a problem (which in many cases would otherwise be intractable) while still delivering adequate results. Mathematics is relatively clean and neat; the application of it in the real world is tempered by practical factors.
But mostly, it seems that your argument is with engineering and science. Math just describes relationships, and not liking the relationships it is used to describe isn't an example of inadequacy. It describes elegant relationships just as easily as it describes inelegant ones (a property which tends to indicate that it is quite adequate indeed).
A computer that crashes faster ?
;>
For those that would protest "science can't be left-wing" I refer y'all to Gross and Levitt's works for instance. Or Sokal's Transgressing the Boundaries.
The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.
The vast conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.
A good test case for this statement (relating to the correspondence between mathematics and the universe) is the N-body problem. Current mathematics has no closed-form solution for it, despite which the N-bodies go blithely on their merry ways.
A basic philosophical question here is whether a true mathematical description of the system should be closed-form. One is tempted to say "yes," though the underlying requirements for the statement would require some very basic proofs which do not as yet exist.
Be that as it may, the present most-accurate mathematical approach is to integrate the equations of motion. Numerical integration is an explicit approximation of the problem to begin with. Beyond that, even an exact integration would be only as accurate as the force models (approximations), and also the truncation of forces being modeled.
Math just describes relationships, and not liking the relationships it is used to describe isn't an example of inadequacy.
This approach tends to treat math as something akin to a "force of nature," whose principles merely await discovery. In that vein, one can imagine a combination of perfect integrators, perfect models, and the inclusion of all perturbations, that would give exact results. However, these all presume perfect knowledge of the system -- not to mention assuming the availability of the mathematics necessary to implement the prediction. It seems quite unlikely that we can ever assemble such knowledge.
Bottom line: whether or not it's ultimately "perfect," mathematics is inadequate, because we are inadequate.
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